Comment by jonathanlydall
4 hours ago
I’m also “old” (44) and feel that rainbow LEDs are gaudy.
Seems these days that they’re not optional for most things remotely gaming related (e.g. motherboards, graphics cards) , but fortunately can generally be disabled or if illumination is useful (e.g for a keyboard), they can be configured to be white only, which was useful for the Steel Series keyboard I purchased. (I wouldn’t recommend Steel Series keyboards though, has stupid design choices and reliability issues.)
Also did LAN gaming back in the day. Computers were so much more work to lug around when you had a CRT and HDDs. These days desktop computers are far easier to transport.
I wanted to go RGB free when I built my desktop, but ran into the exact issue you describe. I kinda just shrugged and accepted it, but maybe I should have looked more deeply into their configurability. Off or all white would be a much better look IMO
What drives me crazy is that recently I had to download three separate bloated Electron app packages just to turn off the RGB in my new mobo, RAM and GPU because in 2025/26 we still don’t have vendors using a common protocol to control RGB.
On my ASUS TUF motherboard there is simply an option in the BIOS to turn off the LEDs.
It’s an old motherboard though, bought in 2018, but I would expect the option to be available on new ones too.
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