Hacker News Reader

Comment by crtasm | Hacker News Reader

I had to install software to turn off the lights on my CPU cooler (wraith prism included with an AMD CPU) - it's ridiculous.

View on HN

Oh god, that's just the worst. My laptop defaults to maximally bright blue lights for the keyboard whenever it's turned on. Had to keep Windows 10 installed just so I could turn that shit off via proprietary manufacturer crapware that takes one minute to even get an unresponsive interface on the screen. Pissed me off so much I reverse engineered it into a Linux program that does it instantly.

Seriously what are these manufacturers thinking? It's like they go out of their way to make things as bad as possible.

If you're exclusively running Linux, you actually can't turn off the lights on a GTX3000-Series card :c

I had been meaning to google how to do that... thanks for saving me the time :(

Does that mean you have to temporarily install Windows or plug it into a PC with Windows, turn off the lights, and then go about your day with Linux?

I'd just open up the card and unplug the cable to the lights. It's not a bad idea to open up the card to reapply thermal paste/pads anyway if you're hitting the card hard, a lot of manufacturers don't do a great job with heatsink contact, thermal paste quality, or both. On the lower tier cards in their product stack half the time there won't even be thermal pads on the vrm or memory chips. And recently I saw a post where powercolor forgot to remove the tape from the thermal pads at the factory [0]. And no, in most countries they can't void your warranty for opening it up.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/oyu1j6/thanks_powercol...

Why? Not even with proprietary nvidia drivers? If it's using a proprietary interface I'd expect those to be reverse engineered for such a major product.

I had to install drivers from the Arch User Repository to turn off the lights on a Razer keyboard. It still stays lit and in color-cycle mode unless it's plugged in directly to a USB port on the laptop.

Same for me and my GPU!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com