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Was looking into building a new computer today, after 5 years with my current one... Saw that even the ram sticks comes with leds. I don't want a single light a
by towb 7y ago
Was looking into building a new computer today, after 5 years with my current one... Saw that even the ram sticks comes with leds. I don't want a single light anywhere but that's not going to happen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- vbezhenar 7y agoWhy do you care? Those lights are inside case. If you don't get case with glass, you won't ever see it.
- arrrg 7y agoPeople have been mentioning very practical reasons but I just wanted to add that for me, even if none of these practical reasons were to apply (and I also don’t think the practical reasons are very strong), it’s simply about aesthetics. It’s extremely hard to build a PC that would fit my personal aesthetics and even if I can turn those off the mere thought of having to configure that and the mere thought of those LEDs existing at all offends me on a deep level. You have limitless choices when it comes to building a PC but the aesthetics of the things you can get are awful and tiring and just … ugly.
- grenoire 7y agoIt's a waste of metal, plastic, and electricity. Useless on every single aspect you can think of, except for the hardcore gamer pandering bullshit.
- davesmith1983 7y agoSome people like a bit of "bling" mate. Calm down.
- vikramkr 7y agoI mean, it's not wasting that much of any of those. It's probably less wasteful to just put LEDs on all those motherboards than create separate product lines with and without the flair - if some decent majority of the kinds of people that build their own PCs (gamers) want them, then it's easier to save on all the tooling and design and so on to create a new "pro" line of motherboards just for the people that don't want LEDs when they can just use an opaque case.
- shrimp_emoji 7y agoIt wastes a lot! Unintuitively, for the things that do all the heavy lifting, chips are incredibly power-efficient. The stuff on the side, anything that glows or moves (LEDs and fans) takes up a disproportionate ton of power. I don't like that X570 needs a chipset fan, but at least cooling's useful. I can't have as much charity toward LEDs. Although I do like 'em. The æsthetic is sick. Although not this one: https://smile.amazon.com/G-Skill-Trident-3600Mhz-PC4-28800-Channel/dp/B07M8YGCMV/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Trident-Z+Royal+DDR4-3600&qid=1562984282&s=gateway&sr=8-2 https://smile.amazon.com/G-Skill-Trident-3600Mhz-PC4-28800-C...
- effie 7y agoI saw this design on Youtube, it has to be the most senseless and tasteless thing ever sold in computer hardware.
- vikramkr 7y agoI'm talking about the overhead involved in making the separate lines. But that's an interesting point - but counterintuitive as I don't need to build in coolers for the heat generated by LEDs. Do you have numbers on power usage?
- kllrnohj 7y ago> It wastes a lot! Unintuitively, for the things that do all the heavy lifting, chips are incredibly power-efficient. The stuff on the side, anything that glows or moves (LEDs and fans) takes up a disproportionate ton of power. Not at all true. It's around 0.1-0.2 watt per LED. A RAM stick is going to have maybe a dozen at most, so that's an extra 1-2 watts. Similar for a motherboard. Maybe a fully binged out build is burning 10-20 watts on RGB, give or take. That's comparable to the power usage of just the VRMs or the X570 chipset (which is 10-15w), to say nothing of the CPU or GPU itself (both of which commonly blow past 100W under loads) LEDs are very, very efficient. They do not take a "disproportionate ton of power."
- megous 7y ago2W is a power budget for an entire single borad computer I can run a desktop on. So it's quite a lot in absolute terms for a led inside the case that I'll never see. 10-20W is 10-40% of idle power consumption, perhaps, for a workstation. So it wastes a lot even in relative terms.
- Havoc 7y agoAlas you can. Blinking LEDs are visually distracting even through fan slots etc
- hollerith 7y agoIf you were the kind of person who gets annoyed by low levels of light (e.g., when trying to sleep) then you would've noticed by now that putting a light inside something with as many holes as a computer case does not block all the light. (Also computer hardware vendors seem particularly fond of blue LEDs, which is the most annoying color to some people.)
- megous 7y agoFor some time in the 90s blue leds were though of as premium (they were certainly sold at premium prices), because they were harder to make.
- towb 7y agoBecause it limits what I can get. Some light might be leaking out of whatever case I end up with. Why is it on everything? It's a waste. I didn't want it when I was 16, I don't want it when I'm 30. I can't be alone.
- washadjeffmad 7y agoYou don't have to turn them on? I get the feeling people don't realize they have control over not just the color and action, but whether they're on at all. And yes, I mean RAM, GPU, motherboard, fans, etc advertised as "RGB". If it's the same price and includes LED, then for all purposes it doesn't have LED.
- towb 7y agoAs long as I can do it easy in the bios menu and it's not some windows only software that's fine. But still unnecessary which always will annoy me.
- ben-schaaf 7y ago> I get the feeling people don't realize they have control over not just the color and action, but whether they're on at all. Not a single vendor supports Linux. Luckily some things have been reverse engineered, but it's very far from "just turn it off". Even on windows it sucks if you're mixing brands. MSI Mobo, Asus GPU, Corsair RAM, gonna need 3 separate programs running at startup to control those LEDs.
- washadjeffmad 7y agoThe control softwares set the state and don't need to be installed beyond that. I downloaded the trial Win10 image for a VFIO VM, disabled all the lighting, and never thought about it again. I may choose not to use Windows, but I'm not going to overlook a tool because I'm "Linux-only". I get that some object to non-open standards on principle, but RGB is not a serious impediment to availability or use. Looking, there are non-RGB versions of most current-gen hardware available from popular resellers, and there are plenty of OEM options that are RGB-free. What I don't have racked somewhere else is in solid 'silent' cases with as few moving parts as required, but I bought parts with minimal/no lighting anyway. I certainly hope that everyone can find something amenable to their situation, but I also feel that objecting doesn't help when an hour's work or research beforehand can allieviate the cause.
- noir_lord 7y agoThat was pretty much my attitude then I wanted a high air flow case and switched to a Coolermaster H500 (2x200MM, 3x120mm noctua (two in the top, one on the back) with a glass side..and a tinted glass side. The RGB stuff sorta grew on me and it's kind of interesting on Linux to be able to see the CPU fan stop spinning completely (never seems to happen on W10 though...).
- gameswithgo 7y agoyou can get all the things without leds, and/or don’t plug the rgb cables in.
- towb 7y agoYes. But less stuff to pick between in every price range.
- dmix 7y agoLED's can't add to much to the price can they? Although I'd also like an option not to have extra electronics bolted on if I don't want them.
- hi5eyes 7y agothats not the point the point is to market the premium RGB'd hardware as some game specific hardware to kids that think "game cache" is anything but more memory
- kllrnohj 7y ago"game cache" branding is stupid but it is L3 not just "more memory" and the amount that Ryzen 3rd gen has is actually significant. So much so that it hugely impacts some workloads like GCC compilation times, which are way, way faster on Ryzen 3rd gen than anything else thanks entirely to that huge amount of game cache, I mean L3 cache.
- towb 7y agoDon't think it adds at all on the most common pieces that has them, so you can't even get away cheaper and happier without!
- opencl 7y agoThey add very little to the manufacturing cost but often quite a lot to the end user price. Corsair sells $40 RGB fans.
- arthurfm 7y agoBy far the worst PC component I have come across containing LEDs is Kingston's HyperX Fury RGB SSD [1]. It's a 2.5" SSD with 75 LEDs! These LEDs generate so much heat (70°C+) that the drive thermal throttles and either prevents the operating system from booting or causes significant performance issues [2]. [1] https://www.hyperxgaming.com/us/storage/fury-rgb-ssd https://www.hyperxgaming.com/us/storage/fury-rgb-ssd [2] https://youtu.be/vnST5rA64Oc https://youtu.be/vnST5rA64Oc
- userbinator 7y agoLife expectancy 1 million hours MTBF Garish LEDs aside, marketing that sort of blatantly false exaggerated spec should be illegal. 1M hours is over 100 years.
- TylerE 7y agoMay well not be unreasonable for a solid state component. Also, keep in mind that MTBF is not expected lifetime or anything at all like that. What a 1 million hour MTBF actually means is that if you had 1 million of these drives running at the same time, you'd expect one failure per hour. (Or similarly, if you had 1000 drives, you'd expect a failure every 1000 hours).
- markwkw 7y agoFollowing your logic: 100 drives - failure every 10,000 hours 10 drives - failure every 100,000 hours 1 drive - failure every 1,000,000 hours... How is this not expected lifetime? [edit: split lines]
- barrkel 7y agoThe mean rate of failures over time may not be constant, but it may have a mode for an expected life time window. This modal mean rate of failure is what's being described, I reckon. It would be nice to know the time window, but I'd expect it to be somewhere in the 5 to 10 year range.
- 7y ago
- totony 7y agoa lot motherboards allow to disable the leds, nvidia cards usually allow this too but the software is often laggy and doesnt work
- 0815test 7y agoLED's are the modern blinkenlights. They can be useful if the OS supports them properly (Linux is slowly but surely getting there), so that failure states or heavy load can be conveniently signaled in a way that doesn't impact actual, on-screen work.
- viraptor 7y agoI suddenly want to write a kdump helper which allows you to extract the crashed kernel memory via the connected LEDs.
- grenoire 7y agoI wouldn't mind components with a couple of tiny status LEDs, toggleable with a small dip switch or whatever. The issue is that manufacturers add these to simply get "rad-points."
- garaetjjte 7y agoInitially I complained about RGB lighting of my mouse, but now it is used for CPU load and RAM usage, and it's pretty cool.
- walterbell 7y agoAsRock has "PRO" AM4 motherboards in black/grey colors. http://in-win.com/ http://in-win.com/ makes quality cases without windows.