4 ms·

It is surprisingly difficult to buy decent hardware that doesn't light up like a goddamn christmas tree. I recently bought a mouse and had to filter out like ha

It is surprisingly difficult to buy decent hardware that doesn't light up like a goddamn christmas tree. I recently bought a mouse and had to filter out like half of the good candidates to avoid having a stupid LED on my desk. This past weekend I installed a new AMD CPU (my first AMD ever) and the stock cooler has this dumb ring light on it. The only way to disable it is to hook up the CPU fan to a USB port so it appears as a USB device and use some proprietary Windows software to turn it off. That's right, CPU fans are USB devices now! The motherboard I bought has some backlighting(?!) which thankfully you can disable in the BIOS, but that's such a waste of hardware. Almost every RAM cartridge looks like a flashy high-level dagger from an MMO. What the fuck is with this trend? I just want a goddamn black box to sit there quietly in the corner.

stepbeek 6y ago
I feel your pain. The AMD fan is good enough thermally for my gaming machine (R5 3600), but I'm not a fan of the trend towards ultra RGB.
lostgame 6y ago
>> What the fuck is with this trend? The aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous to a vast majority of people, myself included. Especially the average person is going to look at the one with lights and the one without and assume the one with lights is automatically ‘better’. It helps sales, it helps jack up prices. You can see it in the dark clearly. It looks more interesting on a live stream, something very important these days. They’re programmable, and can be a fun way to express your personality. These are just a few reasons this is a trend. :)
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  They are also about as useful and "aesthetically pleasing" as the go-faster stripes on a 70's Ford Escort ;) At least on peripherals the bloody lights can usually be turned off in a bloated settings tool which always has an outrageous UI that screams "extreme gamer" too.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  > The aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous to a vast majority of people This sounds like perception bias to me. "The vast majority" of people are likely indifferent. The amount that love it and the amount that hate it are probably about the same sizes. Manufacturers just realized they can just target the part of the market that loves colorful stuff, charge more for it, and all groups, the lovers the haters and in between will buy it because it's the really the only stuff available. Which is the entire frustration the original post was complaining about: It's actually quite hard to find parts and cases (and even peripherals! It seems like most mechanical keyboards are light-up RGB keys nowadays) That don't have LEDs all over them.
Finnucane 6y ago
For my new pc I got a black box. Well, mostly black box, it has a glass panel on one side, but it faces away from me. As few lighted parts as I could. Considering how ugly and tacky many cases are, there could be a market for case cases to cover them up, though of course, they'd have to be well-ventilated also.
- tubularhells 6y ago
  Silent base cases are sound dampened and have no open sides by design. There are.options for it, for the mentally challenged who buy a silent case but then want the functionality compromised.
leetcrew 6y ago
I doubt the LEDs add more than a few cents to the BOM for these parts. I imagine the line of thought goes something like this: most people don't buy desktops. if they buy a desktop at all (instead of a laptop), they are probably an enthusiast. if they're building a desktop from parts, they are definitely an enthusiast. if they have a window in their case, they want blingy hardware. if they don't care about bling, they won't have a case window to begin with. QED, put LEDs on every single retail part. outside of the HN crowd, I don't think they're actually wrong. personally I don't hate the idea of RGB LED parts, but I do hate the fact that I have three different poorly written apps that control the colors of different hardware/peripherals for the same computer. and they never all manage to remember their state after a reboot.
auxym 6y ago
I share your frustration. Finding a nice case that doesn't have a window is also hard. I guess the demographic that buys PC parts these days is gamers that are into this stuff (as I was when I was 16, anyone remember cold cathodes?). The vast majority of non-gamer computer buyers buy systems (or laptops) from Dell & co.
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  Yeah but when we were 16, we weren't buying this type of case off the shelf either, we were brining shitty beige box case panels into the metal shop, cutting holes in them, and screwing in plexiglass ourselves. The whole aesthetic really does rest on a DIY aspect, off the shelf it's just obnoxious.
- detaro 6y ago
  Not that hard IMHO. Sure, lots of the market has shifted, but e.g. many SSF options don't have a window, e.g. BeQuiet, FractalDesign and Bitfenix have window-less ones and all are IMHO in the range of "nice" (for different tastes), ...
neogodless 6y ago
If you look back far enough, you can see where the trend began. The infamous "beige PC." Enthusiasts wanted to not only build their own PC, but for it to be custom, and to look good. Cases could be bought with silver, black, white, even color! And with enthusiasts working hard to make the inside of their case look neat, tidy and visually appealing, windows became popular. As RGB LEDs became inexpensive and easily programmable, it became a way for users to customize their hand-built PC further. Of course OEMs want to capitalize on this. I just don't quite understand why it's a complaint, though. Is it difficult to buy a case without a window, and set LEDs to some kind of steady state dark color? Or simply replace the stock cooler with the one that looks the way you want? The whole point is being able to pick and choose so it fits what you want. Is it really hard to buy hardware that doesn't light up? I went to Newegg.com and plenty of the CPU coolers there have no lights. And you were able to disable the motherboard lights. Here are lots of black boxes to pick from: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007583%20600006506 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007583%20600006506
- coldpie 6y ago
  I agree with you it's minor, and I admit I'm mostly just ranting (although lights on external peripherals like mice are inexcusable). But, waste annoys me. My CPU fan now has a microcontroller with USB logic on it, a bunch of LEDs and plastic light tunnels, and the requisite jacks to hook cables into, and came with two different cables I could use to control this light I don't want. What do I do with all this, just throw it away? That's a bunch of plastic and metal and manufacturing and shipping and packaging that neither I nor the planet need right now, and it's all going straight into the trash in a few years. It could have just been a dumb DC brush motor.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    is it really so bad to have marginally more material on a hunk of metal you're going to throw away anyway? if you really cared, you could have bought a cpu that didn't come with a fan and a noctua cooler. they'll mail you a new socket adapter for free whenever you upgrade, so you can keep it running indefinitely.
pengaru 6y ago
Go watch some twitch streamers to get a better sense of who is buying/building gaming PCs these days...

stepbeek 6y ago

I feel your pain. The AMD fan is good enough thermally for my gaming machine (R5 3600), but I'm not a fan of the trend towards ultra RGB.

lostgame 6y ago

>> What the fuck is with this trend? The aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous to a vast majority of people, myself included. Especially the average person is going to look at the one with lights and the one without and assume the one with lights is automatically ‘better’. It helps sales, it helps jack up prices. You can see it in the dark clearly. It looks more interesting on a live stream, something very important these days. They’re programmable, and can be a fun way to express your personality. These are just a few reasons this is a trend. :)

flohofwoe 6y ago
They are also about as useful and "aesthetically pleasing" as the go-faster stripes on a 70's Ford Escort ;) At least on peripherals the bloody lights can usually be turned off in a bloated settings tool which always has an outrageous UI that screams "extreme gamer" too.
bluefirebrand 6y ago
> The aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous to a vast majority of people This sounds like perception bias to me. "The vast majority" of people are likely indifferent. The amount that love it and the amount that hate it are probably about the same sizes. Manufacturers just realized they can just target the part of the market that loves colorful stuff, charge more for it, and all groups, the lovers the haters and in between will buy it because it's the really the only stuff available. Which is the entire frustration the original post was complaining about: It's actually quite hard to find parts and cases (and even peripherals! It seems like most mechanical keyboards are light-up RGB keys nowadays) That don't have LEDs all over them.

Finnucane 6y ago

For my new pc I got a black box. Well, mostly black box, it has a glass panel on one side, but it faces away from me. As few lighted parts as I could. Considering how ugly and tacky many cases are, there could be a market for case cases to cover them up, though of course, they'd have to be well-ventilated also.

tubularhells 6y ago
Silent base cases are sound dampened and have no open sides by design. There are.options for it, for the mentally challenged who buy a silent case but then want the functionality compromised.

leetcrew 6y ago

I doubt the LEDs add more than a few cents to the BOM for these parts. I imagine the line of thought goes something like this: most people don't buy desktops. if they buy a desktop at all (instead of a laptop), they are probably an enthusiast. if they're building a desktop from parts, they are definitely an enthusiast. if they have a window in their case, they want blingy hardware. if they don't care about bling, they won't have a case window to begin with. QED, put LEDs on every single retail part. outside of the HN crowd, I don't think they're actually wrong. personally I don't hate the idea of RGB LED parts, but I do hate the fact that I have three different poorly written apps that control the colors of different hardware/peripherals for the same computer. and they never all manage to remember their state after a reboot.

auxym 6y ago

I share your frustration. Finding a nice case that doesn't have a window is also hard. I guess the demographic that buys PC parts these days is gamers that are into this stuff (as I was when I was 16, anyone remember cold cathodes?). The vast majority of non-gamer computer buyers buy systems (or laptops) from Dell & co.

blacktriangle 6y ago
Yeah but when we were 16, we weren't buying this type of case off the shelf either, we were brining shitty beige box case panels into the metal shop, cutting holes in them, and screwing in plexiglass ourselves. The whole aesthetic really does rest on a DIY aspect, off the shelf it's just obnoxious.
detaro 6y ago
Not that hard IMHO. Sure, lots of the market has shifted, but e.g. many SSF options don't have a window, e.g. BeQuiet, FractalDesign and Bitfenix have window-less ones and all are IMHO in the range of "nice" (for different tastes), ...

neogodless 6y ago

If you look back far enough, you can see where the trend began. The infamous "beige PC." Enthusiasts wanted to not only build their own PC, but for it to be custom, and to look good. Cases could be bought with silver, black, white, even color! And with enthusiasts working hard to make the inside of their case look neat, tidy and visually appealing, windows became popular. As RGB LEDs became inexpensive and easily programmable, it became a way for users to customize their hand-built PC further. Of course OEMs want to capitalize on this. I just don't quite understand why it's a complaint, though. Is it difficult to buy a case without a window, and set LEDs to some kind of steady state dark color? Or simply replace the stock cooler with the one that looks the way you want? The whole point is being able to pick and choose so it fits what you want. Is it really hard to buy hardware that doesn't light up? I went to Newegg.com and plenty of the CPU coolers there have no lights. And you were able to disable the motherboard lights. Here are lots of black boxes to pick from: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007583%20600006506 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007583%20600006506

coldpie 6y ago
I agree with you it's minor, and I admit I'm mostly just ranting (although lights on external peripherals like mice are inexcusable). But, waste annoys me. My CPU fan now has a microcontroller with USB logic on it, a bunch of LEDs and plastic light tunnels, and the requisite jacks to hook cables into, and came with two different cables I could use to control this light I don't want. What do I do with all this, just throw it away? That's a bunch of plastic and metal and manufacturing and shipping and packaging that neither I nor the planet need right now, and it's all going straight into the trash in a few years. It could have just been a dumb DC brush motor.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  is it really so bad to have marginally more material on a hunk of metal you're going to throw away anyway? if you really cared, you could have bought a cpu that didn't come with a fan and a noctua cooler. they'll mail you a new socket adapter for free whenever you upgrade, so you can keep it running indefinitely.

pengaru 6y ago

Go watch some twitch streamers to get a better sense of who is buying/building gaming PCs these days...