


Something incredibly important to monitor and note with stock fans is their noise, because stock fans are notorious for sounding like small airplanes. If it can’t perform at least up to snuff with some of the more popular coolers on the market, there wouldn’t be a point for a builder to keep it around in the final cut of their build. It might look better than past stock CPU coolers, sure, but we needed to find out if it performs better, too. It’s much slimmer and stylish when compared to the included CPU fans I’ve been receiving for the past decade, and that alone was enough to peak my curiosity. Why? Well, first off, it catches the eye right away. We got our hands on this sleek cooler alongside a Ryzen 3900X 12-core processor, and while it’s true that the Ryzen itself is very impressive, and we can’t wait to include it in a snazzy new build here in the Newegg studio, I wanted to check out this cooler. With AMD's continually improving finances thanks to their increasing successful product launches after laying off their Operating System Research Center years ago, hopefully in 2020 we see more support from them in the Linux space in areas like this for non-critical areas but "nice to have" features.It’s not often that PC building enthusiasts choose to just roll with the cooler that comes with their processor, but AMD aims to change a few minds with the Wraith Prism, a powerful thermal solution that comes included with some of AMD’s Ryzen 3rd gen processors. Those wanting to try out CM-RGB with a modern Wraith Prism heatsink can do so via GitHub and Python's PIP. The program allows setting the lighting mode, color based upon hex code, brightness, and other factors. But CM-RGB is a Python-written independent utility that is command-line based and allows easily controlling the heatsink's lighting under Linux. Just like AMD doesn't offer any CPU overclocking client from the Linux desktop, they don't offer any RGB control software for Linux. Fortunately, there is now a straight-forward solution for dealing with those Wraith Prism RGB LEDs thanks to the open-source and independent CM-RGB project. With the Wraith Prism heatsink fan included with many modern AMD Ryzen processors there is configurable RGB lighting, which unfortunately AMD hadn't publicly documented or offered a Linux utility for manipulating the RGBs under Linux.
