Quick question about RGB

[milk carton]

     I did a massive update to my computer a while back, it went from a buffed Dell Optiplex to a relatively-possible-to-go-pro kit complete with all the glowy colors and rgb necessary to impress your 4 year old younger brother.

     Anyhow, I have a MPG Z390 Gaming plus MOBO and a Thermaltake cpu fan.  The fan on lights up one setting, but I want to control it how you're supposed to be able to.  There are 2 cords that come out of it and one of which I cannot identify at all, nor can I look up one of the symbols because I have no idea what it is.  I will drop a picture below, can you tell me what this cord does and what it plugs into?

[fordy_rounds]

Try this document. Since you have an MSI motherboard, you'll look for the JRGB headers and connect as shown in the linked diagram.

 

Edit: It looks like your motherboard doesn't support ARGB (and this cable design is obviously for ARGB, even though you didn't specify which cooler you have), so ignore my advice. The JRGB headers on your board are all 12V non-addressables; the cables shown in your picture are for a 5V addressable. They won't work with your board (and trying it might break the ARGB on your cooler). You'll need to get a USB ARGB controller.

 

Oh, and as for what that cable does, the black wire is a ground wire (essentially, provides a baseline for what is "0V"). The red wire, labeled "D" (for Digital) is a digital signal—basically your ARGB controller sends out a signal specifying which specific LED to set (the "addressable" of ARGB) and what color to set it to (the RGB of ARGB). This allows your cooler to show multiple colors at one time (since each LED is individually set), as opposed to non-addressable RGB where all the LEDs are the same color at the same time (and which has 4 wires: one for 12V, and an analog red, green, and blue signal). Note that ARGB typically also has a 5V wire; in this case it does not, as it apparently pulls its power from the fan wiring.

[milk carton]

Thank you, very information-wealthy reply.  I didn't say exactly which cooler because I didn't think it would matter for the name of that cord, and it would have taken a bit of scrolling on amazon to find.

[LogicalDrm]

17 hours ago, milk carton said:

Thank you, very information-wealthy reply.  I didn't say exactly which cooler because I didn't think it would matter for the name of that cord, and it would have taken a bit of scrolling on amazon to find.

Those two leads don't look like standard, which is kinda bigger issue. Usually the cables look like this:

[fordy_rounds]

35 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

Those two leads don't look like standard, which is kinda bigger issue. Usually the cables look like this:

Yeah. It looks like (because it's a CPU cooler, so there's LEDs and a fan) they're sourcing the 5V from the fan connector's power—though it seems odd to do that but still require a separate ground here. It's unusual for sure, and I don't know why they'd do it that way. It seems like the circuitry to step down the 12V to 5V would be more expensive than the extra wire needed for a standard connector? Or maybe they're using LEDs with a higher voltage drop and just feeding them straight 12V.