RGB Case Lighting with ASUS Motherboards & CableMod LED Strips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,350 words · ~6 min read
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welcome to the RGB lighting guide or the current state of RGB Lighting in your
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case or whatever you want to call it we've had RGB Lighting in headsets and
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keyboards and mice and whatever for quite a while now but inside of the case
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it's been slightly more tricky one of the very cool things that has happened
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is ASUS now has RGB 50/50 headers which
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is the standard for RGB strips and little cables that come off of them so
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you can plug in RGB strips to them cool cable mod also has led strips now r ing
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from RGB to UV to single color ones so
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we're going to put the two together and see how it works
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out first we're going to start off with cable mods wide beam LED strips so these
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come in RGB the main feature of today single color whether that's like red
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green blue white or single color but
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ultraviolet so yeah that's pretty cool the idea behind wide beam is that it has
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a wider spread of light than a conventional led up to 50% more which is
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actually really solid if you want to have consistent smooth lighting
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throughout your entire case another thing that I really like is the different ways that it can stick to your
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case one of them is your standard kind of adhesive style but it's with a
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different adhesive than I think we've seen before on LED strips which is a a
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foam 3M solution which is actually really aggressively sticky which is
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great because really sucks when your LED
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strip in your case is like bowing out and falling off and just looks like junk
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and this one should stick pretty well another one that will stick pretty well
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and actually my favorite one is the magnetic
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one voila I love that that is super cool
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they put little magnetic blocks throughout the entire strip and then it
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just sticks anywhere in your case the LED strips that are actually in the case
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right now both of those are magnetic another thing that I wanted to mention
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is that power whether you're just powering the IR LED box or if you're
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powering an LED strip directly you're able to do that using SATA connectors
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which is actually pretty cool because it would be a shame to plug in an a Molex
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strip to your modular power supply just for some Led strips when you could run a
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SATA connector that actually allows you to plug in another one afterwards which
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is pretty sweet it's a pass through SATA cuz you don't need that much power for
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these little guys um yeah saves you
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Cable Management space uses a more modern connector that's nice mlex can go
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away I don't need it anymore now they are fully chainable each end of the LED
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strips having a female connector and then having these male male little
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bridging connectors that come with your LEDs and if you want you can have them
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IR LED controlled so you can use this little box which comes with the big
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package for the RGB LED and here are
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your female connectors so that you can Bridge them into your LED strips have
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these going going in two different directions if you want and then the
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third little cable that comes off of here is the LED receiver thingy for the
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Box this allows you to use this controller which is great it has on and
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off so you can turn your strips on or off if you want to like go to bed and don't want the light on or something you
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can dim it or make it brighter you can change what color it's currently running
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or what Hue of that color it currently is you change what mode it's in so flash
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strobe fade or smooth all that stuff is
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great but the usability of a controller to control the LED strips inside of your
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computer is a little bit wonko and feels a little bit old and has been done for a
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while so we're going to put all that kind of stuff away I'm happy that it's
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able to be done but if you have one of these new spunky ASUS boards that
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happens to have the aura connector or the aura header where you can plug in
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50/50 LED strips like these guys I think
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you're in luck in terms of plugging them into the board you can use a combination
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of wires but you do need to use for the RGB connectors the wire that comes from
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cable mod that's a custom cable that they have that makes sure that the RG
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andb wires actually match up with the configuration that a has for instance if
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you don't use the included cable from cable mod and try to set it on like
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what's my CPU temperature it shows a chart from green to red and shows up as
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purple if your CPU isn't that hot which is means nothing also if you set it to
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music effect it looks absolutely crazy
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if I set it to music effect right now and listen to the Christmas album from
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lonus media group's awesome amazing Christmas band it still kind of looks
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like it should probably be playing
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dubstep but whatever at least the colors are somewhat accurate there's also a
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static effect if I wanted everything to just look white which I think looks
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great in this case there's a breathing effect just so I can have everything
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kind of breathe in and out we all know the breathing effect it looks really
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cool on Aus logos I've been doing it forever in red uh strobing so basically
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it just turns on and off it's not super fast but it just turns on and off uh
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color cycle which will go through all the available colors if you want to have
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this cool like uh gradual rainbow effect
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and then yeah music effect and CPU temperature like we mentioned earlier
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also what you can do with this software is sync everything up if you want so you
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can have it so that all of the LEDs in your whole rig so the one that's on your
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motherboard and the both the headers that you might have branching off are
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all synced doing the exact same effect or you can decide to individually
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control the logo header 1 or header 2
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thanks for watching this video hopefully you guys enjoyed the current state of
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RGB lighting personally I think we've had some pretty good improvements having
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headers on a motherboard and having software on your desktop just makes
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sense in my opinion and the new mounting options of the foam and magnets are huge
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improvements in my opinion let me know what you guys think in the comments down
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below don't forget to check out the links in the description there's an Amazon affiliate code that helps us out
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a ton it's actually like super awesome another thing that's super awesome is
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