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Comment by chuckdries | Hacker News Reader

If you're in this thread "I built a PC, all my stuff has RGB, it's fine but I don't get it", try setting them all to the same color - you might be surprised how nice it looks. I set everything to white, but my roommate has a nice shade of purple he uses for everything. My real golden rule is absolutely no motion. Can't stand cycling rainbows or whatever.

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I normally never have any RGB components in my personal builds but I was asked to build my niece a gaming rig for Christmas, figuring a kid would probably like a bit more of a blinged out system I sprung for RGB fans, RAM, water-cooler, and PSU and set them all to a light pink (the case is mint green, her other favorite color) and I have to say it turned me around on RGB lighting. It looked super clean and minimal once I tuned the brightness and color.

The only downsides I encountered were color matching among different components, it was a bit tedious. The other was the control software (gigabyte fusion 2.0) was very touchy, at one point I had to do a hard reset and wait for the caps to drain before I could get the LEDs functional again.

Edit: typo

Not positive this does it, but I learnt this trick from some greybeards. Hit the rocker switch on the PSU, then attempt to power on the computer. Caps will be discharged from the attempted boot. It might not be perfect though. Just something I picked up.

This is the trick. If you get all of the lights set to the same color, plus maybe one that changes based on CPU temperature or something, and you make sure none of the colors clash, you can get a very nice/clean look.

For an added bonus, on keyboards such as the logitechs you may be able to have different colors for different key types for quick and easy reference

Some games like Factorio have nice contextual cues for certain key bindings. I'm sure there's extensions available for most editors to do the same thing.

I let my CPU fan do its default color changing rainbow, buuuut only because it's under my desk where I can't see it. If nothing else, I can quickly glance down there and see if the computer is powered on.

AMD ships them standard with their Ryzen processors, I guess the market for enthusiast range parts has decided that we want RGB hardware.

Personally I think case aesthetics peaked around the Antec P180 which looked like brushed metal fridge and was one of the first cases to care about sound isolation. No window panel, so nobody cares how much of a mess my wiring is, and I can buy the RAM that's on sale instead of the one with color coordinated heatspreaders.

But if other people are into that, power to them.

Someday I'd like to do a "desktop literally built into the desk top" build and ditch the suspended computer mount completely, assuming I still even want to have a full desktop computer 10 years from now.

Might be nice to have the fan color change with the cpu temp, but otherwise it always seems gaudy. I like things having function in addition to form.

Then again, I also gave up on desktops roughly 8 years ago. If it isn't my laptop it is a NUC or similar small form factor thing that can be mounted on the back of the monitor or otherwise hidden away.

> Someday I'd like to do a "desktop literally built into the desk top"

For 7 years my desktop has been literally just a motherboard sitting on a cut-up yoga mat on my bookshelf. [1] The SSDs are piled next to it. My work PC is zip-tied to a milk crate. Don't let people fool you, you can be pretty creative with your definition of "case".

[1] https://i.imgur.com/NkEmS4N.png

That’s awesome. Are yoga mats dissipative? Is this like a poor man’s ESD mat (figuratively speaking, not trying to imply that you’re poor)?

No idea, at the very least it didn't seem to build up a static charge, and it's worked fine for me for a long time. I imagine it probably depends on the specific yoga mat.

I used to just have it directly on the wood, which was fine too, but then I put it on top of an upside-down, powder-coated-metal IKEA drawer thing (so I could put the power supply underneath for more shelf space). My fiancee was worried it might get scratched and conduct at some point, so we added the yoga mat.

> Are yoga mats dissipative?

Not at all, it's plastic!

But my case (with mesh intakes) serves the important function of keeping cat hair out of the heatsinks

I actually have a medium-hair cat and it's been fine. But it's pretty far off the floor.

Yeah now that you mention it, mine has needed this a lot less since I hung it under the desk earlier this year. It used to be on the floor.

The party hats are a nice touch

Thanks! I made them for a video Github put out last year, [1] and decided to keep 'em around.

https://youtu.be/w5HykygC43Y?t=7

My old i5-2500K based build was like that for many, many years. It sat on my desk on top of an anti-static bag (that the motherboard came in). The new graphics card I had, which was a gtx 480 maybe, wouldn't fit in the old case I had.

It took me at least 5 years to get a new case, much to my wife's annoyance.

It was fine. Swapping SSDs was easy. >.<

desktop literally built into the desk top

The Sun "pizza box" computer was like that.[1]

You could just bolt a 1U rackmount server to the underside of a desktop. Or get a desk that's 1.75 inches thick, cut a hole of the appropriate size, and recess the server into it. There are lots of under the desk computer mounts, but I haven't seen a recessed one.

[1] https://blog.pizzabox.computer/pizzaboxes/sparcstation/

Biggest issue I find with using a 1u case for a client is fan noise - short of some clever modification to the side panels to fit larger fans transverse, it's near impossible to get acceptably quiet 1u fans.

I imagine something like this: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2047642/how-a-legendary-pc-m...

Except without the glass top. Or perhaps glass with a very dark tint so that it looks black, but with sufficiently bright internal lighting you can see through it.

The easier and more likely version would be to make the computer fit in a normal desk drawer. Prefer that to a 1U on account of fan size as another commenter mentioned, but being off to one side instead of the whole desk surface has the benefit of not making the whole desk chunkier.

That site won't even scroll with the 19 ad trackers blocked.

Working for me with 20 things blocked by ublock, but try this: https://www.l3p.nl/l3p-d3sk/

The other link is showing this desk and another commercialized version inspired by it.

Do you know if newer cases gotten better than P180, for sound isolation while keeping cool?

That's still my case, but it's huge and I don't need that space anymore.

Check out the bequiet! brand cases.

No idea - I remember spending a lot of time browsing Silent PC Review on previous builds to make sure I got an appropriately quiet power supply and everything else, but it stopped doing any meaningful testing years ago, and the current incarnation basically looks like affiliate link blogspam.

Be careful aiming for sound isolation, it can be counterproductive.

Generally speaking "sound isolation" means reducing where sound can escape from the case, and putting some noise absorbing foam where you can to dampen the noise.

The counterproductive part is that having a lot of airflow would be the opposite of "sound isolating" -- anywhere air flows freely sound does as well. So by definition a sound isolating case has poor airflow. Poor airflow could require you to run your fans at higher RPMs to compensate, which is then introducing more noise than you would have had with a more open case that could run low RPM fans.

Gamers Nexus did a good piece on this https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3391-airflow-vs-silent-ca...

(as he points out, there are still reasons to prefer sound isolating cases, it's just not as much of a clear win as it might sound at first)

> desktop literally built into the desk top

DIY Perks did that.

Invisible PC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Perqf0dOGLk

Invisible monitor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E0mNSMBmFQ

This is perfect!

>AMD ships them standard with their Ryzen processors

Only for the ryzen 7 and the r9 _900 cpus. The low end ones come with a basic black cooler and the high end come with nothing.

Ah, I'm on a Ryzen 7.

I was used to always getting an aftermarket cooler for previous Intel builds to replace the stock one with the whiny little fan, but the included Ryzen 7 cooler is comparatively great (unnecessary bling aside).

My problem with that is that while it looks nice, I find it visually very frustrating if it's in your field of view. Those points of light that go in and out as your hands move over them are an annoyance for me.

If you don't touchtype and need to see your keyboard to type effectively then being able to configure the color and intensity is nice, but for me all the intensity I need is 0. At night I'll just have some gentle ambient light in my room.

I use an expensive Moonlander keyboard that comes with RGB lighting and I tried to give it a fair chance but I always end up finding it distracting and useless.

When I was younger lights didn't fill my vision like they do now. Blue LED's in the dark become impossible to ignore. If the RGB LED's are really low then it's not bad, but it is still distracting on something like a mouse.

I have a red led mechanical keyboard and that one doesn't bug me at all. But the white ones do.

Or have the color encode a performance counter like total CPU.

After someone gave me mouse with RGB decorations I thought it would be nice to have CPU and RAM usage encoded into it. (in practice it isn't very useful, as it is usually obscured by hand) (https://gist.github.com/Milek7/f5669c00cf660c3984becb031c2ec...)

Agreed yea. I recently shifted mine to all a single color and like the look a lot more. It makes the open Thermaltake Core P3 case look quite striking.

In terms of the "why" for this kind of thing, I guess if I'm going to be staring at a computer screen and computer all day, I want it to look interesting. The P3 case is open with a large glass plate on the front (look it up), and I've got it mounted directly on my wall. It does nothing for my computer's performance, but it makes my time at the computer more pleasant.

I went with white because my keyboard only has white LEDs, but RGB white (255,255,255) still has strange colour tinges that vary by component.

This app is great but the tales of bricked RGB hardware during development are a little concerning.

It's still tacky, tho.

Another cool usage is to light up specific keys based on the current application. This is quite useful in things like games or editors. You can have green for movement, white for actions, etc.

I never got that one. Who is it for? When you're playing a game, you're not looking at the keyboard. And with just the few buttons available covered by your hands, it's not really for others... Why is the game-layout lighting a thing?

Its mostly aesthetics. It could be useful if you come back to a game after a break and you forget some of the keys. I can see its use as a training mode too.

I've always been about the red because I game so much in the dark. I set mine to pulse on/off gradually, almost like breathing and don't find it distracting at all.

ooo and dim them if there's an disturbance, like ramped up cpu, gpu, or a key pressed on the keyboard would dim that key and radiating decreasing dimming from "disturbance"

I'd get that

What I love about RGB is the flexibility: I have a white case (Lian Li 011-D) with a custom waterloop. I run 9 cheap chinese RGB fans (EZDIY-FAB) and two custom rgb strips at top and bottom, which emit light against two white radiators. [1] The white allows the light to reflect from basically every surface in the case. They come with a custom rf remote, and I setup everything so I can control the strips and the fans separately. Currently, the fans are all white, with the strips being red at top and bottom.

But if I want to, I can go all unicorn... - or turn everything off.

[1]: https://imgur.com/7PqDhKo

Doing this in Linux seems like a lot more time/trouble than just putting the side of the case on (and not getting one of those silly cases with a window in it).

When I went to build a PC recently, I was disappointed to find out that the most cost effective cases that otherwise met my requirements all had those silly windows, and that some RGB components were actually cheaper than non-RGB. So I ended up with a window and RGB, despite having no desire for either!

I had to hunt around for the correct software to disable the stuff. Little did I know that this project existed at the time :)

I'm not sure what you're price range was but a lot of Fractal Design cases have solid side panels. I have their Meshify C case and the temps are great with a Noctua cooler.

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