Are There Any Tech YouTubers Who Are Not Obsessed with RGB lighting and TG computer cases?

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Do any gamers out out there fall for the joke that RGB increases frames per second when playing games? There is an article saying that the computer components can make an impact in frames per second and not RGB lighting.

One of my favorite tech YouTuber, Hardware Canucks, actually made a comment that “RGB increases FPS as well. Don’t forget that” when reviewing a computer keyboard.

Yeah, why not use our smartphones to shine a flashlight right up our eyes? That would increase frames per second when playing games, right? I’ve made a comment on YouTube and I did just that: turn on the flashlight on my smartphone and face it toward my right eye (I’m blind in my left eye since the day I was born). I kind of get the feeling that the computer and gaming industry makes me want to take that joke too far that flashlight from my smartphone increases frames per second.

I even saw a video about Micro-ATX cases making a comeback.

Dmitri commented in the video that not having a tempered glass side panel is a weird one. Yeah, really? How about I dazzle myself with all the RGB components so I can keep myself distracted while working remotely and let the productivity go down the drain?

This is why I am not obsessed with RGB lighting and computer cases with tempered glass side panels. Plus, there aren’t that many choices when it comes to choosing a computer case that has just the plain side panel and nothing else. And besides, it’s not my place to promote self-harm on the Internet.

A couple of months ago, I wanted to replace my AMD RX 5600 XT that does not have any form of lighting which I enjoyed the most with an NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti, but as far as I have looked in Amazon, there are no NVIDIA GPUs that do not have any form of lighting in the market. I mean, I tried, but the GPU that I purchased which I thought wouldn’t have any lighting at all, did!

And now I’ve had to live with it. I don’t plan on doing any kind of crypto-mining but only for gaming and I found that GPU at the price point of MSRP as of September 25, 2022. It is a nice find, but it did have lighting which I do not want.

One day, I plan on hiding my computer in a server closet or for the time being, put that computer case in an enclosure such as this:

I have also written a blog a few years ago where I talked about hiding my computer in a home closet (I would call it a “server room” of sorts) and make use of some network KVM or maybe a network keyboard/mouse switch with separate active HDMI 2.1 cables between the server room and the computer room.

This is why I am very obsessed with being an anti-RGB/anti-TG type of guy and that I would love to hide my computer out of sight.

With all that said, as I mentioned in the subject of my thread, are there any Tech YouTubers out there who are NOT obsessed with tempered glass cases and are NOT obsessed with RGB lighting when it comes to gaming?

And yes, I promise to take care of my eyesight, but as I said earlier, I do get the feeling that the computer/gaming industry does make me want to shine my smartphone’s flashlight against my good eye for hours just to increase frames per second just because 100% of all the gamers out there love RGB lighting. :joy:

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I don’t watch a lot of youtube channels anymore. Wendell from Level1Techs is the only one that likes stealth builds. But he will review cases with tempered glass side panels.

I believe I remember that joe that RGB increases FPS from HC, but generally, people who watch their channels constantly know that was a joke. Sure, they don’t realize that average Joes might see the video and not realize it’s a joke, but their focus is always on increasing viewer counts, not in educating people. Which is one reason why I like Wendell and Jay, they at least try to teach people, while viewers come after.

Cases that come with metal side panels can be found by looking on pcpartpicker. I didn’t find mine that way though, I was eyeing the Antec P101 Silent for a while. I like it, but I moved away from large server builds into armland, now I have SBCs laying around on a desk organizer. I need to find a way to cram more of them.

After I saw Linus build his gaming rack closet at his old house, I was interested in one too. I eventually built one, but I didn’t have a closet, so I had to put it in the same room as myself. I built 2U boxes with 80mm SilentiumPC fans. They weren’t loud, but they were audible. I got used to it after 4 years or so of sleeping 9 feet away from them.

Now I’m all about building small. My main PC was a RPi 4 for a while, but it has gotten to a point where it was unreasonably slow and I couldn’t run libreoffice on it anymore (because the build template always broke and keeping it too long would break the dependencies, so I had to uninstall and rebuilt it from time to time). Now I upgraded to an Odroid H3+ 32GB of RAM. It’s much faster and somehow uses less RAM, around 5.1GB, as opposed to all 8GB of the Pi and some swap.

The antec is a sturdy (and kinda heavy case), but the components are snug in. And they survived 2 moves now. And they aren’t lightweight components, it’s a TR 1950x with x399 Taichi motherboard, which weight a ton by themselves, but to add injury, I have a Noctua NHD-15. And to add insult to injury, I have 2 GPUs, a RX 6400 and RX 6600XT and some PCI-E USB cards. The system was originally meant for passthrough, but only half of it works (because I couldn’t get a Linux VM to output on the 6400 and gave up).

I ranted too much. I don’t think there are many tech tubers who don’t fancy RGB, especially gaming focused channels. I like stealth builds, but I like having RGB around. My lights are normally on warm white light (the classic yellowish tinge), but at night, I turn them red and on low brightness. They serve as actual lights where it matters, around the room, but lighting the insides of a place that I shouldn’t be looking at anyway is dumb.

There was a guy, not a tech tuber, but a hardware / engineer tuber, Great Scott!, who made an RGB monitor backlight that synced with the actual monitor frames via a second HDMI port and setting the pc monitors on duplicate. It was pretty atmospheric, and made the sharp black edges of the monitor fade away a bit into the bleeding light behind it. Again, RGB where it matters, I’m surprised there aren’t kits like those available to buy (when I looked, there was a set of leds in a plastic shroud, that only worked for monitors 19 to 21 inches. No actual kit for a DIY solution with a led strip.

Too long rant, I’m out.

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One area where I really dislike RGB is in keyboards. Having backlighting is great for typing but I don’t need flashy colors for that. It also reduces battery life (on bluetooth keyboards) by weeks!

The thing is, monkey people do as monkey people see. If a YouTube channel starts getting real popular because the thumbnails have a stupid face in it, that’s what people will start to mimic. If the fancy Youtuber that people like starts taking closeup shots when reviewing whatever item, same thing.

It’s just a trend, it will wear out.

Remember how cars used to come with tons of color options, but now they are all black and white pretty much all around? Laptop chasis and even smartphones cases used to be more colorful but now that’s not the trend anymore.
So, yeah, give it 5 years or so and it will go away.

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I really like the Toyota Blue on their Rav4s.

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Everyone, I’m not interested in motor vehicles because I do not care for one, so please do not turn my thread into discussions about motor vehicles. I mean, I envy people who can drive motor vehicles, but no thanks. If I will be working on-site in the future, I would gladly walk back and forth to work and home. But please keep the topic about motor vehicles out of my thread. I would like to see that photo of motor vehicle removed from my thread, but then to each their own. And besides, because I cannot drive, motor vehicles are just too boring for me.

And thanks everyone for comments. I guess there aren’t any YouTubers who are not into RGB lighting.

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I don’t think people on YouTube are necessarily obsessed with RGBs… I just think they are in it for the views, they are entertainers after all, so they will use whatever tactics they can to keep and increase their audience.

To clarify, I don’t mean people like Jay who produce content of actual quality with the explicit intention of teaching.

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I figure I’ll chime in here, I’m not sure how much (if any of this) is in regard to RGB and LED lighting I may use but I do have an opinion, so…

I think there’s two different types of people that implement LED lighting:

  1. People that use it to accent something, or “frame” something of importance
  2. People that go overboard and implement it in a “look what I can do” kind of way

I feel I fall into the first category. My office desk has a green LED strip around it, which I use because I like the way it frames the outline of my desk. My Turing Pi PC build has an LED power supply cable, but I hate the way it looks. My “vision” was to have something show pulses of energy (similar to a warp reactor in Star Trek), but instead it ends up having a Windows-only controller so I can’t change the light pattern. At all. I connected a Windows laptop to it in order to change the lighting to something more subtle, but apparently it has no built-in memory and I’d have to leave the laptop connected forever in order to retain the setting. I’m currently too lazy to remove it. Or maybe I’m hoping there’s some way I can find to control it.

LED lighting can be practical. For example, my Launch Keyboard has a different lighting color depending on which layout I have active. This gives me a visual indicator of this, and takes the guess work out of it.

Something that seems a bit frustrating is when you don’t have a means of disabling LED lighting, as was already mentioned here. I think a toggle to enable/disable it should be mandatory. I spoke to someone at System76 (can’t remember who) that was annoyed by the lack of this. At that time, a very specific part was the best for compatibility, but it had LED lighting on it that could be seen from outside the case faintly. It may have been the GPU. Anyway, it’s a little pretentious to not have a toggle.

I think “less is more” when it comes to LED lighting. That’s why I have it down to just a light strip and the cable in the Turing Pi that’s proprietary.

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I’m talking more about “People that go overboard and implement it in a “look what I can do” kind of way.” These are the kind of people who think that “RGB will give you more frames per second” when gaming and that we should always have a tempered glass side panel in our computer cases in order to show off our computer build 24/7. That’s the kind of obsession that I am getting from tech YouTubers. It’s like if you don’t have RGB, you get less frames per second when gaming and I think that’s ridiculous.

But hey (@jay), I enjoyed your channel a lot. Yours is not as obnoxious compared to tech YouTubers when it comes to reviewing gaming products and no offense, but I am very thankful for that. I like that System76 does not go overboard with tempered glass side panels for Thelio line of cases.

I would like to buy a Thelio case, but when it comes to having an RTX 40xx series GPUs, I could see myself buying a Hyte Y60 which has vertical slots for a 3-slot GPU, but the only disadvantage is the half-height PCIe slots for the motherboard. Even then, I could hide my computer case so that it’s not visible to me. I don’t care for the looks when it comes to functionality. I despise that GPUs are getting bigger and bigger.
https://hyte.com/store/y60?v=113

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I auto launch OpenRGB and it turns all the “default” RGB in my system off, only leaving my keyboard backlit.

Some custom builds look amazing with their RGB configurations, and I have heard that some games can configure your RGB while playing to “provide immersion” with RGB effects. I think I would find the latter to be very distracting.

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I’ve never used OpenRGB, maybe I should check it out as my keyboard does have RGB but I almost never use it as all the pre-configured modes are too flashy for me.

That reminds me, some TV’s have RGB on the back that matches the dominant colors on the screen which is a nice touch for home movie sessions.

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