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I'm now officially converted to the RGB LED religion and OpenRGB is amazing

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Well, this wasn't what you were expecting to read was it? After years laughing about people who go over the top with RGB lighting in their PCs I am now a convert.

I've never really been into the hardware customization side of PCs but I think that's about to change. All it took was a good PC case I wanted to do more with and now I want to see how far I can push things. I want people to walk into my office and be blinded by the power of my PC. Something like that anyway.

You see, recently I picked up the Fractal Design Torrent PC case, and I did a successful transplant. The operation was a complete success, although touch and go for a moment with a few bits of sweat and some tears, IT LIVES! Two annoyances though: the first being the spacing between where you connect up the SSDs and the mass of wires coming down the back from the front panel, and needing some completely flat SATA power connectors for the HDDs (I have a lot of drives).

It truly is an absolutely gorgeous case, a recommendation from the GamingOnLinux Discord and I couldn't be happier with the result.

Now I have a nice case, and the inside looks pretty tidy with glass panels to see into both sides of the machine — I thought "why stop there?". So, doing something I never thought I would, I shopped around for some colourful additions to place inside the case. 

I ended up going for the Addressable Speclux LED Strip Light. Cheap and cheerful for my intro into the world of RGB lighting. A great decision too as it turns out, because even though it's cheap and I only have two strips, I'm just a little bit more in love with my PC now. Thanks to this, my rather dull office has been lit up and I can suddenly see why people like RGB LEDs so much (and just RGB lighting in general), because it really does give you a little extra spark of happiness and that should never be underestimated. 

Thanks to my motherboard having a connector for RGB lights, I plugged it in there and stuck the strips into my case and when powering on my case came to life. I'm all excited about it for another reason though, a fun bit of open source software called OpenRGB. Regular readers have probably seen it, because I've written about it a few times now but never really used it properly myself — until now.

With OpenRGB you can control the lighting on many different devices, and it works very nicely. My surprise here again though is that directly from my Linux desktop with OpenRGB, I can change each individual LED to a different colour, set up profiles, effects and more. Gosh, I love open source developers doing amazing stuff like this.

So now I have a good case, and it looks awesome. Bring on the rainbow.

I can happily recommend both the case and the lights.

I wonder what else I can do to make it even more ridiculous. What do you suggest? Have you set up your gaming rig with some cool lighting? Let me know all your thoughts in the comments. Show me your rig.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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30 comments
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chrisq Dec 29, 2022
My computer is a mainboard on a test bench-style case in a closet.
The other one is on a MDF board in a different room.

Too much hassle to open and get into tiny spaces when making changes when using a case, prefer to keep everything easily accessible. Obviously no need for lights when the PCs can't be seen anyways.


Last edited by chrisq on 29 December 2022 at 6:06 pm UTC
WayneJetSki Dec 29, 2022
RBG is cool. But lately I just like having RED leds on everything. (The blue LEDs bother my eyes at night)

Soon I will need to get some LEDs like that and give OpenRGB a try.
Sojiro84 Dec 30, 2022
I try to avoid RGB wherever I can.

I am the person that either has no RGB or all RGB. I did looked at the time of my PC build at RGB pieces, but the extra money just for the RGB bit's was not worth it, so I tried to avoid it as much as I could.

Unfortunately my MOBO and GPU still got RGB but luckily I was able to turn that off.
ExpandingMan Dec 30, 2022
I really don't care about RGB but I just built (just as in yesterday) a new machine that has a few RGB (RAM, CPU cooler pump and fans, GPU cooler).

Sadly OpenRGB can't detect anything

 
<h2>WARNING:</h2><p>One or more I2C/SMBus interfaces failed to initialize.</p><p>RGB DRAM modules and some motherboards' onboard RGB lighting will not be available without I2C/SMBus.</p><p>On Linux, this is usually because the i2c-dev module is not loaded.  You must load the i2c-dev module along with the correct i2c driver for your motherboard.  This is usually i2c-piix4 for AMD systems and i2c-i801 for Intel systems.</p><p>See <a href='https://help.openrgb.org/'>help.openrgb.org</a> for additional troubleshooting steps if you keep seeing this message.<br></p>


I installed what looks like the main Manjaro package for `i2c` but same result.

Might go back and mess with it at some point but doesn't look like there's much documentation.
ExpandingMan Dec 30, 2022
Oops, I take it back, after rebooting, seems to work fine. Just can't address the GPU for some reason.
Valck Dec 30, 2022
I said it before, I say it again: Sad as it is, I'm at the point where I'd be willing to pay *more* just so I don't have to put up with this nonsense. What a useless, stupid waste of resources and energy.
rkl Dec 30, 2022
I just got a new PC and it's a tower with black panels on all sides (and, yes, I turned off any motherboard RGB in the BIOS since you can't see it!). I was much more interested in quietness than RGB, so I got a case that came with soundproofing material inside, along with a quiet PSU.
Grogan Dec 30, 2022
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"energy cost" <--- Those LEDs would be trivial... probably less than a case fan.

Want to save electricity? Shut computers down when there's no reason for them to be running. I'll leave rigs running overnight if I've scripted some build jobs or something, or I'm leaving something up for networking reasons, but otherwise I'll shut them down if I'm not going to be here for more than a few hours or so. That's more because "nothing can happen to it if it's shut off" than for saving power though.

I'm kind of lucky that power is cheap here though. It varies by time of use (low, mid, peak) but on average it's about 9 cents per kWh ($35 flat fee per month + time of use kWh which varies from about 8 to 13 cents for a few hours of peak time in the morning). We've got 400A service here so we can handle a lot of appliances, too.

I'm pretty messy (I don't care about cosmetics, I care about being able to access cables etc. easily) so when I get a case with a window (I'd prefer not, but most nice cases have them) that just faces the wall anyway. So no blinken lights for me :-)
Lofty Dec 31, 2022
Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: mr-victory
Quoting: kokoko3kToo much energy wasted imo.
On my laptop keyboard LEDs draw ~4W which decreases battery life a lot for me. (2.5 hr -> 2 hr) On a desktop where your GPU pulls 300W? Leds are very innocent.
20 or 30watts are 20 or 30 watts.
They are not justified because something else draws even more.

Gaming PC's are quite wasteful all round for everyday tasks. Outside of gaming ( and only really AA / AAA titles) you are using way to much energy for just coding, browsing, watching streams or basic office tasks. My PC is using between 70 - 80w watching a 720p video, when a mini PC can do this and everything else comfortably at 6w - 10w.


Last edited by Lofty on 1 January 2023 at 4:46 pm UTC
ridge Jan 1, 2023
This is my case.



I bought it for a reason.


Last edited by ridge on 1 January 2023 at 3:37 am UTC
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