[skibz]

I miss the days when most people had a vanilla looking computer. You wouldn't have felt out of place at the LAN party lugging in your dad's old Packard Bell tower that you used for your gaming rig.

We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them.

Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?

[mort96]

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.

[pseudohadamard]

That's when black PVC tape is your friend. Just used that earlier today because some cretin decided that putting a 10,000lm blue LED strip on a bedside phone charger is a good idea.

(It's actually a very nice charger, except for that --ing LED strip).

[jkestner]

Yeah, if people were still doing LAN parties, I’d want to bring the equivalent of a sleeper car. Maybe empty out that beige AT case with the turbo button on it.

[johnwalkr]

That, and using old G4 or G5 Mac cases are very common projects.

[lazylizard]

backlit keyboards are an ok idea..

[jonathanlydall]

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.

[water-data-dude]

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

[returnorthrow]

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.

[shellwizard]

There's openrgb, authors not all brands/models are supported

[0_____0]

I once tore apart my laptop and ripped out all the blue leds and replaced them with green amber reds. If yoi hate it that much you can just mod it. Soldering iron and a magnifier if you're over 30.

[jonathanlydall]

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.

[burnt-resistor]

The only reasons I bought a case with a tempered glass side panel were its overall rating and it was extremely cheap. A similar situation happened for the Core V71 case I used for a Supermicro H11DSi dual EPYC virtual server and NAS for my home lab. It's one of a few features I don't care about but are difficult to avoid without incurring limitations like additional cost.

Back in my day™, I remember full super tower cases made from steel when they had 8-10 5.25" HH front bays. They were boat anchors and they were generally terrible at managing heat and airflow.

[badlucklottery]

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.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I always thought of the lit cases as an instance of "I could put a cool LED light in this space, but I also need the space for my computer ... oh, hey, I could do both".

I have never used a lit case.

[arcfour]

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!"

[pan69]

I did the same in 2023. I got the Asus Q470:

https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/cs...

I added a Intel Core i7 10700K (with a nice low-profile Noctua cooler/fan) with 32GB of memory and a 512GB SSD and I'm using onboard graphics which is just fine for a daily driver "office" type machine running Linux. Very happy with it.

[rasz]

Manufacturers have no incentive to offer barebone products anymore, BOM price difference is negligible. Its $0.5 of leds and "fancy" solder mask colors become free at scale.

[tim-projects]

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. :/

[jug]

It's a gamer subculture, I think originally from showing off your build? The irony is that people in the Western culture are generally lonelier than ever, and definitely going to fewer LAN parties than in the past. And this showcase thing established itself mostly _after_ Internet making us physically lonelier.

[technofiend]

I view it like the automotive world - lots of people like to buy a car and trick it out in some way. Same with PCs. Just think of it like that.

[wincy]

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/

[WalterBright]

> a little bit of hammering got it looking good as new

A hammer and an oxy-acetylene torch is all that a good mechanic needs.

[hackerfoo]

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.)

[rjh29]

I love them too and I'm happy they come built-in by default (plus the fantastic OpenRGB project to sync them all) instead of having to make them myself... I remember when I was paying £100+ for a membrane keyboard because it was one of the first to have RGB. Now they all do.

[alexjplant]

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.

[keyringlight]

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.

[fwipsy]

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.

[Shorel]

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.

[Aardwolf]

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

[saltcured]

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

[wincy]

There’s the Silverstone FLP02 [0], for a mere $250 you can get a case that looks like it was built in 1996, complete with a turbo button that spins all your fans to max.

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

[hakfoo]

You can still get a handful of non-RGB cases. They're usually sold as the "Silent" version (i. e. Fractal Pop series, Gamemax Titan Silent series) since the non-glass side panels often have sound-deadening material glued in.

15 bucks of rattlecans will make any case beige. :)

I'm sort of waiting for a motherboard manufacturer to weigh in though. Even the "pro" ranges tend to be black PCBs with a lot of complex silkscreening. The boards that don't have any of that tend to be OEM-tier boards with skimpy features. Surely someone can make an X870E-VINTAGE board with a green or yellow-brown substrate, no nonsense silkscreening, and finned brass heatsinkage that looks like the sort of thing you saw permanently glued to your 486DX2/66 CPU?

I want the aesthetic, but that can still be implemented in the context of no-compromises modern hardware.

[rjh29]

Yes, RGB is so common now that it's not popular, and retro stuff is coming back in. I think I saw even some landscape PC cases (laid flat) with fake HDD drive slots and a turbo button.

[asyx]

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.

[rglover]

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.

[delduca]

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

[somat]

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.

[merelysounds]

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...

[burnt-resistor]

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.