I did an article a few years ago about why I hate RGB. Now, a few years later, I am revisiting this topic because instead of the RGB solutions on the market getting better, in my opinion, they are now worse, and the direction they are heading in is a mess.
In that article, one of my big “pet peeves” was the lack of standardization — how everyone tried to reinvent the wheel. While software like OpenRGB or SignalRGB has provided a small level of relief, they are not options that work all the time. Instead of moving toward standardization, it seems companies are leaning even more heavily into a proprietary approach.
This all came to a head for me when I started building two new show rigs for events. For my personal builds, I usually avoid RGB, but for show builds, you want something that attracts attention.
As I started the build, I had some specific goals in mind and made choices based on those goals. However, those goals revealed to me the mess that is becoming the world of ARGB.
Many companies are now selling complete ecosystems for the lighting in your PC. However, it is not just the pretty lights on fans — now those fans and other RGB devices in the ecosystem must connect to a proprietary controller. These are not just controlling the ARGB lights but also, in many cases, the actual fan speed.
This is bad, as it means you now need a special program running all the time to ensure your fans not only look right but, in many scenarios, are running at the right speeds. I have always been a proponent of running clean systems with minimal background software. So, adding extra background software is bad to begin with — but it’s even worse when you realize these programs are not always the most stable.
If this were just one company taking this approach, it might be overlooked. But from my own experience, I know for sure three big names — Lian Li, Corsair, and Thermaltake — are all doing this, and I am sure others either are preparing to or soon will.
These ecosystems potentially decrease system stability and do so at an increased cost to consumers. The industry seems to have bet on the community becoming so superficial in chasing the perfect look that we will pay more and introduce more issues into our PCs — being happy about it all the way. Sadly, based on what I see out in the world, they may be right.
As if all these pretty lights are not enough, we have now seen the hard push to put little screens on everything — AIO heads, fan hubs, little add-on screens, and more. While some of the add-on screens can be run via your GPU, many of these (most, in fact) use an internal USB connection and then proprietary software to make the screens work.
All this software is how they tie you into their system. You see, just one such program can cause system instabilities, but when you mix in two or even three different control programs, the mess is just too much to dprograms you need.
Another factor I begged for in the earlier article was persistent memory on the devices so the software would not need to run all the time. However, companies have added more features and made it so the software needs to be constantly active in the background, or all your hard work to create the look you wanted is lost.
All of this proprietary software has another issue as well — it is all designed for Windows. This means if you were thinking of making the jump to Linux but bought into one of these ecosystems, then to be able to properly use (if at all) those pretty devices, you are just out of luck, as they do not support Linux.
All of this, by the way, is being shoved down the throat of our community. I decided to see what was involved with building a proper, blacked-out system — no RGB.
First, the case — go look for yourself. You have to put in effort to find a case without a window. It seems like every case is designed to have a window to show off the hardware. You actually have to try to get a non-windowed case.
How about buying an AIO? I was surprised at how hard it was to find an AIO without any ARGB compared to how many have lighting. Even finding one without a screen can be more challenging — and the wild thing is, the ones without any RGB or screens can often cost more than good budget AIOs with screens and lighting.
This leaves me, now a few years after writing the first article, looking at the state of RGB in our community and realizing it has become worse, not better. Companies have started throwing RGB on every product they can because they know people will rush to buy the pretty. We, as a community, have allowed this mess to exist, and our continued support of it — in our purchasing of these overpriced and overly complicated products — will make sure the state of affairs does not get better and will likely get worse.
If you enjoy RGB, then that is awesome — more power to you. But we should be demanding better solutions, not settling for prettier lights that actually make things worse.
