I have absolutely no interest in RGB anything in my computer. Yet I've occasionally ended up with all these RGB parts -- RGB LED on my mouse, RGB RAM sticks, RGB GPU -- just because it's the best alternative right then and there, it's wild. It's at the point where you sometimes have to go with a worse price/performance option or otherwise suboptimal choice just to avoid the stupid useless little RGB LEDs.

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've been a watercooling "enthusiast" for about 20 years now and, while the DIY-ness of the old school builds was a lot of fun for young me, I'm also glad I can just buy some off-the-shelf (or at worst "small batch") components that let me get really effective and near silent performance by just slamming some stuff together.

No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.

That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.

I was putting together a new PC in 2024 after not having built one for ~7 years, and browsing for motherboards, I kept saying "just give me an ugly green one, damn it!"

The last time I built a PC was almost 25 years ago. The gaming card seemed expensive at the time at $250.

I don't understand what's happened to PC building since. It's like it's a sport now or something. What's with the RGB crap? I remember wanting my PC to be quiet and out of sight. The screen and speakers were what mattered.

Now everyone's wearing crappy headphones. Everything is about how it looks. :/

I have RGB keyboard, video card, and speakers.

Not by choice, they just came that way and it is unimportant enough that I don't see it as something positive or negative.

I set up everything to a single flat orange-amber hue. I plan to switch everything to a green hue during summer.

It certainly helps to set certain mood.

You people are just old and cranky. I’ve loved LEDs ever since I first saw a red one light up in the 80s (we didn’t have blue ones then.)

I run with no RGB in my computer case, I got a very nice $250 case used for $40 with a broken tempered glass panel that looked like it had been dropped out of a second story apartment, but a $20 replacement panel and a little bit of hammering got it looking good as new.

On the other hand, I’m building my daughter a gaming PC for her birthday, and she loves the RGB, I set everything to a pastel blue that matches her Cinnamoroll Razer mouse, keyboard, mousepad, [0] with a Cinnamoroll desk mat I got shipped from China. She only knows about half of that (hard to hide an entire PC while I’m working on debloating windows), and is super excited.

I’ll admit I’m pushing 40 and bought a red mouse to go with my red backlit keyboard, but mostly because I like the aesthetic and to get the lowest latency from click and keypress to output on the display you’ll want 8K polling rate inputs and 240hz+ monitors. I was somewhat radicalized by reading this blog [1] on Hacker News years ago, and gaming peripherals are largely the way of achieving an extremely smooth desktop experience.

[0] https://www.razer.com/collabs/cinnamoroll?srsltid=AfmBOooMjB... [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Two things that strike me.

One is the "when everyone is special, no one is special" factor, but I think that's tempered a bit by PCs becoming a status item (alongside the rise of streaming that shows the streamer and their environment) so it's important the PC is conspicuous. Also for those that have invested significant time/money it has become a point of pride for them that they want to display, and get into flamewars on the internet to defend their team. The manufacturers probably don't mind that it lets them display their brand in lights too and not be hidden away as a sticker or PCB marking.

Also that there seems to be space in the market for 'PC as a pretty lightbox', RGB systems are sophisticated now alongside LCD systems getting attached to various components. The PC becomes a decoration as opposed to a tool that fades into the background like a lot of other devices which are pure display or have enthusiasts salivating about thinner bezels. The thing I find curious is that the lightbox is constrained in the form of a PC (even if they sometimes try hard to hide the machinery of it such as wires or putting components on PCBs hidden behind panels), there's not a lot of consumer products where you could assemble elaborate colored lighting displays.

My first two gaming PCs in high school had a side window and blue cold cathode light. My next build in my early 20s I decided that even this was too garish and went to a simple brushed black case. I understand that cheap tri-color LEDs mean fewer SKUs and infinite custom colors but in practice many people never turn off the "demo mode" color cycling and it just looks ridiculous.

Then again I'm typing this from a Thinkpad - maybe that says something about my aesthetic preferences for computers.

Any popular aesthetic will be commoditized eventually. The new frontier is SFF PCs! -Rockin a ~5L SKTC A07 with r5-5600, rtx 4060, and zero RGB.

Yep, there were people hand-building wooden PC cases, building a fish tank into their case, painting fancy colors and patterns on it, ... And there were colored LEDs too, but they didn't come with bloatware OS-dependent software, because they didn't need software

Will there be another retro phase, with the vanguard using beige cases that scream, "this color expects to capture a nicotine patina"?

I think my computer is pretty. I have the black with brown wood panel case that is super popular and then all black components except for the RGB LED gpu manufacturer logo on the GPU. Looks pretty nice and sleek.

But I also had to look past the RGB nonsense. The GPU was basically an accident.

Built my first PC (for basement LAN parties) using the old family Packard Bell case. Cut my thumb on the poorly machined aluminum inside...I'll cherish that scar forever.

Ah, the good ol' days.

I imported my motherboard from US because all we have here have rgb

I still enjoy building my pc's, But I put them in 4u server chassis. they are built better and have sane airflow. I have not been 13 for a long time and it is tricky to find non rgb parts anymore. No windows on my case but it still looks like someone is holding a rave through the gaps. sigh.

For free. My main rant about desktop vs server grade motherboards. For a desktop system you really want a desktop grade motherboard. server grade is expensive, takes forever to post, the compute tends toward slow and wide vs desktop's fast and tall, and the parts(ram, cpu) compatability tends to be much more picky. My grip is why is the desktop mb airflow so bad. In a server board everything is aligned front to back. pcie, ram, cpu cooler are all aligned the same way. in a desktop board the pcie goes front to back, the ram goes top to bottom. and toss a coin for which way a cpu cooler will fit.

In other news, there are new cases in beige being produced, some with turbo buttons and mock 5.25 inch floppy drives.

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...

Beige was the only color case available until around 1992. And, sometimes, the floppy drive/s or HDDs didn't match the case at all. Off white cases were one of the first "innovations" before black, gray, and multi color cases arrived in the late 90's where I was. Then tempered glass and ARGB came in like an involuntary disco, a Ford Fiesta with ground effects, or a Trump apartment. All I wished was that Noctua and similar fan mfgrs offered standard monochrome black or white fans rather than brown turds or RGB fluorescent orange.

Signetics was first with their 25120 Fully Encoded, 9046xN, Random Access Write-Only-Memory[0].

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20120316141638/http://www.nation...

They couldn't possibly understand NAM, man

I'd call it write-only memory.

Is that like the Write Once Read Never (WORN) drive?

Or DMZBR, for "dedicated mass zero buffer ram". 4, 8, or 16 gigabyte sticks of the finest zeroes on Earth! Now you don't have to reuse the same zeroes over and over! Reduces wear and tear on your zeroes!

[dead]

> Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM"

I'm an advocate of sticking a $5 16Gb Optane stick from eBay on a $10 M.2 to PCIe 1x adapter from eBay. Set it up as swap in Windows or Linux. Or pay $200 for a 16GB stick of DDR5.

> I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.

It will take a couple years. Either AI has to have a big crash or YMTC has to grow their production 3-8x before prices come back down to levels from 12 months ago.

Super interesting charts there. What's really interesting to me is that the GPU prices (which also includes RAM) didn't see such a massive increase in price as the RAM itself. Anyone know why that is?

> It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.

Surely this will be helped by a helium supply shock.

Why won't they check? It says it on the stick with text. It doesn't look identical.

Quickest way for this idea to die a horrible death.

people already have been doing that with fake "rgb only" RAM sticks

Now that you leaked the beans...

... and then the next person who buys RAM on Amazon gets the returned package with the two fake sticks.

Dummy sticks have existed since rambus as well.

First time hearing about this, it's pretty dramatic for me. I grew up in times when computers were off-white and we liked it.

I would love to have blanks for every unused socket/port to keep dust out.

I'm just too cheap to pay for them though...

Yes these have been around since at least 2018 - here’s a 2018 link about Corsair’s version: https://overclock3d.net/news/memory/fake_dimms_corsair_launc...

And stuffing your PC case with various disco lights doesn't affect its performance either. But an evidently large portion of gamers are, well, special people.

This is peak gamer marketing, paying for fake heatspreaders so the slots look full while airflow gets worse and the whole thing costs more for no upside to perfomance. If you want extra heat just skip cleaning the case for a month.

Think of it as RGB lighting in DIMM format and it makes a lot more nonsense.

Nobody really buys 8gb sticks anymore, so selling 2x8gb isn't economically great. Also, there are more factors than just density in RAM pricing, but it really depends on the vendor and chip layout design.

Up to a certain point and It’s actually very dependent on the CPU.

Take Epyc processors. On certain ones, after certain RAM amount, populating all the slots causes the cpu to kick the RAM speed to a lower tier.

You’re then limited to capacities of two sticks.

Weird, but it has to do with power requirements. Abutting above the threshold had to be buffered, which increases latency.

For the same spec it's likely to be a different chip count rather than density. In theory two sticks could have higher bom... not that consumers would see such savings given the price segmentation where the appetite for higher capacities has deeper pockets.

Have recent boards/cpus fixed the instability problems people had with 4 sticks of DDR5 yet?

I was shocked when I saw folk saying you can't use 4 slots. It would mean that a one stick build would have an upgrade path but if you started with 2, you'd have to replace them.

Yes but if you want to upgrade later buying another 1x16gb is cheaper than buying 2x16gb and throwing out your 2x8gb (although it's a bit contrived since most motherboards have 4 slots).

People don't want to buy 2x8gb because there are limited slots on a motherboard and they want to upgrade when they need the extra ram.

>And shouldn't smaller capacity sticks be cheaper since they can use lower density chips?

In 2026 the bottleneck is wafer size as fabs are booked out making things for AI.

This is a product that some people want and it's marketed for exactly what it is.

This is the reason I hate lobbyists.

There is no sensible reason for the RAM market to be priced the way it is. It's obviously unchecked corruption. There's clearly more value in allowing that corruption than exposing and punishing it.

Plenty of people do.

AI is one of the few major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. It's potentially applicable to everything, which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything. Including developing new optimization algorithms, optimizing optimizing compilers, optimizing applications, optimizing systems, optimizing hardware, ...

Big AI vendors are at the forefront of it, because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution, so any efficiency improvement saves them money.

It's sloppy developers. People used to be able to make software to run on limited ram natively. Now everything is wrapped in something.

Improving LLM memory contention will allow LLMs to use more memory.

We are.

I'm writing a metric ton of Rust code with Claude Code.

LLMs are intrinsically deaigned for token production, which is typically inversely related to optimization and efficoency.

> I can't even see inside my CPU, why would I care if there's an empty slot?

Then, you’re not the target audience.

> Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything?

It doesn’t do nothing. FTA: “Their sole purpose is cosmetic, though. While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem, they don't contribute to your computer’s memory capacity or performance.”

This is for people with transparent PC cases and memory sticks with RGB LED lighting. For example, see https://v-color.net/collections/prism-pro-rgb-memory-voclor/...:

“RGB SOFTWARE SYNCHRONIZATION SUPPORT

Dynamic RGB lighting control synchronized across main leading M/B such as RGB FUSION, MSI Mystic Light Sync, AURA Sync, POLYCHROME Sync etc. Customize lighting profiles or assign colors to each LEDs to create your own spectacular look.“

Meanwhile lots of people in the PC building community have cases with glass panels on the side, and go to a lot of effort to make the inside look a certain way. This includes things like custom sleeved cables, perfect cable management, RGB on various things.

I also have a glass panneled side to my computer, but the only RGB on it is on the graphics card waterblock, everything else is just jet black (fans, ZMT water cooling tubing, radiators etc. etc.)

I'd estimate that most consumer PC cases sold these days have a glass side panel, and have had for a while.

And pickup trucks, for some reason.

Build PC with 16gb now, upgrade to 32gb in the future, not be stuck with surplus 2x8gb afterwards.

The word fits here is pretend.

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Lots of two-packs followed by one-returns.

If you read the article it shows the packaging and is incredibly obvious that one of them is RAM and the other one is filler.

>Performance RAM + RGB Filler Kit

>Complete RGB Look Instantly

Every time I see those I just think of Anchor Arms from SpongeBob. https://youtu.be/aDKkyM34e_k?feature=shared

Jeez, that whole website…

A fake still costs more than nothing, and they are famous for saving pennies any place they can.

Supposed to… maybe. But can you?

> Even if your budget only allows you to purchase a single real memory module, you can still achieve the look of a dual-module setup in your build.

> For users aiming for peak performance, a dual-channel memory configuration remains the gold standard. However, with memory prices currently inflated, it’s easy to see the appeal of cost-effective options like V-Color’s 1+1 memory kits.

:-)

Yes, even more than COVID. At least during that period I could buy PC parts without problems.

Looking forward to the next AI winter.

The separate light-only sticks are useful if you want the appearance of all four slots filled: having four RAM sticks usually forces a slower memory speed (as the target market typically overclocks their RAM*), so unless you actually need a lot of RAM and can’t get a 2x32 or 2x48 etc kit you’re better off with the fakes.

Edit: this is also why some “extreme overclocking”-type motherboards** only have two DIMM slots: having four actively opposes their purpose.

* And yes, loading an XMP/EXPO profile to get the advertised 3000CL60 or w/e counts!

** i.e. https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-cross...

Many kit builders with flashy PCs are only running 32gb. If you look at datasets like Steams, most people are still on 16 and 32. Hell 4% are still on 8!

Rambus RAM (RDRAM) required unused slots to be populated with Continuity something something Memory Modules (CRIMMs). Basically just a blank DIMM.

"I'd like 32G but I can't afford 2x16G right now so I'll buy a single stick and keep a slot open for later when prices are better or I get more available money". Seems pretty easy to understand.

This time, it has more to do with diminished supply combined with heavy demand rather than a trade war.