Razer wants to upgrade your PC build with fans, coolers, and PSUs

At today’s RazerCon event, Razer announced four new products for PC gaming. You can expect RGB, but these new products aren’t mechanical keyboards or controllers, they’re components for building a PC.

Razer has been steadily creeping into the gaming desktop market with products such as the Tomahawk Gaming Desktop, Tomahawk Gaming Chassis, and the Core X external GPU, but this is a whole different ball game. The newly announced products are the Kunai cooling fans, Hanbo all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler, the Katana power supply unit (PSU), and, finally, the PWM PC Fan Controller. All parts will be available in the coming months, with some available today.

Keeping it cool — If you haven’t built a PC before, there are basically two ways to cool your PC without building a custom water-cooling solution. You either buy a CPU air cooler or you get an all-in-one liquid cooler. Both attach to your CPU with a thin layer of thermal paste in between to transfer heat from the CPU to the cooler. There’s no “right” way to do it, but AIO liquid coolers have become more popular in recent years.

According to Razer, the Hanbo is designed for “maximum thermal performance” and it also operates silently. Depending on the size of your case, Razer is selling the Hanbo AIO cooler in two sizes: 240mm and 360mm. It’s compatible with motherboards with an AM4 socket for AMD CPUs as well as ones with Intel LGA sockets. PCs built in the last few years shouldn’t have a problem with compatibility.

Razer is also launching case fans. The Razer Kunai are static pressure case fans that are better for distributing air around builds with a lot of resistance caused by cramped builds, dust filters, cables, or other obstructions. Razer claims the Kunai case fans have 70 percent better static pressure than competitors’ fans. Another claim: The fans are 21 percent quieter than the competition. The 4-pin PWM fans come in 120mm and 140mm sizes and have a noise rating of between 15 to 35dBA and 15-30 dBA, respectively.

To control the fans to your liking, Razer is also debuting its PWM PC Fan Controller. You’ll be able to plug in your fans to this controller to manage PC fan curves and RGB via Razer Synapse. Ironically, this product does not have RGB.

Powered by Razer — The final PC component Razer announced today is the Katana PSU line, which comes in power output ratings of between 750W to 1600W. Out of all the parts in a PC, the PSU may be the most boring, but it’s arguably the most important. The right one could last you a decade; the wrong one could fry your computer and even cause a fire. If you’re building a PC, this is not a part you want to save a buck on. Razer knows this, and it’s why the Katana PSUs have a Platinum rating.

Generally, Silver or Gold-rated PSUs from known brands like EVGA or Corsair are considered safe, but Platinum is, for a lack of a better word, the gold standard. Platinum-rated PSUs aren’t common or cheap, but they are the most trustworthy. On top of being Platinum-rated, the Katana PSUs are also fully modular, which are considered the best because every connector is removable for greater customization and cable management. And, yes, the Katana PSUs do have RGB on the internal 140mm fan. The fan can be controlled via the PWM controller and has a zero RPM mode for the quietest performance.

Everything about this PSU is top-notch, at least on paper. While it needs to be tested, the quality of this part alone says a lot about what Razer is hoping to achieve.

Launching this year — Whether the notoriously hard-to-impress PC building community will accept Razer as a manufacturer of PC parts is tough to say, but Razer’s parts will have to stand out to compete in a heavily saturated market.

You can get your hands on the Razer Kunai case fans and PWM PC Fan Controller starting today for $44.99 and $49.99, respectively. The Hanbo AIO cooler is launching later this year in November, while the Katana PSUs will launch in Q1 2022.