I'll start off with a caveat: I'm not a photography guy. That being said, I do take a surprising number of photos in my role as a hardware writer, and you'll see many of them spread across the pages of this very site in some form or fashion. I've got myself into a bit of a rut with it, actually, routinely targeting the few areas of my house where the lighting and background are good enough to grab a few PC Gamer-worthy shots of whatever I happen to be reviewing this week.

So, I was somewhat excited when opening the latest parcel from my dear Editor-in-Chief, Dave. Yep, it's time for another Budget Win or Recycle Bin—and this time I'm well out of my depth, as he's sent me a pack of three Neewer Basics LED light panels.

For a mere $44 at AliExpress, you get three height-adjustable tripod stands and three angle-adjustable rectangular 10 W LED panels to screw in to the top of them, along with six magnetically-attached diffuser panels, three white, and three orange. Each panel has its own USB Type-A cable with a control box halfway down the line, featuring three buttons. The middle turns the panels on and off, and the two either side adjust the brightness up and down. Even a lighting newbie like me can make sense of that.

Given this is a bargain basement set of lighting gear, it's surprising how well-made everything feels on the whole. The stands have multiple clips along the adjustment pole for setting various heights, while the tripod mechanism has a sturdy locking ring at the bottom that gives me a reasonable degree of confidence they won't collapse when I've set them correctly.

The exception to this is the aforementioned cable, which is coated in a fairly unyielding type of not-as-flexible-as-I'd-like insulation. You can't detach it from the lights themselves, which means for transport purposes, I've been wrapping the cable around the pole and stand. As a result, it's quickly transformed itself into curly spaghetti, and something tells me it's not long before it becomes a completely-kinked mess. Each cable is also fairly short, which limits your options when it comes to where you plug them in.

I've taken to using a USB battery pack to power each light individually, but if you're planning on using this set with a (not included) USB power plug, it's worth bearing in mind that you won't be able to move them far from the wall in a reasonably sized room without an extension cable.

Beyond some cable kink-woes, however, I have to say the Neweer set performs very well. There are 10 levels of light intensity adjustment available through each control box, ranging from a barely-noticeable glow to a full "I need my sunglasses" beaming glare. The magnetically attached diffusers are also easy to use, and transform each light's throw from a harsh (but useful) targeted white glare into a warm orange glow that looks a lot more natural.

As you can see from the photos below, the effect makes a massive difference to product photography. My tried and tested (and at this point, somewhat clapped) Logitech MX Master 3S looks downright ordinary in natural lighting, but lit by the high beams of the Neewer set, you can really see all the details—particularly with the 5600 Kelvin white light attachment. So much so, in fact, you can see some of the bits I missed when I tried to clean it. Apologies, but this is warts and all testing, and bright white light does have a tendency to highlight unwanted details.

The 3200 Kelvin warm, orange filters, however, give off something of a more natural look, and are probably more what I'm after for product photography. Still, if you're looking to shoot a variety of subjects, the easy lighting adjustment here should be right up your street—and I have to say it's very pleasing to be able to control shadows in my photographs, rather than angling myself around like some sort of hopped-up tropical bird while trying to grab the perfect shot.

Plus, it's worth mentioning what a boon this setup is likely to be for streamers. Lighting yourself for a close-up is fraught with potential difficulties, but the addition of three affordable lighting panels should at least provide you with plenty of options. There's no included mount here for say, attaching one to the top of your monitor, but if your desk or shooting space is large enough, I think the Neewer kit would allow you to experiment with potential angles with ease.

The collapsible stands also mean you could quite easily take them on the move, too. Removing the LED panels from the top of their tripods and adjusting everything down to its smallest size makes for three backpack-friendly units, which means I'll happily take them into the office for a shoot.

At which point, there might be a small fight. All of us on the hardware team take photos of the products we review on a weekly basis, and while we have a professional light box in our hardware corner, it can be fiddly to set up. A quick extra lighting boost from something easy to deploy would make a major difference, so I can see this triumvirate of cheap lights quickly being split among our sticky, grasping hands.

And for $44? I think this set is firmly in the budget win category, and a long way from the recycling bin. While it's not quite pocket change, the fact that you get three, highly-adjustable, well-made, great-performing adjustable panels for such a small sum is rather impressive, and while I'd imagine proper photography nerds would tut at such devices, I'd say the Neweer kit is a perfect cheap upgrade for anyone looking to take their snaps one step further. Another budget win? My, it's remarkable what sort of gear you can buy for under $50 these days, isn't it?

Neewer Basics LED lights 3-pack - $44 at Aliexpress

Back in 2018, I remember sitting on my couch watching the RTX 20-series announcement on my then-decently powerful gaming laptop. Jen-Hsun took to the stage in a biker jacket, jokingly announced the release of the GTX 1180 (a pretty good gag), and then proceeded to blow my tiny little gaming mind. Proper ray-traced lighting for your gaming PC was finally here in the form of the Turing generation of GeForce graphics cards, and it felt like the future.

"This is a historic moment for computer graphics," said the leather-jacketed one, and it felt like it. No longer would we, as gamers, be chained to a hodgepodge of traditional lighting techniques, thanks to the RT cores on the new cards. All our rays would in future be traced—meaning that each beam of light would be calculated, reflected, and diffused in real time, in ways that make games look much more realistic than they did previously. The long-awaited real-time ray tracing future was finally here.

I remember closing my laptop lid after the announcement was finished and thinking about the mobile version of the GTX 1060 GPU inside. Suddenly my RT-coreless machine felt out of date, in a way more profound than the usual endless cycle of new hardware announcements would suggest. We all feel a twinge of necessity when a new generation of hardware arrives. How was I going to afford something equipped with an RTX 20-series GPU to revel in all this ray tracing glory?

Turns out, I needn't have worried. Real time ray tracing has been slow to arrive, at least in the way that seemed promised back in 2018. For many moons, it's been, at best, an optional extra. An upper-echelon feature for those of us with hardware beefy enough to handle it. Those days, I fear, are coming to a close.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Star Wars Outlaws. Black Myth Wukong. Four games released in the past year with ray tracing as the only method of lighting. Four fairly demanding games that mean, if you've been trucking along with something from the pre-ray tracing era, like the venerable GTX 1080 Ti, it might finally be time to think about sending it to the great attic box in the sky.

We're starting to live in the era of 'RTX on', all the time. Just. It's been a long time coming, and we're still just about at the point where ray tracing can be mostly ignored if your hardware is behind the times in many games. The tipping point, though, feels like it may be about to be reached. Ray tracing is creeping in as the default now—and it seems unlikely to be a passing phase.

Let's not get too down on the idea overall, though. As someone who has often made do with older hardware due to *cough* financial concerns, I always keep an eye out for DLSS and FSR versions in the specs sheets of upcoming demanding games.

These upscaling methods started out as the closest thing to alchemy we PC gamers may ever experience (Extra frames? Minimal loss of image quality? Yes please!), but have inevitably slipped into the sort of thing you often need to enable to receive smooth performance with the settings turned up.

DLSS may be Tensor Core-dependent, but AMD's FSR will run on many older cards, although it's limited in what it can achieve. And yes, ray tracing has been a big part of that modern upscaler push. Still, it also means that thanks to some upscaling help, ray tracing has become more achievable while maintaining a reasonable frame rate, with a minimal loss of quality. And in some ways, it's not quite as hardware-taxing as it used to be, either.

Unreal Engine 5's Lumen can use either software-based or hardware-based ray tracing techniques. The software version uses mesh distance fields which operate on a wide range of hardware, and are streamed in and out based on distance as a camera moves through a game world.

It works well in terms of calculating limited rays for better performance, but can struggle with light leakage on certain geometry. Plus, it's not as visually impressive as ray tracing proper, and it's still quite demanding overall compared to other lighting methods.

As for hardware ray tracing? That's the full-fat stuff, with all the gorgeous lighting and GPU-stressing factors that come with it. Still, Lumen is capable, in many ways, of being ray tracing "lite." Ray tracing for the masses, if you will. That's a pretty good deal, particularly as Unreal Engine 5 seems to be the engine of choice for many upcoming major releases.

Optimisation techniques seem to be coming on a pace in other engines, too. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle runs remarkably well even on some fairly ageing hardware, despite being an "all ray tracing, all the time" game, likely thanks to the developer's experience with Id software's in-house Id Tech 7 engine.

Here again, you get the ability to switch between full ray tracing (or Full Ray Tracing as Nvidia calls it, path tracing to everyone else) and a more stripped-down version, but either way, it's there, and it's handling the lighting—even with everything set to Low.

The hardware requirements are very steep for 4K Ultra with full ray tracing enabled, but then, you'd be surprised if they weren't for a game that looks this good. Drop the settings and the resolution down to more reasonable levels and even the RTX 2060 Super can get in on the ray-traced action, and that's a six-year-old mid-to-budget range card. That's still an RT core-equipped GPU though, even if it is showing its age these days.

Consider it a sign of the changing times. The Id Tech-based Doom games have long been known for their remarkable performance on older hardware, but even the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages is going to be an all-singing, all-dancing, all-ray traced affair.

Id Tech 7's Vulkan API has supported ray tracing for years, as has DX 12 Ultimate, and it's no surprise that devs are reaching into the toolbox now the hardware is truly able to make use of it. Heavy optimisation and developer engine familiarity will likely help with performance, but again, according to the specs, you'll need a ray tracing capable GPU to get your Doom on later this year.

So, I don't blame some gamers for feeling sore. But while optimisations are being made, and upscalers ever-improved, at some point all hardware simply ages out of consideration. Those of you who have been trucking on with pre-ray tracing era GPUs have had a good run of it, but all good things must, unfortunately, come to an end.

I'm not saying it's all over for you at this very moment, of course. Pre-baked lighting and ray tracing have co-existed for a while now, and in all honesty, they probably will for a little while longer in many games.

But as gamers continue to upgrade their machines and the hardware moves on, it's likely only going to get harder and harder for developers to justify working on and optimising two lighting systems when one gives such spectacular results.

Not only that, but lighting has traditionally been something of a pain point for game development, with the need to use a smoke and mirrors approach that often leads to wonky-looking results. Ray tracing can potentially serve as a much more "one and done" methodology when implemented well, and developers are always going to lean towards a more straightforward (if more hardware-demanding) system if they can get away with it.

Ageing lighting techniques seem destined to go the way of the dinosaur at some point, and I believe we are seeing the green shoots of that switch over today.

The times, they are a'changing. The rays, they come for thee. And while it's difficult to get hold of a ray tracing-friendly GPU at the moment for a reasonable price, it's unlikely this current drought will last. If you've been holding out, and let's face it, missing out on some of the latest games because ray tracing is your great hardware holdback, I reckon now's the time to start saving those pennies for a ray tracing-ready GPU when prices and availability (hopefully) drop back to normal levels. Whatever "normal" means, in this context.

Or you could gracefully age out of the never-ending hamster wheel of progress. After all, indie releases and games from smaller studios will likely be the longest holdouts for ray tracing adoption, and you don't need to be playing the most graphically beautiful, highly demanding games on the block to have a good time with your gaming PC.

The choice is yours, but it's starting to become a clearer choice than ever. And in some cases, not a choice at all.

And if you think me advising you to upgrade your machine to prepare for the ray-traced future is elitist, know that I am one of you. My personal GPU is pretty bad at ray tracing too, so I too am eyeing up my meagre bank balance and considering my next move. Time marches ever forward in this game, and at some point, we all, unfortunately, must do our best to keep up if we want to stay at the forefront of gaming tech.

Or, y'know, something like Geforce Now and on-demand game streaming. You may boo and hiss, but it's really pretty good these days. Put those pitchforks away. Still, by the looks of things, I really don't think the ray tracing train is going to do anything but accelerate further towards the (beautifully lit) horizon. And in the end, at least our games will look even prettier. Even if our bank accounts don't.

Reactive RGB has come a long way over the years. From resource-hogging glowy speakers to AI-driven wall shapes you can control from your phone. But I’m always looking for a cleaner, more simple, and accurate solution. This time, it’s Nanoleaf’s go. Yes, the same Nanoleaf cladding the walls of your favourite tech/gaming influencer or cosy game fan.

Reactive lighting isn’t new for the brand known for turning wall geometry into a nerdy subculture of home decor. Its new take is the Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror Kit—a trimmable light strip for screens up to 65-inches (or 85-inches for a premium), flexible corner brackets, a camera, and a tiny control hub. It’s a clean, affordable marvel that supports anything on your screen. However, some minor issues during setup can hold it back.

The Quick Start guide summarises the installation process in four steps: Apply the corner brackets, stick the lights down, place the camera, and link it to the box. A handy kickstand lets the camera sit in front of the display if you don’t want it perched atop your screen. It’s not ideal on a desk, but it’s an option for living rooms. Either way, plug it in, and you’re good to go. Oh, if only things were that simple.

The purpose of the flexible corner pieces is never explained. You’re told to skip that step if you don’t want them, but there’s no mention as to why you might. In reality, they’re a simple solution to a very real problem.

By wrapping the lights along the corner buffers, the LEDs can shine further afield. This keeps the corners from becoming too bright where the LEDs on the strip bunch up while allowing the lighting to spread further along the wall or, in a tight space, onto adjacent ones.

But that was the least of my worries. The 3M adhesive lining of the light strip just couldn’t hold on. Interestingly, the aforementioned corner strips performed much better. Could chilly conditions be blamed? The manual didn’t mention optimal application temperature. Google suggested above 15 degrees celsius. The room? Around 13C. Warming things up and applying after-market adhesive improved things, but they’re still slowly peeling away.

With things in place and a docked Steam Deck as its source, it was time to give things a go. But now that the hardware issues had been ironed out, software issues needed to be tackled.

While clean next to Govee’s icon-laden app, the Nanoleaf app isn’t perfect. It’s good fun setting things up with a wide fisheye view from the camera displayed on your phone, but a minimal UI often means minimal instruction. The setup process was somehow too basic. Showing the camera each edge was no trouble, yet in cutting the calibration process short for simplicity, the performance of the reactive lighting was borked.

By cutting down the light strip to fit a 42-inch TV without the control box intelligently concluding the lack of LEDs, it couldn’t accurately deduce how to translate a glowing object in one corner to the respective spot along the strip. It thought opposite corners were actually beside each other. This led to a top-right light source being displayed beside a dark corner in the bottom right.

Rectifying this isn’t a huge hurdle: it’s just hidden away. Worse still, the lights would lose connection. That issue was solved with a software update, but it was another annoying setback, furthering the complaint of poorly worded UIs.

Another thing never explained is the 4D mode. That’s the top end of “D” settings (they start at 1D of course). Even when trying each, it isn’t clear how they work. They’re immediately different, but an explainer would have been appreciated. There are interactive graphics on the Nanoleaf website to demonstrate the difference, but it does claim the lights offer “VR levels of immersion,” which is complete nonsense.

In practice, they seem to affect the range and complexity of the reactive lighting. The higher you go, the more camera data is translated into illumination: 1D appears to display a simple bright or dim effect on the wall to suit the mood of a scene. At 4D, the contents of the screen edge make up the light show. Settings below that focus on highlight the focal action in the centre of the screen. You can enable Rhythm to have sound taken into account as well.

On that 4D setting on a wide-ranging game like Dead Cells, you’ll notice the alluring warmth of a distant torch, light on a shallow pool reflected beneath the screen, and the rays bleeding through the high prison window highlighting the upper corners. In battle, explosions and effects burst beyond the panel. At a lower setting, the focal point of the action is what you’ll see blasted onto your wall.

Employing a camera to extract that data isn’t the fastest solution. Still, you won’t see the blood splatter appear off-screen long after damage has been dealt. It’s imperfect, but it’s practical. But like any camera pointed at a screen, it’s susceptible to glare. A darker room is recommended—as it would be for a light show—but the app does feature sliders to rectify imperfect conditions.

Amusingly, Nanoleaf managed to simplify the method of creating custom ambient lighting themes to a word or phrase. That’s where the AI comes in. I typed in YMCA and got a fittingly vibrant gradient the hub’s built-in microphone could manipulate. Generative AI is still a scourge, but this is a sensible use.

Despite the initial setbacks, the Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror kit entranced me. Move beyond the poor setup process and it’s a genuine joy. It’s a simple solution to the once-complex quest for reactive lighting. And at $80/£90, it’s considerably cheaper than the bulkier Govee T2 while still feeling as fast as the Govee AI Sync Box 2.

Sweetening the deal is compatibility with Nanoleaf stuff like the Smarter Essentials Bulb and its myriad wall decor. If you have other lights around your TV, you can save $40/£20 by foregoing the LED strips. Plug your current lights into the box and you’ll get the same feature set. And with support for Razer Chroma, you can add specific game compatibility for context-based lighting on PC—the sort you can configure to mirror health bars, react to damage, or celebrate a triple kill.

Want it all? Link the lot over Wi-Fi to spread reactive lighting throughout your room. Philips Hue and Govee have had this for years, but that doesn’t make it any less magical. And by never linking up to your PC, there’s zero overhead bogging down your system.

But there’s always room for improvement. The lights themselves do a terrific job of extending the visual flare of your media beyond the screen. It’s just a shame the sticky solution is rarely up for the task, the hardware can struggle for a connection, and the app is so simple it’s perplexing.

With 10 RGB clusters per meter, the Govee AI Sync Box 2 wins out with 17 RGBWIC bulbs per meter, drastically improving contrast and colour mixing. But this Nanoleaf solution is ⅓ the price. With that in mind, great compatibility, a low cost, and in-store availability make the Nanoleaf 4D the easiest reactive RGB solution to recommend. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a very good option.

From sconces and curtain lights to glowing geometric shapes and things seemingly named after bread rolls or vegetable form factors, Govee has a gargantuan catalogue of (frequently discounted) smart lighting options. There’s always something you’d like for any product to do better, and it’s nice when someone listens. The result of one such wish is the Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2.

The Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 is the successor to its reactive RGB solution from a couple years back. It’s a flexible strip light for your monitor, two lighting towers, and a sturdy hub that’s one part HDMI switch and one part processing unit. You get some good-quality HDMI cables, too.

Reactive lighting uses hardware or software to translate the colours on your screen into a dynamic light show that can respond to the image in real time. The result is a soft and immersive ambience that reacts to the scenes of your games and movies.

It’s a technology that’s been around for decades. But with Wi-Fi enabled lights everywhere now, the Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 can technically fuel a house-wide solution of lamps, wall art, string lights, and spotlights. The use of AI is there to offset the traditionally processor-heavy workload needed to reflect specific in-game actions without requiring collaboration between individual game developers.

Setting up this kit is identical to the last Sync Box Kit, which I've previously used. Though while there are many similarities, there are some key differences. The strip’s LEDs now pushes for 75 bulbs per meter. We can’t count the bulbs in the light towers, but the whole package now supports RGBWIC: bright white LEDs that expand its range of colour temperature.

But I never had a problem with the apparent lack of LEDs on the old model. My issue was the main hub’s lack of DisplayPort output. With the box acting as the middle man between your graphics card and monitor, this locked popular gaming displays out of Nvidia G-Sync, creating a conundrum: immersive reactive lighting or silky smooth images.

Competitive players running high refresh rates and low resolutions were fine, with the lighting being a distracting way for an enemy flashbang to feel worryingly real. For those looking to add extra flair to their single-player adventures, the compromise wasn’t welcome.

With no support for VRR solutions, I retired my original kit. Given the £200+ asking price, it was a demoralising decision likened to removing an extra monitor to clean up your space. Thankfully, all five ports on the Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 are HDMI 2.1. G-Sync, Freesync, VRR, and ALLM are all fair game. Ultrawide 1440p displays can hit 240 Hz with 144 Hz supported at 4K. Above that, 60 Hz is the peak.

Still, the 34-inch length of the LED strips means anyone rocking a Samsung Odyssey Ark can forget it. There’s a version for larger screens in select regions. You won’t get the light towers, but you’ll get the hub and strips. That’s because the towers are designed to sit away from a screen of equal height, extending the glow beyond the backlights.

Unlike Corsair’s LT100 light towers, the tower base isn’t illuminated. So while the lighting can stretch across your wall, you won’t have bursts extending along your desk. With no option to choose specific parts of the screen to sample, manually matching the towers to ally and enemy resource bars is limited to what’s officially supported through the phone app.

Speaking of the app, it’s required for setup. Want to link up multiple devices through its Dreamview system? You need the desktop software—but only after enabling LAN control through your phone. The problem? Despite mentioning Dreamview in the box, the app says the Sync Box doesn’t support LAN.

I’ve always had issues with Govee’s convoluted software solutions, but this takes the cake. The messy app’s poor English wording only makes matters worse. You’ll also need to jump into the app to enable profiles for supported games. They won’t kick in automatically. Still, reactive lighting support is there the moment you hook everything up.

Beyond its AI capabilities that generate ambient lighting profiles based on keywords, the four HDMI 2.1 inputs and eARC output on the hub can make it an essential part of your desk-based gaming setup. You can connect modern-day consoles and streaming sticks, removing the need to swap cables on monitors with limited I/O, introducing immersive reactive lighting to more than just your PC titles.

Though I can only realistically shine these against a set of brown blinds, which is understandably dumb, I dug out a pure white projector screen in the name of science.

The result? Bright and enthralling reactive lighting that admirably reflects the warm glow of the forge (and Fatalis fire) in Monster Hunter World or the chill of its snowy climes. The popping colours of a frantic Overwatch match faired just as well. Even the smooth-panning landscape of Hyrule in Echoes of Wisdom on a connected console was an added delight.

There’s still a perceivable delay, and transitions can appear sudden and staggered. But when you’re not actively looking for faults and properly lose yourself in your on-screen entertainment, the effect is joyous and easy on the eyes. Especially in a dark room.

The Govee AI Sync Box Kit 2 fixes most of the major issues of the first, and most of my gripes. The lights are brighter, more colourful, and more even. The hub also no longer bottlenecks expensive gear, supporting higher resolutions and frame rates alongside its fanciful, immersion-enhancing ambient lighting. There’s still no support for DisplayPort, so you’ll still be sacrificing Nvidia G-Sync without an HDMI 2.1 monitor.

But there’s still the issue of just how expensive it is. With the box being the original thorn in the foot, why they won’t sell it as a standalone upgrade is irritating. If you found no fault with the original lights, at nearly $300/£300, it’s a lot of money to right one wrong. At least there’s a slim chance you’ll need to bin it if you buy another monitor.

Is it the best solution to the reactive lighting conundrum? For some, it very well could be. So long as it’s against a largely white surface, the bright LEDs help create a mesmerizing display with more punch than before. The powerful HDMI switch alone can solve an annoying issue of the complete gaming desk.

But if your desk is for PC gaming only, Corsair’s iCUE system still feels like the more premium offering with better build quality, additional lighting zones, cleaner software support, and a more manageable price tag.

Look, I didn't say this but I've heard you're not even a real PC gamer without some RGB strip lighting illuminating your setup. It's no surprise gamer brands are keen to agree and push out ever-more RGB-laden products. Elgato among them, which has just released a line of two-metre RGB light strips, marketed to gamers.

Known as the Light Strip Pro, it aims at becoming the top choice among streamers with features like programmable scenes and camera-ready diodes. And in a lot of ways it makes some really good points.

Inside the box you'll find one spooled light strip connected to a controller box, cables, power supply, manual, and even a few strip connectors. There's minimal packaging or fanfare to the packaging, which is great for keeping the environmental footprint minimal while still giving you everything you need. Getting the strips going is as easy as plugging them into power and using Elgato's Control Center app on either your phone or computer (Mac included, if you must).

Control Center lets you change the colour and brightness of your lights. There are a handful of premade scenes to run through with some pretty basic animations. Some of these will have extra options to set colours, speed, or direction of the movement, but a fair few don't.

For anything more specific you need to download Elgato's Javascript Scenes Builder tool, and get to coding.

Elgato has tried to make this as friendly as possible, especially if you're not familiar with Javascript. It's also limited to scenes and just to the lights themselves—this means you can't do things like set midi inputs from your electric drumkit to give responses. Thankfully, there's a readme file as well as a few examples, and you can test your code on the site. It's probably a good idea to test what you had in mind before purchasing the lights, in fact, especially if you're hoping for specific Java coding controls.

I played with the coding functionality a little, but ended up mostly doing simple things like editing existing codes to my colour preferences.

The way scenes are implemented this way is surely a nod to streamers. When you change a scene in Control Center, It takes about the same time to change the scene on the lights as a standard transition in OBS. It makes a tonne of sense for someone wanting to set up different streaming vibes per scene without having to set up separate solutions. Plus you could set it all to respond to a Stream Deck for easy mode shifts and transitions.

One of the other big boasts these lights have for streamers is being camera ready. A lot of cheaper lights will often have a very visible flicker on camera, and even some fancier ones do on the lower brightness settings. These don't.

Being able to get these lights on a low brightness setting is neat, especially to prevent blowing out sensitive webcam sensors. Plus, while the light strip is restricted to RGB, the colours generally have a vibrant depth to them with rich primaries that still show up nicely on low brightness settings. Out of all the LED light strips I've tried, which is a fair few these past few months, these are easily the friendliest to film.

The Light Strip Pro sports a tonne of cut points at almost every centimetre or so across the metal connectors, which is good to see. These can't be lengthened as the box limits the output to a two-metre strip. If you get some silly ideas in your head and try to attach some extra length just to see, the lights will just cut off after the two metre mark. Still these handy points make it trivial to shorten to specific lengths and even add things like corner connectors to get your perfect shape. It's just that little bit easier to make these lights fit your room than the other way around.

These are the first LED strips I've seen where someone had the good sense to put magnets in them. Almost everything I want to attach these to is metal, and it makes it a breeze to move them around and test them before resorting to the adhesive. I just really wish they were a bit stronger. The weight of the strip is still enough to pull it away and have them fall with magnetic connection alone, so it feels more like a temporary helper than a fixing solution. Still a very smart touch for some PC gamer orientated lights.

The Elgato Light Strip Pro is clearly a purpose made piece of kit. It's not going to respond to music, give key light whites, or be able to mirror your screen lighting, but it is going to deliver some of the best on-camera style points. $50/£50 for a two-metre strip is fairly standard pricing for gamer lights, but they can vary a lot. At least programmable scenes, lots of rejoinable cut points, magnetic holdings, and prioritising on-camera appearance is giving streamers some new tools to play with at this price point.

Even as a lover of RGB lighting, I admit that gamer lights have gotten kind of ridiculous, and it's amazing. Sure you can use lighting to have a subtle splash of colour, but if I'm going to have an RGB lit battlestation then I want the works, and wow is Govee's Evangelion themed kit exactly that.

The line includes two different kinds of anime aesthetic wall mount lights, as well as gaming light bars to splash colour all over your room. All together they create a package so over the top even Nerv would be jealous.

Each piece is available separately and comes in its own sealed black box with red imagery from Nerv, the company in the anime. Get past that and you get to the brighter purple packaging themed after Unit 01 with its vibrant green trimmings to match. Inside each set has a little envelope with more Nerv call backs including a QR code to scan to download exclusive themes for the lights in the Govee Home app. I usually prefer minimal packaging but exploring these lights as I opened each box was actually quite exciting. This is one of those products where opening it feels like a part of the experience.

The housings for each light are predominantly Unit 01 purple with themed touches like circuitry or lineart in the matching green. They're quite striking and even if I wasn't a big fan of the anime I think I'd still want these just for the look. It's not that common to find purple accessories, let alone ones this cool to stare at.

The packs also include all the extras you need to get set up like connectors, adhesive stickers, cables, as well as a few extra ties and what not for good measure.

The light bars are the best place to get started when setting up this kit. Each bar fixes to a stand that you can easily move around your desk to find the best placement. They plug into the back of the control box, right between the power and audio ports.The power one is self explanatory, but the aux allows you to send audio straight to the device for responsive lights. It even has a splitter so you can send the audio on to your headset or PC from there. The purple Eva themed box has four buttons and a knob allowing you to turn them on or off and do things like change modes and brightness without needing to open an app.

Having the direct aux input gives you a lot of control over what these lights hear and react to, and you can use the DreamView feature to set all the other lights to follow these. This combined with an update to the Govee PC app that lets it do screen reading to send colour to the lights makes for a super responsive setup. All the Eva lights are RGBIC so you miss out on warm whites but I'm glad the money was saved there for this setup. You still get more than enough vibrant colours that match flawless across devices to really transform your space.

Being able to light paint the room to match my game or movie is super immersive and it was really easy to get set up. The Govee Home mobile app, which is a notoriously mixed bag, is still needed for some things but the desktop one is finally a useful thing to download.

Next, I went for the wall lights, which come in a few different configurations. This set is 6 bar lights and one of each a triangle and square connector. The bar lights come with tabs so you can slot them into each other at the ends, and the connectors allow for offshoots and angles. These are a bit fiddly to put together because the tabs snap out of place really easily, but once it's on the wall and supported I had no such troubles.

The connectors and bars make your design options a bit limited, so you may want to figure out your design before purchasing. I was one more square connector away from a huge H initial, and the triangles sold more of an R or K. It makes the expansion kit a really tempting addition, and I like that Govee has those options to add on to this display so I'm not just stuck with making another huge purchase for a few more pieces. I'm largely considering it because the circuit cut outs that allow the RGB lighting to shine through easily make these the coolest looking wall bars I've ever seen. Or I would be, but I can't get it in Australia.

If I had to guess there's something like the Govee Cob strip light in the back that shines through as it can achieve some beautiful tight gradients. It's independent of the light bars in the middle and you can even set them individually in the app, so they look like legitimately separate things. Plus the themes (Not just the Eva ones) will often pulse from the connection points which can really elevate the designs. Even the tiny screws on the front panels are green and I just love them. It's a funky sci-fi vibe that absolutely captures the aesthetic of the anime.

The Glide Y lights are a bit more toned down, with purple plastic casing over the front. These output more light to the side and are much more about lighting your wall than yourself. The Y shape allows you to get a lot of coverage out of the five panels included in the pack, in a variety of shapes. I found the tabs on these easier to connect as they weren't holding as much heavy plastic, and there's a flexible one included for wrapping the design around the wall. These hold together without as much support required as the wall lights so they're a bit more versatile for experimentation.

Both of these wall mountable lights have a themed connection to the power cable, as opposed to a boring basic plug. I know I'm a sucker but I just love a good detail like that. The cable gets boring after that though, featuring a three button controller for basic options on a normal black cord, that leads to a power brick. This outputs via a figure 8 to the plug though, which is especially handy for avoiding power adapters for different regions.

The Govee themed set of Evangelion battlestation lights have got to be one of the coolest collaborations I've seen in a long time. They're relatively easy to get set up and kick along in harmony all together, mirroring your screen, or alone doing their own thing. Like most of Govee's offerings, these aren't the cheapest gaming lights. For the ease, versatility, and just excellent aesthetics, they also aren't that pricy at $200/£200 for the 6 bar set, which has to be the coolest of the lot. The whole kit is just under $500 RRP, which doesn't feel too awful considering you're getting mirrored screen lighting.

It's worth mentioning I'm yet to see these listed for full price so it's worth checking, especially if they're on sale like they are at the moment.

RGB LED lightstrips have gone from niche gamer accessories to mainstays of modern housing decor. Brands from all corners of the market are now vying for your pick when it comes to lighting solutions, and this competition has led to innovations like brighter colours, more connectivity, sound responsive functions, and more. Govee is one such brand offering a lightstrip that can essentially do it all, with the Govee Strip Light 2 Pro.

The Govee Strip Light 2 Pro features densely packed RGBWWIC diodes (including warm and cool whites) that can basically do it all, as long as you're happy with the Govee App's definition of it all.

The Govee Strip Light 2 Pro comes well packaged with required power and fitting accessories all in the box. These are powered by a figure eight cable to a power box which then plugs into the controller, which in turn connects to the lights. The strip is on a spool, which is quite handy for trying out different placements and moving the lights around. Once you've made your choice, the adhesive strip comes away easily, and holds fast to its fixed position—so far, so good for my review setup.

This strip boasts a tonne of cut points meaning you can easily cut it down to fit your desired area, but extending it is much more challenging.

Govee's website doesn't say whether or not this strip is extendable, but the Amazon listing implied it. The pin points on the strip also look like they've been layered and joined to start with, so it seemed likely. Plus, I had some 4 pin connectors on hand, so I cut the strip a few times at pin points to try extending it. There's a translucent plastic sealing over the front of the strip so I had to pull that back to expose more of the metal, and I removed as much of the solder as I could without having proper tools. My connectors are fairly standard but these strips are a bit thicker so I had to file down the inside of the connectors to get the strips to fit, but voila, we had light. Sort of.

In all of my tests I'd lose the green LEDs in sections closest to my cut point, sometimes I could get them to come back with pressure but usually not so much. As such, this strip is perhaps not the most DIY friendly. But, with proper tools or joiners, or even the ability to clear the solder better, I'd call these extendable. That's if the app allows it.

One of the biggest selling points and hindrances of Govee's current lineup, including the Govee Strip Light 2 Pro, is the only way to get full control is through Govee's mobile app. Sure, they connect to most smart homes via Matter but you get fairly limited operation. Govee offers a desktop app too, but it's also pretty bare bones. For anything more complex than turning it on or off or using predefined scenes, you're likely going to be back at the mobile app, for better or worse.

The mobile app, Govee Home, is the true dichotomy of software. It swings between being quite simple to use and able to do a whole lot, to specifically limiting and a bit convoluted. There's just so many menus as well as a social hub and a rewards section all packed into the same UI.

For the Strip Light 2 Pro, it's easy to do things like change the colours, even by section. You can set some cool moving light effects, pick a palette, and have them respond to sound through their own mic or your device. They even sync up with other Govee and Razer RGB lit stuff with DreamView scenes. Telling different sections to be a specific colour and then respond to sound, however, isn't possible.

The App is also needed to calibrate the lights, which includes telling the app how long it is after you've altered it with some scissors. It's fairly intuitive, and especially handy if you want to use it as a monitor backlighting or desk runner and need those specifics dialled in. I didn't have extra to add to it so I'm not sure how the app would handle adding sections, or how much one power unit can handle, but judging by the size of the power brick on it I'd expect it to light LEDs for dayz.

Both the colour and brightness on these lights are powerful and vibrant. I've caught a glimpse of flicker now and then on the lowest lumens, but at all other settings they've been steadfast. Thanks to those capable diodes, you can get beautiful gradients between colours, and they look stunning peeking out from under a desk.

These boast the full RGBIC spectrum complete with warm and cool whites. As such, they can suit any use case fairly easily, including key lighting if you diffuse them or settle them far enough away.

The hues all match up perfectly with the other Govee lights in my house too, creating a really cohesive look. If you've got one of the screen reading cameras from another Govee kit, it can even potentially do screen mirroring. The LEDs are too bright to be directed right at a camera for streaming, or probably pointed too directly at anyone's eyeballs, but they easily handle throwing light from hidden spaces like under desks, behind monitors, or all over my drum kit.

Govee's lightstrips have proven to be vivid, bright, and capable, but they aren't the cheapest. The LED Strip Light 2 Pro retails for $100 | £100 for a five metre strip which is fairly on par for most reputable brands. You can get far cheaper strips out there that might suit your needs, but they'll likely not look as good or do as much.

For the price, this strip is definitely one of the strongest and most feature complete, as long as you only want to do what Govee has planned for. Setting up a whole house with reels of strips, all working together on a vibe that syncs to music, would be as simple as a few taps in the app. Cutting specific lengths to rejoin and create sections not so much.

For someone wanting easy access to auroras, Govee's LED Strip Light 2 Pro has a lot to offer. You get all of the colours, connectivity, and sound responsiveness included in the one package, that's a breeze to get set up and flashing away to your tunes, games, or movies. It's just not going to be the best choice for your super specific DIY lighting project.

RGB lighting has exploded, with dozens of brands vying for the honour of bestowing your home with vibrant photons. Competition has proven great for making rainbow lights a more accessible dream for everyone, but it has also created a confusing landscape where every diode seems to have its own proprietary way of doing things, leading to frustrating inconsistencies, incompatibilities, and just some cheaply made lights. That's the way I felt about Govee, when I first had a look at one of Govee's offerings two years ago, the Dreamview G1 Pro, but now reviewing the brand's new Cob Strip Light Pro, it's clear these LEDs have had their glow up.

Govee's Cob Strip Light Pro comes in two lengths, 9.8 ft or 16.4 ft, and can be easily cut to shorter lengths. Though once it's cut, it's cut for good. You cannot extend it, which while sad, is fairly common for this breed of light. 

The RGBIC+W style lighting is a step up from many standard RGB-only offerings. It allows for smooth fades between colours, and even some really pleasant white hues from a dedicated white diode. That's only a single white diode, however, and a lack of dedicated warm white in the mix means it is a bit more limited than options with more. Supposedly 1,260 LEDs are jammed all together and the colours are generally smooth, vibrant, and quite pleasant for the effort as advertised. This is packed into a flexible diffused unit with adhesive acrylic back for sticking it right up there.

Like most of Govee's new lights, this Cob Strip is Matter enabled, and it was fairly little effort to get it added to Google Home. I can do basic things like adjust the colour and brightness of the whole strip, and turn it on and off. This has been really handy, but if I want to do anything particularly fun with the lights, Govee's app is required.

I wouldn't call the Govee Home app straight up bad, but it is incredibly convoluted. There's menus on menus, social sections, a shop, and probably some stuff I haven't even found yet. While getting lights set up is fairly trivial in the app, sometimes finding settings can be a real trial. There are a lot of customisation options with scenes, music responsive options, and even AI assisted prompts. Some are easier to find, let alone understand, than others. 

You can also make Dreamview scenes, if you can find the option, which allows you to sync several lights for a cohesive arrangement. This can also be teed up with Razer's app to work with more devices. There's plenty to play with, but It's not always easy to tell what any of these are going to do until you play around with them, and while you can edit them more control would make a huge difference.

The lights have their own mic, so when telling them to respond to sounds you can choose where they're getting that audio input from. This was perfect for my drum setup because all my music and sounds are coming through my headset and all the strip can hear is my hitting the drums. The lights respond to my physical bashings and looks super kinetic on stream. Dreamview even allowed me to create a cohesive scene between my drums and the curtain lights behind me. It's a really cool setup, but it's not exactly what I wanted.

The Cob Strip has 12 sections, which you can set the colours of individually. Thanks to the bright vibrant LEDs, this allows for some really pretty gradients and contrasts. What I can't do is create a scene that responds to music using those sections specifically. When I had it draped over my electric drum kit for YARG I was hoping to set each section up to correspond with the colour of the pad it was near, but just couldn't find a way. 

At least the densely packed LEDs put out some bright light  and Govee's Cob Strip is brighter and floppier than God's lightsaber. It's great for throwing light onto scenes and providing ambience tucked under desks, but less useful for being actively on camera. 

Turning it even all the way down was still too much for my webcams, blowing them out consistently, despite my eyes having a mostly pleasant experience. Plus, my phone cam would pick up the slight movement of lights on the lower brightness settings. I'd often notice whatever the lights were shining on looked far more the correct colour than the lights themselves on cam. The diffusion does a lovely job of making things appear how you'd want in person, which is great for room ambience, but it doesn't seem to help that much for cameras. 

When it comes to streaming or videos, facing the strips away from the camera and having them paint their surroundings with lights is where Govee's Cob Strip absolutely shines. The colours are vivid and nuanced, and the diffusion gives them an even hue. The whites, and even the fake warm white, are good enough to use as a key light, and with the strip you can get a super broad array on your desk space with the one light. If you can set it up right in your space, it's probably one of the better lighting options around for this purpose, thanks to that individual the segment control.

Govee's Cob Strip Light Pro is an incredibly bright and vibrant strip light you can do a whole lot with. It's not the best choice for being on camera, but when it comes to painting a scene with light the strength of the LEDs, coupled with the diffusion, make for a powerful array. The monkey's paw of an experience that is Govee's app mostly leans to the helpful side and there are a tonne of options there, too. You just want to know which kind of light you want before making your final decisions.

LED lights have become a staple of game rooms, gaming PCs, and dedicated gaming peripherals in recent years. The generic rainbow RGB lighting of yesteryear has been significantly upgraded with more customization options, but overall the market for mood-setting ambient lighting options feels like it has come to a standstill. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for continued innovation, however. Lepro, for example, has sought to expand the availability of unique lighting solutions for gamers by harnessing the power of generative AI technology. 

Lepro’s first-of-its-kind AI lighting technology enhances gaming sessions 

Whether you love to bling out your rig with as much RGB as possible, or prefer a more low-key approach to lighting, we can all agree that creating the right ambience will enhance the vibes of your gaming den. There are some advantages to using ambient RGB lighting in your gaming space. AI-powered smart lighting from Lepro can help bolster these benefits.

Proper ambient lighting can help balance out the harsh, contrasting lighting from your television or monitor. Finding the right colors and lighting effects can be a struggle, though. Lepro smart AI-powered lighting solutions are the first to be trained with large language models to adjust your lighting using complimentary colors and lighting effects. 

The powerful AI is not just capable of matching your game’s ambiance, it can also adjust your lighting to match your emotions based on your verbal cues, and then balance your lighting solutions to influence mood and focus. Stuck in a frustrating battle that is leaving you feeling like you could throw your controller at your screen? Lepro’s innovative AI technology can adjust your lighting to lean in toward cool blue colors to help you chill out before you try that big boss fight again. Trying to hype yourself up before a big race? Lepro’s generative AI tech can adjust your lighting to a bold and vibrant red, enhancing your energy and helping you find the grit you need to take out your opponents.

Aesthetically pleasing RGB meets AI 

Useful ambient lighting that can help improve your mood and focus relies heavily on the use of color theory. Unfortunately, knowing the types of lighting colors that can set the best mood for your environment and needs isn’t something many of us are aware of or knowledgeable about. The first products introduced by Lepro containing AI technology are all useful in everyday lighting scenarios, but the use of large language model training bolsters what these lighting solutions are truly capable of. 

You do not need to be an expert in color theory to change your home or office’s lighting settings to improve your mood or your game room’s overall aesthetic. Lepro’s line of AI lighting solutions easily balances your mood, game immersion, and aesthetics with simple voice commands. Feeling a little sad? Share the mood with your Lepro lighting and watch as your game room is taken over by soft, comforting shades of blue. Or, hit the start button on your favorite live-streaming software and watch as your ambient light solution kicks in with a high-energy light show in bright shades of pink or purple. 

Lepro AI-backed lighting products utilize a large language training model that is powered by professional knowledge spanning color theory, lighting design, and the creation of tailored lighting effects. This ensures that the ambient lighting you’re bringing into your personal gaming space is helping you perform at your best, no matter what you’re playing. 

If people start asking you for your best horror stories every time you're on camera, there's a good chance you're in need of a better lighting setup. Thankfully, key lights have become a staple for most PC users, which means there's a massive range on the market. Elgato was one of the first gamer brands to branch out into these streamer solutions, and the newest on offer is the Key Light Neo.

It's a part of the Neo lineup which boasts simplicity with plug and play functionality and clean white designs, at a mid range price. When you can pay pennies for a light that will get the job done, $90 USD will take some justification. Allow me to begin.

The Neo lineup has the simplicity motif down to the packaging with simple white recycled boxes. Inside is the Keylight Neo, monitor mount, and a braided USB extension cable. That last part is handy because the attached one is pretty short. On the face of the product, one at each corner, three buttons and a dial are positioned for manual control over power, brightness, and temperature. They're super easy to locate and operate, even with a blaring light in your eyes. 

The back offers some cable management. On the bottom is the standard 1/4-20 UNC screw mount connection, which works with the included folding monitor stand and most other stands I have. While it's a nice and thoughtful monitor stand, complete with transparent front lip, lighting is something I often like to move around. The complete package included with the Keylight Neo makes that really easy, especially compared to bulkier lights.

You'd expect a nice soft, even, flicker free light from Elgato and this little light absolutely delivers across both warm and cool settings, and all levels of brightness. As well as physical buttons for control, brightness and tone can be adjusted via the Elgato Control app via USB. Or set the Key Light Neo up on your Wi-Fi and use the app on your PC or phone. I even added it to Home Assistant and can control it from there, including adding it to rooms. 

Of course, it also integrates seamlessly with Elgato's Stream Decks, including the matching Stream Deck Neo, so the options feel pretty limitless.

If you don't want to bother with other options, you can run the light just via USB (any 4.5 watt port on your PC) and get 400 lumen brightness, which is good for a webcam setup, and that includes in-app control. Even if you want to forgo the PC, a basic power bank or supply gives at least basic light and full manual control. 

The wired cable is USB Type-A to the PC (Type-C for the device), but if you've got USB ports rated to 7.5 watt they'll knock the brightness up to 700 lumens. If you want to get the best out of this light, plug it into 12 watt power and get plastered with 1000 lumens. 

This is complete overkill for what is most likely to be your monitor mounted light only a few feet away from your precious retinas. While being blinded in testing, I was able to turn the light on its monitor stand to the walls in my office. Because I'm in a corner and have white walls, those lumens bounced right back at me giving me a far more even lighting setup than I've had before at my desk.

A lot of my filming and lighting requirements have seen me depart my desk, however. I'm in the middle of the room, under downlights with a lot of obstructions. It's absolutely disgusting. Thanks to the standard mount connection, USB extension cable, multiple control options, and easy form factor of this light, moving it around to find the best spot was about as easy as it gets. 

This flexibility let me try out different configurations and brightness levels. Right now it's sitting on an old camera tripod pointed at a very home made bounce panel and just doing an excellent job considering its the size of my hand span.

For its size and versatility, Elgato's Key Light Neo is one of the best monitor top lights I've ever seen. I've never had a light that was this easy to move around, which is incredibly helpful for managing multiple setups, or even just dialling in one. I can also easily control it no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Its clean and simple design makes it easy to underestimate but it's a capable little beastie, especially with that 1000 lumen brightness. Even the lower settings provide wonderful basic lighting, but being able to go ham and actually use it as a bounce light has me mad with power, and I'm looking amazing doing it.

Good lighting for your stream setup can be the difference between being able to present a clear friendly face to your audience, or to looking like you're telling ghost stories during nuclear winter. Thanks to the rise of content creation, you can get all sorts of lighting solutions at many different price points for making all sorts of videos. With streaming, gamer brands are truly in the mix and we are starting to see some purpose built options for our niche. 

The Logitech Litra Beam LX is one light designed to not only light your face, but also provide RGB backlighting and bonus control options. It's a smooth and quality experience but there's nothing revolutionary here to justify the price.

Setting up the Logitech Litra Beam LX is nice and easy. The light strip screws into the stand with a standard 1/4-20 UNC mount connection. There's a screw on the long and short ends of the light so you've the choice between having it sit horizontally or vertically when mounted to the stand. There's also a little bit of cable management aid regardless of the direction, and the stand is nice with solid pull into place action, though has a somewhat bulky foot.

You'll need a free power outlet for the light and then connect to your PC through Logitech's G Hub app via either USB-C or Bluetooth. This was also nice and simple as the light was immediately recognised by the app, and from there I could use the software to change the lights settings from my PC as opposed to using the pretty hard to find (especially with a key light shining into your face) physical buttons the Litra Beam XL.

Those physical buttons are excellent in a pinch, however. There's the choice between cool or warm light and a slider for brightness. You can tune it to your preferences and it's handy to be able to do it subtly in app while streaming. 

Once set up, it really is an attractive key light. The light is soft and even and there's no flicker regardless of brightness. I found that having the brightness set to about 70% was enough to illuminate myself quite well, giving room either way for different scenarios. The light is also smooth enough for taking shots of makeup, which is what ring lighting was originally designed for so the evenness is impressive from a bar light.

The packaging boasts Logitech's Truesoft lighting technology to give this effect, alongside passing safety checks for long term use. Some of that is hard to quantify, but the video results aren't that noticeably different from much cheaper solutions such as baking paper defused lightbulbs and budget ring lights I have used in the past. 

The other tab in the G Hub software is for the back RGB light panel which you can set to pulse and vibe away to a whole lot of colourful presets or make your own. There's an audio responsive mode for visualisers and also a screen mirroring mode if you want to create that immersive splash back effect. The lights are bright, quite customisable, and look pretty cool. But also feel super unnecessary. They don't affect your stream at all, which is good in the sense that your bright RGB party doesn't affect your soft camera lighting you've just set up, but kinda makes you wonder what the point is.

That is what I keep coming back to when using this light. I have no qualms in using it, it's an enjoyable tidy solution with a few handy extras. As much as I love RGB lighting I can't see myself bothering to really use the Litra Beam XL back side. I have better solutions for that, and I've noticed that when streaming using the front key light I won't even notice the backlighting effects thanks to everything else going on. 

When considerably cheaper key light options provide indistinguishable results, while only losing a handful of nice-to-have features, Logitech's Litra Beam XL becomes a harder sell at $150/£150/$250 AUD. Especially when the non RGB Litra Beam is a full $50 cheaper.

Logitech's Litra Beam XL is a breeze to use. It's easy to set-up and does a great job of providing ample illumination while looking good on your desk. It has a powerful soft front light for your face, different configuration options, easy app use, and you get that RGB back light if you really want it. It's also carbon neutral, which is very cool to see. If you're after a key light with those features and the price doesn't seem high to you then you'll have a great time. 

However, if you're strapped for cash and just want to look good on stream you can likely save yourself some considerable dollars elsewhere.

Lighting is an integral part of every PC gamer's setup. Bad lighting can cause glare, distractions, and disadvantages as you seek to bring home the victory in an online shooter, or immerse yourself in the magical landscapes of an epic open-world RPG. A good lighting setup, on the other hand, can add an impressive new layer of immersion.

Gaming hardware veteran Corsair know this as well as anyone, and for years they've been integrating RGB lighting into their accessories to bolster your desktop loadout with tasteful colours. This is all brought together by iCUE Murals, a tool that lets you sync your lighting not only across Corsair devices, but Phillips Hue and Nanoleaf ones too. Using Murals, you set up countless custom profiles—whether you want the on-screen action to bleed out onto your walls, or whether you're seeking a zen lightscape while you kick back with a cozy building sim.

Here, we're going to show you how to get started with Corsair's iCUE Murals tool.

First, you'll of course want to make sure all the accessories you want to sync are connected (we'll be using a pair of LT100 Corsair Smart Lighting Towers, the M65 RGB Ultra Tunable Gaming Mouse, the K70 RGB Pro Mechanical Gaming Keyboard, and the HS80 Wireless Gaming Headset). Once that's done, download and install the latest Corsair iCUE software.

Once the iCUE software is installed, open it, and install any firmware updates it recommends (which may require restarting your computer). With that out the way, it's time to start playing with the Murals!

On the iCue Home screen, you can choose from several fancy 'default' Murals in the left-hand pane. Simple enough, but you can also create your own ones by clicking the '+' icon.

There are lots of options here. You can select Audio Lighting to sync your lighting up with music, for example. 

Monitor Screen will track the colours of whatever's happening at the edges of your screen—great for immersing you in the action. 

Using Video or Image Capture, you can select from a bunch of patterns to project across your accessories, or even use your own images and videos to set the lighting pattern. Here, just to mix things up we've turned the LED Towers to face us rather than projecting onto the wall. 

Or perhaps you just want some classic Gradient lighting, set the colours it uses, the speed at which it changes, and the direction of the lighting. 

Once you've created your Mural, just name it and save it, and it'll be available to activate with the click of a button. 

Click Murals at the top of iCUE, and you'll be able to change the layout of your Devices, which will affect the order in which the lighting effects travel across your devices. We set it up to reflect the placement of the different devices on our desktop, but you have complete control here over (you can also create extra Device Layouts by clicking the '+' icon at the top of the Device Layouts screen. 

All of Corsair's latest RGB gaming accessories are designed to work with Mural seamlessly. Beautify the inside of your gaming PC with the H150i Capellix XT Liquid Cooler, surround your mouse with colour with the MM700 RGB Extended Mousepad, or create a compact lightshow with the K65 RGB Mini Keyboard. It's all there. 

Corsair has been delivering dazzling and powerful devices to gamers for decades, and will continue to do so deep into the gaming darkness of the far future. You can grab all these peripherals on Amazon (US, UK) as well as the official Corsair site.

To keep up with the latest happenings at Corsair, follow them on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. Happy gaming! 

While the 'gamer' aesthetic previously meant sharp angles and over-enthusiastic, preposterously proportioned artwork adorning our hardware, now it's all about the RGB. If a piece of technology isn't haloed by myriad addressable RGB LEDs then it's going to have a hard time pretending it's been designed for gaming.

And you don't have to be a technology journalist with a couple decades of experience to know that tech with coloured lights brightening it up will always perform far better than something that isn't using extraneous power just to get lit.

Even in places where you wouldn't expect RGB illumination to be useful, or even desirable, we've seen it added. Headsets, for example, where you can't even see what's going on around your ears now come RGB'd up. And SSDs, too, because they don't get hot enough all by themselves.

And so, when I was considering how to upgrade my humble home, there was really only one option. After all, I was never going to actually paint a wall myself or do some sort of interior design that required a permanent solution. No, I wanted to overclock my house in the only way I know how, with slabs of RGB lighting on my walls.

Even in my bedroom where a thoroughly pink aesthetic has been pushed by forces greater than mine. Somehow, I've managed to squeeze a little gamer gear into the boudoir, with the express permission of my partner. What a world we live in. 

Nanoleaf is arguably the biggest name in RGB home lighting panels, though Philips has got its own claims to homebrew light shows via its Hue lightbulbs. But, thanks to streamers and YouTubists haloing themselves with Nanoleaf strips and panels, it's become the go-to company for your RGB PC backdrop.

Nanoleaf is the established player and has recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with a set of matte black light panels. But there's also upstart, Govee, which has only been going since 2017, but has already got itself a bit of a following. Y'know, with the RGB contrarians.

I have, therefore, put the traditional white Nanoleaf Shapes triangular panels, up against its new black triangles and the hexagonal Govee Glide Hexa Pro panels in a battle for the ages. Well, a battle to see which one gets the okay from my long-suffering partner and is actually allowed to go on the wall of our bedroom.

Y'see the bedroom wall panel is the gateway drug for RGB lighting the entire house, allowing me to expand into the harder stuff: sticking a set of panels up in our front room and the family room, too. 

"Instead of buying a new lamp for the bedside table," I suggest, "how about we go minimal and mount some panels onto the wall?"

I will admit, I expected some push back, not a willing collaborator. And yet here I am with addressable RGB panels lighting up different room in my home.

The different kits are similarly priced, with the Nanoleaf Shapes Triangle Starter Kit is $200 (in nine panel trim as I've been playing with), while the Govee Glide Hexa Pro kit (with ten panels) is on sale for $175 right now. Though I will say, if you do get hooked, the price of expanding these kits is high. Another three panels for from either Govee or Nanoleaf comes in at $70. Ouch.

In the end we've actually settled on the Govee Glide Hexa Pro panels for prime position in the bedroom, which is maybe a surprising choice given the popularity of the Nanoleaf panels. But the reasons are more about usability than aesthetics. Although the hexagonal panels, with their split sections of addressable RGB lighting, do allow you to create more interesting 3D effects than with the more uniform Nanoleaf triangles.

But it was the ease of setting them up, and the fact there is a very obvious, very physical 'on' button that makes them more like a traditional lamp. If just waaaay more expensive. The Nanoleaf panels do have buttons, too, so you don't have to rely on turning them on via the smartphone app, but it's nowhere near as intuitive and is positioned on the primary panel that feeds power to the whole group.

Because they're on the light panel themselves, the Nanoleaf buttons have been designed to be invisible. Which makes actually hitting the right one, and not the random disco lighting button, a bit of a lottery. The Govee button is along the power cable, away from the panels, and is just a single, physically depressed button that even my 3-year-old can find at 6am to wake us up. 

I also really appreciated the design aid from the Govee app, which allows you to create the wall display you want virtually, and will then help you arrange the physical panels, with the connectors threaded into the right places, to weave your pattern on the wall. Using the removable sticky pads, it's a simple thing to get your light show up and running.

It's also easy to get them connected to your network so you can actually control them via your app. I'm running a Google Nest router at home, which has served me well over the years and, while the Govee panels will only connect via a 2.4GHz network, not a 5GHz one, they had no trouble with the mixed signals of the Nest setup.

You see, Google doesn't have discrete connections for 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which is normally not a problem as most apps and devices are smart enough to deal with that if they require one or the other.

Not so with Nanoleaf. 

I know it's a one-time setup kinda deal, and that once you are in place you shouldn't need to worry about going through the trials of hooking your lights into your home network, but connecting the Nanoleaf panels to the Nest router almost had me in tears.

In fact, I had to put it down, take a couple hours breather, and return afresh once I'd calmed down enough not to put my fist through a still unlit triangular panel.

The issue is that Nanoleaf's connection isn't smart enough to just train itself on the 2.4GHz network and needs manual intervention in order to convince it not to continuously butt its head against the 5GHz wall and fail to connect. And what form did this manual intervention take? Walking down the garden with my mobile phone, for the very specific amount of time the app allowed for connection, until I got far enough away from my router the 5GHz signal wasn't available and it defaulted to 2.4GHz instead.

It was a frustrating time. And one I cared not to repeat. Except it was the same with both the white and black panels. Though by the time I'd jumped through the hoops with the white version I did at least know the measures it would take to connect the black anniversary ones up.

The setup is one thing, but what about the actual lights? Well, I will say I do actually prefer the lighting on the Nanoleaf panels. Though only the white ones. 

But what about those fancy 10th anniversary black Nanoleaf panels? Well, honestly, they're a bit disappointing. Disappointingly dull compared with either the vibrant Govee or the traditional white Nanoleaf panels, and I'm afraid I barely ever bother turning them on.

It seems obvious thinking about it, but the matte black Nanoleaf panels are far dimmer than the white ones, and you end up with a much more subdued effect from them. The traditional white Nanoleaf triangles, however, can be blazing bright and really light up a room. 

Once connected the Nanoleaf app setup is really good, too. Where the Govee software shows you how to plumb the panels into each other to create the display you want, the Nanoleaf app is more user oriented. You plug the panels into one another, and the app reflects the way you've arranged them yourself.

And you can download and upload patterns, too. There are heaps of user-created and official Nanoleaf lighting patterns that can change colours or react to sound in different ways, and it allows you to keep things fresh if you fancy a change.

The Govee app, however, has a fair few different presets you can use—and they are really effective—but as far as I've been able to tell, that's what you're stuck with unless you want to start designing your own. That makes it feel a lot more limited, and the Govee software doesn't feel as slick and intuitive as the Nanoleaf one, either.

Both Govee and Nanoleaf can hook into your home control network, though, as in either your Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, or Amazon Alexa thingies. And that means you don't have to spend time messing around with individual apps to light your home. Assign a room to each, and then you can just tell your phone or smart speaker to turn on the lights, turn them green, or have a disco replete with a pulsing light show wherever you wish.

Though obviously voice control is still prone to errors, and I have turned the bedroom lights on in the middle of the night, waking my partner into a blinding panic, when I'd actually just meant to turn off the lights downstairs. 

Because yes, while Govee may have won the battle for the bedroom, with its ease of setup and physical controls, the white Nanoleaf panels have won a place in my heart, and my home office, thanks to the actual lighting effects and the fact I can switch it up when I inevitably get bored with the glowing jungle theme I'm currently rocking. 

Being a PC gamer often means having a bunch of different kit that comes together to complete a set up. At the very least you're going to need a PC, but from there the world is your oyster when it comes to choices for peripherals. Not only do you have your keyboards and mice, but headsets, speakers, microphones, and lighting are all things you may want to consider. There are different styles for all of these things, not to mention different brands so this can all get to be a bit of a pain in the butt, especially if you want stuff to work together.

While frustrating in some ways, competition is generally speaking pretty excellent for consumers. It can drive innovation and advancement, push down prices, and generally challenge the status quo. It can even make brands form partnerships, which has just happened with Corsair and Nanoleaf. Now Corsair's iCUE RGB software has been integrated to work with Nanoleaf products, joining the likes of Razer's Chroma, and Secretlab's Magnus.

Nanoleaf is one of the biggest names when it comes to RGB lighting in the gamer home. You've likely seen the wall mounted LED shapes behind streamers online which the brand is most famous for. Those can be quite expensive, but it also offers other light themed products like the essentials range which was quite impressive for its price in our reviews. You can have a whole room set up with various Nanloeaf products like LED strips, bulbs, wall mounts, back lights, and all sorts and it should all work together nicely – which is one of the biggest selling points of the brand.

PC peripherals are a bit of a different kettle of fish, and tend to need their own proprietary software to configure their LEDs. In Corsair's case this is called iCUE, which spans its profile of products like headsets, liquid coolers, keyboards, mice, and even cases like the Corsair iCUE 5000T RGB mid-tower PC case. The iCUE app is also one of the nicer options out there, so it's definitely a welcome addition to the Nanoleaf compatible lineup. It's worth noting that iCUE is also supposed to work with Hue lights like the Loupedeck, So don't go throwing them out yet either.

The setup video for configuring iCUE and Nanoleaf products to work together seems fairly simple, and looks like it's mostly done through the iCUE app. Again, this is a blessing not only because the iCUE app is generally quite nice, but also because the Nanoleaf one often isn't. It can be sluggish and often unresponsive in my experience, so it could be that managing this through a different app may help with some of those problems.

What this means for gamers is there's one extra option to really get your station pulsing with matching RGB auroras. Between Corsair and Nanoleaf there are tonnes of ways you could kit out your room with blazing lights that should all work together from trusted brands. Even more if you consider the Razer or Hue integration too. As more of these products work together, It's getting even easier to turn your study into the cyberpunk glowfest of your dreams with more choice than ever before.

RGB lighting has been the bright beacon of the PC gaming gaming world—illuminating everything from our PCs, keyboards, mice, even headsets. It's easy to spot that gamer aesthetic from that bright and colourful aurora. But one of the issues with this is it can become a bit of a mess with a myriad of devices all pulsing along to their own hue.

A good desk lighting set up should ideally have a few strong focal points outside of the accessories to create a uniformed and light blanketed feeling. But good quality RGB lighting solutions can be pretty expensive, and it's hard to know how much you need. 

One of the more well known brands out there is Nanoleaf, which has recently released its Smarter Essentials range of globes and lightstrips. These are staples of the RGB lighting world and are great flexible choices. Globes are around $20 USD and can go in lamps you already have making them much cheaper than standalone light accessories. While the strips are also fairly reasonable, currently going for $50 USD. But how much can these simple offerings really improve a PC gaming desk.

The answer is a surprising amount. I already talked about the great versatility of globes in general as a coloured light solution, and these Nanoleaf bulbs look like a great choice. They're really bright and vibrant and paired with a funky polygon design helps suit a gaming set up to a tee. Plus it being a normal lamp I can move it around pretty freely to change my look. For example, setting one up behind my PC gave me an instant backsplash of colour.

If I had a thread router I could even set it to mimic the colours of my screen through the Nanoleaf desktop app. I don't, but this would be a great way to create that immersive feeling of bringing the game screen all around you to paint your walls with light.

The desk lighting strip is equally much better than I expected when it comes to brightness and colour. It does have clear LED points shining through, so it looks best used when you can't see the strip directly. Under a desk it provides an excellent amount of under glow which gives an eerily cool feel to your workstation, and makes it much easier to see the old stains on your carpet.

Due to it being a strip, it's a bit harder to set up. This one has an adhesive to stick to surfaces which so far works great, but it's just tricky if you don't want to stick with straight lines. To go around the corners of my desk I've awkwardly bent the lightstrip. You can't see it from above so it looks fine, but it was tricky to do and I'm not sure how well I trust it. Joiners and accessories are available to make this easier, but it's worth keeping in mind if you're after a similar use case. Still, the 2M strip was more than enough to cover the front and parts of the sides of my desk, which gives a surprisingly complete look, especially in conjunction with a globe that can really set the scene.

There is also the option of a 1M extension for the strip if you want a bit more length. Adding this I found it went all the way around my desk nicely giving me a nice back glow onto the wall behind. Unfortunately my wall behind is curtains so it gets a little lost. I wouldn't say it's necessary as my desk was lit up fairly well with the single strip, but if you really want the all encompassing strips or have a large desk, it's pretty easy to achieve with one of these added on.

A second globe on the other hand is a bit more of a game changer. Having two of these lets me set them up and move them about easily, creating different focus points and looks on my desk. This is especially helpful for streaming setups. Or I can leave them behind to backlight my curtained wall better for that immersive monitor feel—but again that would require a bit extra with the Nanoleaf software which is probably my biggest bugbear.

I've set up most of this on my phone, given that I don't have a thread router or compatible device to do it any other way. It's not a frustration free experience, and took several goes to add them and also get the firmware updated. It can be very slow to start up and connect to devices too, but once running everything seems to be ok. I have a few older Nanoleaf devices like the Hexagon Shapes that might allow me thread control but they've had their own issues with the app and falling off the system since day one. Thankfully I haven't found that yet with this essential line, yet, but I am still limited to using this software and only on my phone rather than my PC.

Adding a few other touches like your RGB lit mouse, keyboard, speaker or whatever else helps you add focal points to the desk itself. This looks cool and is helpful for playing in the dark, but also gives you little accent points you can use with your lighting setup. Have it all match or taste the rainbow for that final spark.

As far as nice RGB lighting setups go, the Nanoleaf Essentials bulbs and lightstrips are great choices in a lot of respects. They offer bright, beautiful colours that should match up to each light along the collection for a very conclusive feel. The hardware for the bulbs and strips are both super easy to install, even if you do wind up with some curves in your strips, though it's let down by the software component of the experience. Still, these are very fair prices for brand name products that really do look mint in a room and add a lot of flexible RGB light options.

The best desk lighting can turn a stale desktop into somewhere you actually want to spend your time. From lightstrips and reactive lighting systems that adjust in real-time to what's shown on your monitor, to key lights that will help you glow on a Twitch stream, a decent spot of lighting can elevate a setup from dull to fabulous in seconds.

The best key light is the Elgato Key Light Neo. It's bright, easy to use, flexible and, considering all of that, reasonably affordable. You could spend a lot more, or a lot less, on a key light, though it's the Key Light Neo that offers the best value for what it offers.

If you're looking for something a little more aesthetically pleasing, a set of Govee x Evangelion Glide Wall Lights is easily the most visually stunning of those we've tested.

The quick list

The best key light

The Elgato Key Light Neo is the best key light I've tested. It's simple, effective, and surprisingly affordable. What more could you want?

Actually, don't answer that. There are reasons you might want to spend more than this on a key light. Yet for the average user looking to light up their streams, this key light is fantastic.

Sitting directly atop your monitor with the included mount, this light couldn't be much easier to set up. It comes with a short USB cable attached, but there's an extension cable included in the box for extra length. On the light itself, there are three buttons and a dial, one in each corner, and these control the brightness and temperature, and let you flick through presets.

The light comes diffused out of the box, which means it's slightly softer than your average bulb. Though you still might find it a bit harsh whacked up to the full 1000 lumens brightness. That's only available if you plug the light in over the 3 A power supply, otherwise, it's limited to 700 lumens over USB Type-C and 400 lumens over USB Type-A.

You can control the light using Elgato's Control application, which is available to connect to the light via USB or Wi-Fi. Plus, since the app is available on phones, you can connect to the light without actually plugging your device into it whatsoever.

The Key Light Neo bathed us in a sufficiently glamorous light during testing, but mostly I'm just impressed with the price. It's a well-made bit of kit for the money.

Read our full Elgato Key Light Neo review.

The best lightstrip

Throughout our testing, one lightstrip shone out from the rest. That was Govee's Strip Light 2 Pro, the best lightstrip by far.

These lengthy strips (2-meter, 5-meter or 10-meter) emit a powerful hue. It will light up in any colour of the rainbow, around 16.8 million or so, but this strip is all the better for the way it produces adjustable white light.

White light? That's any old light, right? Sorry for the accidental rhyme, but no, it's not really that simple. You need cool white and warm white LEDs to really offer the full range of temperatures. Many lightstrips and LED lights only come with one type of white LED, but the Strip Light 2 Pro comes with two.

Those extra white LEDs can be used to adjust the temperature between 2700 – 6500 K. That means it's easier to light yourself, your scene, or something else when you're filming or taking photos. That will come in handy if you're planning on creating any sort of content at home.

A convenient light strip to set up, you can also cut these down to size if you don't want the full length. Just note that you might struggle to reattach them together again in the future—it's basically a one-time snip.

Controlled via a handy app, the Govee strip just ticks all the boxes for us. While you could spend less on a lightstrip, the Strip Light 2 Pro is the whole package and well worth the extra.

Read our Govee Strip Light 2 Pro review.

The best budget lightstrip

For those on a budget, Nanoleaf's Essentials Matter Lightstrip is the best choice. You might find cheaper kits than this, but not by much. And here you can be sure you'll get a good quality lightstrip with simple modern controls.

Another added bonus for Nanoleaf is that this kit is frequently discounted to around half its MSRP in sales. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

What you get here is a simple, straightforward RGB lightstrip with the added benefit of a white LED to produce more accurate color temperatures.

It's controlled via an included control box, which is a simple thing with a couple of easily navigable buttons. Though you can also connect to the Nanoleaf app using Bluetooth for in-app controls—just note Bluetooth takes a bit longer to connect than Wi-Fi.

Available in two lengths, 2 meters and 5 meters, the former is best for a single length of a desk. The 5-meter length could wrap all the way around, or even go elsewhere.

While this kit feels a little outdated by the standards of the more premium options out there, including the Govee Strip Light 2 Pro above or others such as the Elgato Light Strip Pro or Govee Cob Strip Light Pro, it'll still light up a gaming room or office space and make it look a helluva lot more exciting, for less cash than you'd think.

Read our full Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Lightstrip review.

The best wall light

You don't have to like Evangelion or even know what Evangelion is to enjoy looking at the Govee x Evangelion Gaming Wall Light. This really is the best-looking wall light we've tested, and it's clever too. To be fair, you also don't need to have the Evangelion version as the Standard Edition of the Govee Gaming Wall Light still looks pretty sharp.

A part of a wider set of Evangelion-themed gaming lights, the wall lights are the pick of the bunch. They're unusual in appearance, but not in a bad way. They look like something you'd imagine seeing if you opened up a pod racer from Star Wars.

Or, you know, something from Evangelion. Look, I haven't seen it, okay, but our reviewer Hope Corrigan has and thought they were a fantastic fit with the anime series.

They're also a fantastic fit with any over-the-top gaming setup. Sure, some people don't love RGB lighting, but if you've made it this far down this list, then you're not one of them. And you won't find many more wall light kits as in-your-face as this.

Even when you disable the lighting on this kit, it still looks the part. That's actually one of its best features: so many RGB lights look a bit weird during the day with the lighting disabled. These look wicked, with tons of tiny details across each light stick and connector. All of which lights up, by the way.

Connecting over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, there's access to all the modern features expected of a pricey light set through the Govee app. Though that does touch on the high price. These aren't as cheap as your bog-standard lightstrip.

To us, these are worth the investment. They're a little different, they're easy to use, and they're a cool tie-in we can actually get behind.

Read our full Govee x Evangelion Gaming Wall Light review.

The best reactive light kit

The best reactive light kit has to be Nanoleaf's 4D Screen Mirror Kit. While we remain very much three-dimensional beings, we have been treated to some immersive and responsive monitor backlighting.

The Nanoleaf 4D kit comes with a lightstrip long enough to, more or less, circumvent your monitor or TV's rear. There are two cable lengths available to buy, one to fit up to a 65-inch screen and one to fit up to an 85-inch screen. Any leftover cable you can trim down, but the sticky corner pieces help you bend it around the edges.

This light strip then hooks up to a camera and a controller, which let you control the RGB effects and, of course, sync up the lighting to what's happening on-screen.

If you've ever seen one of those TVs with Philips' Ambilight, it's more or less your own custom version of that using a camera. The camera is small, and it sits just out and away from your monitor to capture what's happening on screen. That's then translated into the RGB light strip on the rear to match.

The result is a gorgeous shifting light show that is genuinely impressive. Nanoleaf claims it's able to reproduce "VR levels of immersion" using the kit, which... well, the less said about this ludicrous claim, the better. It's absolutely not like VR, so don't expect anything like that.

Speaking of weird names for things, the '4D' stuff is basically just a gauge of how much the lighting kit tracks the on-screen movement. 1D is just a backlight that glows a little more depending on what's happening, while 4D is full RGB tracking the colours on-screen.

The camera is a little sluggish in picking up and then translating the on-screen motion to the light strips, but it's really not too noticeable in action. If you want the very best, we also tried out the Govee AI Sync Box 2 Kit and found that to be a great option, provided you're able to run it over HDMI 2.1 and not DisplayPort.

However, the Govee is a lot more money than this Nanoleaf option, and we like the Nanoleaf a lot more for its paltry price tag by comparison.

A fairly unobtrusive option, minus the small camera hanging over you at all times, the Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror Kit impressed us enough in testing to get our nod of approval. Even if Nanoleaf's claims of "VR levels of immersion" are laughable.

Read our full Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror Kit review.

The best RGB light bulb

The Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Bulb is our pick for the best RGB lightbulb. It's not the most exciting product on the market—it's a bulb—but it's a simple and straightforward thing.

More so than that, it's quite cheap compared to the competition. I have some Philips Hue bulbs in my house, and while they're also pretty good as far as bulbs go, they're often just a bit more money than Nanoleaf's option. When the end result is largely the same, I'll take the cheaper of the two, especially if you're not making any sacrifices.

That's the thing: what you want here is a bulb that will reliably turn on and off, in a range of different colours, and will connect to other smart home ecosystems. The Nanoleaf does all of that. Admittedly, the Nanoleaf app is a little sluggish, but you can use Samsung, Google, or Apple's smart home controls instead.

It's more important for a bulb to get the white light correct than a lightstrip. Especially if you're using it overhead. You'll maybe want a warm, soft tone and other times you might want a bright, cool white light.... Okay, no one wants a bright artificial light above them like some horribly corporate office environment, but it can be handy if you're doing photography or shooting video at home.

With a savvy price tag and reasonably modern and impressive specs, the Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Bulb gets my pick.

Read our full Nanoleaf Essentials Matter bulb review.

Also tested

There you go, lavishly slapping RGB on your extreme gaming PC build, but have you ever given a second thought to the man behind those bright lights? M. George Craford poured 30 years of his life into researching these little light-emitting wonders, and is generally held as the unsung hero of LEDs. This is his story.

With space exploration at the forefront of his mind, Craford started his journey into tech in the '50s, before LEDs had even been invented (thanks for the info IEEE Spectrum).

Starting early, a family friend and children's science author Illa Podendorf began feeding Craford's inquisitive mind with all kinds of texts. Evidently these sparked his curiosity, because the kid eventually found himself joining the American Association of Variable Star Observers, where building rockets became just a normal part of his repertoire.

A super basic intro into tech then.

Alongside rockets he constructed all kinds of contraptions, as well as other, more chemical-based experiments—one time even cracking his home lab's window with some uncontained, explosive exploit.

Moving on to study Physics at the University of Iowa, lecturer James Van Allen inspired Craford to continue in the field of space science, but his interest in space dwindled throughout the summer following his BA, and soon his journey lead more along the route of semiconductors. Van Allen had pointed Craford to the solid-state physics program at the University of Illinois, where he went to complete his Masters and PhD.

It was here that Craford bumped into Nick Holonyak, designer of the original LED, who put on a fascinating show of dropping a little red LED into a glass Dewar of liquid nitrogen. Craford says it "lit up the whole flask with a bright red light." It was this display that prompted him to drop several years of research into tunnelling effects in Josephson junctions, and Holonyak took him under his wing.

Craford's research continued in the basement of the materials research building, a nice dark place to play around with high-pressure equipment for lighting experiments, using Holonyak's lab-grown gallium arsenide phosphide (GaAsP) and some liquid nitrogen.

What they were trying to understand was why adding pressure to GaAsP samples caused their brightness to increase by "several orders of magnitude." He and Greg Stillman made great leaps in their research (PDF warning), finding that light shining on the samples caused the resistance to decrease and remain low as long as the temperature did (this effect is known as persistent photoconductivity), though this only occurred in samples containing sulfur, and not those doped with tellurium.

At first, they struggled to see the practical applications in their findings and it dropped down the priority list until several years later, when some researchers at Bell Laboratories dredged it back up into the spotlight, and renamed the phenomenon the DX Center. From there, plenty of researchers picked it up, and a bunch of experiments surfaced across the board.

After his PhD, Craford went to work at Monsanto Co. to continue his focus on gallium arsenide phosphide research, but it was a researcher from Bell Labs (who had also offered him a job after his PhD ended) that prompted Craford to head down the righteously colour-filled RGB path.

It was Bell Lab's successes through the doping of gallium phosphide with Zn-O that lead Craford and his team to create the bright orange, green and yellow LEDs that paved the way for the full spectrum of RGB we see in the best RGB LED strips of today.

Craford says the initial reaction to these colourful LEDs was "Wow, that’s great, but our customers are very happy with red LEDs. Who needs other colours?" Turns out, we do need them. I personally can't be without them, and everyone knows RGB improves framerates, too. So we have a lot to thank Craford for.

M. George Craford pumped a good deal of his life into researching LEDs, and yet Nick Holonyak talks of how humble the man is. Apparently, he "doesn’t promote himself, and sometimes this troubles me about George;" says Holonyak "I’d like to get him to be more forward about the fact that he has done something."

"When George published the work," he notes, "he put the names of the guys he had growing crystals and putting the things together ahead of his name." And yet, he explains, "Every yellow light-emitting diode you see—that’s George’s work."

So whenever you gaze lovingly at your RGB-laden masterpiece, your gaming headset, or your twinkling gaming keyboard, remember Craford. An outdoorsman and gym buff—dabbling in everything from parachute jumping to whitewater canoeing—he himself has climbed Grand Teton, and his work has climbed into every peripheral in sight.

What a guy.

A good quality light for streaming isn't a top priority for most PC setups, but it is an upgrade that makes a huge difference to how your stream looks to your viewers. It's also massively important for getting the ~vibes~ just right, and it's for that reason that you may want to check out its new Razer Key Light Chroma: an impressively bright 2,800 lumens light with RGB lighting effects built-in.

Other lights aimed at streamers tend to focus on a single white source. After all, this is all you need to get your stream looking sleek. But Razer being Razer, that wasn't quite enough for its latest lighting gear—not only will the Key Light Chroma light you up brighter than a policeman's Maglite in a lonely lay-by, but it will also throw out an array of impressive colours from across the visible spectrum.

Now if you're already wondering why you'd want to bathe in all the colours of the rainbow on stream, well, this already isn't the key light for you. At $300/£300, the Key Light Chroma doesn't come cheap for its RGB innards. It has truly broken through the stratosphere for relative costs of streaming gear, and it makes Elgato's comparative key lights (which I had thought to be expensive at $200) appear much better value.

But if you're an RGB enthusiast with nothing to lose (and I know there are lots of you out there), you may be able to justify this light's price tag somewhat. After all, it does offer something that few other solutions can offer, and never as neatly as this.

From the moment you open the box, it's clear the Key Light Chroma is very well-made. It's absolutely no problem to set up it up in under 10 minutes. You need only screw the desk clamp into the telescopic arm, then the arm into a joint, and finally screw the Key Light itself into the joint at one of its many mounting points. These arms can be extended at two points for plenty of extra headroom, and the clamp opens up to 75mm, so you shouldn't run into any compatibility issues with your desk, or whatever you're attaching it to.

With the light installed it's time to choose between the two available apps for controlling your light: Razer Synapse for PC or Razer Streaming for iOS and Android phones.

I quite like the idea of having light control away from my PC, so the phone app is a handy option. Though it has been a little temperamental during initial set-up, regularly crashing when I rebooted it to start the process over.

When it comes to the Razer Synapse app on PC, I'm not exactly blown away by its initial set-up either.

Once both are up-and-running, they're relatively straightforward to use day-to-day. You needn't go through many steps to change settings, at the very least, and that's what matters.

There is something important to note with both apps, though particularly noteworthy on mobile, and that is that you need to adjust the Chroma effect brightness independently of the Key Light's core brightness functionality to enable the brightest RGB effects. It's easily done if you know where to look, but if you don't change these settings you'll end up with very washed out Chroma effects.

On mobile, you have to go through various sub-menus to find the Chroma effect brightness slider. First, set the main brightness slider to the off position with the toggle switch. Then head into the Chroma settings, slide up the mostly hidden menu in the lower portion of the screen, and turn up the Chroma effect brightness all the way.

On PC, head to the Key Light settings under the Streaming tab. From there, disable the Panel Light toggle and make sure the Chroma Brightness slider is set to 100, or close to.

Voilà! Bright RGB effects from your fancy new lighting panel. It's a little fiddly on the app, and Razer could make this menu a whole lot clearer, but once it's working it admittedly looks fantastic. 

The more active Chroma effects are perhaps a little overboard, however.

The static Chroma effects really do look absolutely great and the panel is able to emit a wonderfully uniform RGB tone from bezel to bezel. That also makes for an even and soft light tone on the subject (me, in this case). You can select just about any colour across the spectrum for the Key Light Chroma to display, though it does do better when stronger colours are selected. Rich blues, greens, reds, yellows, and pinks are all beamed out with surprising accuracy by the light's many LEDs.

However, if you select a slightly more washed out colour in the app, the Key Light Chroma isn't always able to match it. I selected a light green from the preset colour palettes and the result was more a very light blue. You can eke those lighter tones out of the Key Light Chroma but it takes fiddling with the Panel Light option to do so.

Leaving the RGB effects to one side, the 2,800 lumens LED light source does a superb job of illuminating every nook and cranny in front of it. At 100% brightness, the panel is powerful to light up even the most secluded and dingy streaming setups. It works great during the day, but obviously this thing really excels at night or with blackout curtains.

It makes for easy work for my Logitech C920 webcam, which struggles in low-light conditions, as most webcams do. Though some of the RGB effects do send my webcam into overdrive, especially the strong red light, so it is important to get the balance just right. An SLR camera hooked up to my PC would almost certainly provide a better image with more of the subtle tones from the light in the shot, but we're talking significant costs if you don't already have this sort of setup already.

And while we're on the topic of costs, let's talk about the Key Light Chroma's price tag. At $300, this is a significantly expensive piece of kit, and let's not pretend that Razer doesn't have stiff competition in streaming lights. 

Take Elgato's Key Light, which is rated to an identical 2,800 lumens but costs $100 less. There's also the less powerful Elgato Key Light Air for $130. It delivers just 1,400 lumens, half that of the Key Light Chroma, but for less than half the price it's hard to argue with what's on offer. 

That's just one popular manufacturer to consider, and if you're only looking for a bright light to make your webcam happy and lighten up your streams there are much cheaper options out there than any of the above. There's a whole world of generic photography gear, from brands such as Neewer, that is popular among some pro streamers today.

My partner uses two Key Light Airs for her streaming setup, and there are a lot of benefits to having two lights as opposed to just one. With two it's possible to reduce strong shadows on your face and more uniformly light your stream. Plus you can balance the lighting on either side for those lighter shadows that make a stream look less artificially lit. Plus, you don't have to be quite so fussy about where you sit or where these lights are aimed as you would a single strong light source. The problem is, with a pair of Razer Key Light Chromas, you're spending cash equal to a new graphics card.

It comes down to what you feel is best for your stream. If you're just looking for a light to make yourself look great on webcam and help brighten up your video feed, then a cheaper light is definitely going to be a better choice here. The Razer Key Light Chroma is absurdly expensive for that purpose alone. If you've been struggling with dark streams or unflattering lighting, I don't believe the Key Light Chroma is the answer you're looking for either. The RGB effects serve as a, admittedly fun, distraction from the core utility of the light itself.

One or two cheaper lights and some simple RGB lighting strips could get you awfully close to the vibe you're chasing without dropping quite so much cash.

But if you have money to spend or very particular needs for RGB lighting, say you need to set the tone for a certain game or experience, the Razer is a solid option to meet them. You can also get rid of a lot of clutter and cables by simplifying your lighting setup to a single source that does it all, à la the Key Light Chroma.

The Razer Key Light Chroma does deliver something a little different with its RGB lighting effects, and I'll give it to Razer for trying that out in a market that's already packed with similar options. However, in this case, it feels an awfully frivolous purchase: a $300 multi-coloured streaming light might just be one of those streaming accessories that sounds great, but few, if any, actually need. 

Coloured lights are a great way to immediately spruce up any room—an easy splash of colour to match any situation. Controllable RGB lighting goes a step further by allowing the look of those lights to be immediately changed, and reactive lights do one better again by changing on the fly to what's around them. When it comes to PC gaming, a kicking RGB setup is like the bright and tasty cherry on top. For some, an unwanted distraction. Others a nice touch of flair. And for some of us, the secret reason we really ordered the sundae in the first place.

Reactive RGB lights are some of the coolest when it comes to gaming and entertainment setups. Having them set up behind a screen allows you to paint rooms with the colours of the current scene, helping to immerse you in a piece of the environment. It's a great addition to the experience, but it can also be a very expensive one. A lot of the better known brands charge an arm and a leg for their RGB services, but there are much cheaper offerings on the market.

Govee is one such brand offering more budget friendly options for RGB lighting setups. Many of their offerings include those made specifically for gaming or TV—the kind that go around the back of a screen and are specifically designed to react with on-screen content. 

One of these setups is the Govee DreamView G1 Pro gaming light, that comes with an LED light strip for the back of a monitor, as well as two tall side lights, and the camera and control unit. This is all in a pack for $180 (but it's currently on sale for $160). That's a complete back of monitor desk setup that works entirely independently at a pretty decent price.

The first point of note is that while it isn't difficult to set these lights up on a monitor, you will need to do some checks first. These lights only work with flat back panels which is stated on the Govee website. I was surprised by how many monitor screens I have that these would not be compatible with due to the back portions not really allowing the light mounts to work. The flat backed panel that I did have worked easily, but it would have been a complete non-starter for about half the monitors in my house.

Once installed some calibration is required that has to be done through the Govee smartphone app for iPhone or Android then connecting to the lights by Bluetooth. Again, it's a fairly easy process, but given these are likely to be used with PCs, the lack of a desktop app is a little disappointing. There are extra calibration options in the app like white balance and saturation, which you're also definitely going to need to play with.

This is because the way the Govee lights work is by using a camera mounted on top of your screen. Because it's gathering the data via a visual sensor, that means there are bound to be problems. Different screens show light a little differently on some angles and it's impossible to really get the colours dialled in to perfection. The lights are also just staggeringly bright, which is excellent, but may also need to be turned down which can also be done in the app.

On my screen I struggle to have the lights not see black, or most dark colours, as red. I've played with the white balance and saturation to try to mitigate this but it's still not completely fixed and now everything else is a bit too blue. It's less noticeable on bold colour changes but still can occasionally make a huge difference. Sometimes transitions between colours can also be stuttery, as it feels like the camera catches up. For general vibes and nice bright colours it's perfectly fine, but in a budget device like this you won't be getting perfect colour replication.

But the camera setup also has some good sides. There are a surprising amount of apps that block screen reading software, often including things like Netflix and some games which can make them periodically not work with some programs. Plus a camera pointing at a screen allows you to use this with anything playing, that includes consoles that may not be otherwise compatible. Other RGB lighting products may get around this with expensive pass-through boxes, but a camera pointed at a screen isn't a half bad solution either.

Overall the effect is really quite good, though certainly not as nice as more expensive offerings, but I don't really think that matters. The colours can be a bit off sometimes but for the most part they're still adding a really cool cyberpunk glow that matches your experience, well, close enough. They can easily light a room, and the two light stands can be positioned nice and fair apart to help you do that. The downside is you do end up with quite a few cables that can be difficult to manage. 

Still, it's a very complete, if slightly budget, setup that does a lot to enhance a gaming room, and you don't really notice the cheap feel unless you're really looking for it.

There are PC gamers who hate RGB lighting. There are also PC gamers, like me, who are ready to RGB light anything. RGB lights on non-gaming products like neckties or toilets make my life worth living. So you can imagine my excitement when I first saw the new wheel covers for McLaren's F1 car and thought, "Those crazy bastards did it; they added RGB to a race car." Sadly, it's not actually RGB, just a cool-looking byproduct of a strange sponsorship, but it did get me thinking. 

On Wednesday the McLaren Formula 1 Team announced a two-year partnership with Google and Android. McLaren will be putting the companies' branding on its cars for the 2022 F1 season as part of the deal, and that branding includes these cool-looking Google Chrome-themed, not-RGB wheel covers. 

When you first look at the photos released by McLaren, the spinning Chromo icon really does look like the tires of the MCL36 Formula 1 race car have been bedazzled with RGB lighting. I can only imagine that at 200MPH, the wheels will look like Corsair's giant joke desk fan. 

Considering McLaren driver Lando Norris is a big gamer, I'm sure he would be excited to drive a car with some RGB on it. Let me just imagine them really going wild with it and hooking the RGBs up to their diagnostics systems, so that the lights almost act as a car health indicator. Fans watching in the stands or on TV could see things like tire degradation or engine trouble in realtime. Imagine seeing a car glow bright blue or something whenever it is close enough to another car to enable DRS. It adds to the drama but also keeps the crowd looped in. 

If we have to endure helmets, cars, and jumpsuits being covered from top to bottom with boring sponsor logos, let's spice things up and add some Cyberpunk 2077-esqe weirdness to sports, neon lights and all.

Don't get me started on how we can make MLB and NHL games 10 times more entertaining by having baseballs and hockey pucks change color depending on how hard they're hit. I'm full of underappreciated million-dollar ideas.

I guess it's just only a matter of time before the likes of a Razer or HyperX become an F1 team sponsor, and the hope of seeing Charles Leclerc's helmet light up to reflect his mood during a race suddenly looks more likely.

OperaGX browser is getting some new RGB love. For anyone packing Logitech peripherals OperaGX will now allow Logitech G's Lightsync integration. Why? Who knows, honestly.

But moreover, why not? I'm not one for oppressing free expression in fantastical photonic format. If people feel the need to create custom lighting effects and animations to "unleash an explosion of color," as the press release describes, who am I to stand in their way?

If you've not heard of it, Opera is a browsing alternative to Chrome, Firefox and the like, one that prides itself on taking users' privacy matters seriously. A self-proclaimed "global web innovator."

OperaGX, on the other hand, is the gamer-friendly version of the popular browsing software. It has more gaming-related features, such as limiting its access to system resources, so your gaming PC can focus on gaming performance instead of drowning due to your greedy browser's RAM demands. 

"Custom effects and animations can be imported into the browser in just one click," the press release notes, "transforming opening a new tab, downloading new gaming content or activating the RAM, CPU and network limiters into a full spectrum light experience."

Back in September last year, we saw OperaGX getting cosy with Corsair, when the company announced its browser would include iCUE integration. Now Logitech users can join the browser rave, and have those long, midnight wiki deep dive sessions feel much more lively.

If you thought bagging one of the best graphics cards was difficult, questing for a Kyber crystal is totally unthinkable. But fear not. Where previously, such a pursuit would require you to evidence immense Jedi skills through a series of ridiculous tests, researchers are now one step closer to manufacturing real-life lightsabers with the dawn of particle suspending, holographic technology.

Ok, so currently they have only teeny weeny lightsaber examples to show, and they can't slice through anything… yet. But something quite stunning has been achieved here, so bare with me.

Dan Smalley, a professor of electrical engineering at Brigham Young University, is heading one of the most exciting holographic research projects of our age. Funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, his team have birthed 'optical trap technology.' It gives researchers the ability to trap tiny particles in the air with a laser beam, and by dragging the particle around just fast enough, an image can be drawn in the air (via Pys.org). 

It's sort of like when you try to write your name with a sparkler, but a thousand times faster, and way cooler.

This isn't completely new technology either, but a new twist on what the team had already achieved three years prior. Back then, it was possible to draw free-floating objects in space with light, though it was necessary to take long exposure pictures in order to capture the final image, as they were rastered out slowly in physical space. 

Now though, real time animations have been achieved, and they can actually interact with 3D objects. The results are light-based stick figures walking on human fingers, and photon torpedo animations crashing against tiny model starships. All of which can be seen with the naked eye—no CGI or space-age goggles necessary.

And without the need for a screen, this research surpasses current holographic techniques. As graduate student researcher Wesley Rogers explains, by using motion parallax tricks that involve tracking and adjusting the image as the viewer moves around the display, they can "create the illusion of a much deeper display. Up to, theoretically, an infinite sized display."

Just imagine the possibilities.

If you've clicked on this article, I'm going to assume you already have a strong opinion about RGB LEDs. For many they are a staple, an utter necessity for any gaming setup that gives myriad—easily editable—customisation options. For others, they are a scourge that incites unfettered rage due either to their lack of practical application, impact on the environment, price hikes for pretties, or the general distaste for everything being lit up like the Las Vegas Strip on steroids.

I'd love to say the discussion surrounding the subject isn't a heated one, but it seems those pushing for swathes of neon to light up the darkness have been met with a guarded vendetta from the residents of Vogsphere. Yes, those who aim to stamp out any kind of beautification and with a desire to either go back to beige potato aesthetics, or have everything painted black, with black LEDs that light up black causing their setups to reverse in on themselves creating a singularity. 

It's fair to say that plenty of RGB applications could be labeled 'unnecessary,' some are downright ominous, even dangerous. And sure, the utilitarian stance is fair and practical, but it is borderline puritan to simply shout down everyone with a lick of light on their setup. 

You're entitled to your opinion but stand down sunshine, there is yet one application that even the most stalwart anti-RGB evangelist might think twice about. 

Below, we've put together some of the silliest uses of RBG to illustrate that perhaps the trend needs to calm down a bit, as well as one example that might make you fall in love with RGB all over again. So whether you feel RGB LEDs should be slapped across every surface imaginable, or stamped out altogether, here's a little reminder that they do exist, and they're here to stay.

I'm going to steer clear of internal hardware components here—except for your goddam SSD does not need an LED strip—but I'll leave it up to you lot to fight over the rest of those. I'm already treading on eggshells as it is.

5 Things that shouldn't have RGB LEDs

RGB L.A. Lights

I'm gonna go from zero to 100 straight off. You may remember L.A. Lights sneakers as an absolute must-have from your youth, but these LED laden novelty shoes had a darker side. Sure they looked rad, but before you send me a bunch of angry emails for talking smack about your childhood dreams, there's something you should know about this piece of wearable tech.

The real reason your parents took them away was to protect you, not because you left your Meccano set all over the living room floor. These lovable light-ups actually came with a fair amount of mercury inside their LED mechanism, which is not something you want your little ones traipsing around with at school discos, considering how toxic mercury is to humans. 

The subsequent legal battles resulted in LA Gear being forced to pay $70,000 (a fair bit of money back then) to help remove the shoes from circulation. For the better, I reckon. I think it's safe to say this is one thing that probably should've gone without LEDs—or at least had mechanisms that didn't involve distributing toxic metals to kids.

RGB Mousepads

Hear me out. These don't necessarily need RGB, but I can see the practicality—if only minor. Just think about it like this: you're in the heat of battle in a fast paced FPS, no time to check how much your arm's drifted from the center of your mousepad. Then, oh crap, you've dropped off the edge only to miss a headshot and get fragged. 

With an RGB mousepad, you can avoid such humiliation. The light's skirting it indicate where the edge is, so you don't fall off it. Still, this is a very niche complaint. It probably doesn't warrant spending triple the cost of a normal mousepad, does it? 

Let's let this one go. You're only going to cover most of it up with your arm anyway.

RGB Chromotherapy shower heads

Ever been taking a shower, only to stop and think "Damn, I could go for some light therapy right about now"?

No? Didn't think so. Chromatherapy is one of those marketing ploys that tries to convince you that RGB is going to cure you of your depression and, as you stand there in your darkened shower feeling like you're back at a 90's rave, will clear your mind of all evil and baptize you. That's right, you can be born anew as one of the great RGB's chosen ones. Pull the other one.

Okay, for some there might be benefits to immersing yourself in a fairy grotto that spans every room in the house, but the likely outcome will involve a lot of cursing and grabbing at the wrong shower bottles. 

Don't even get me started on trying to shave with one of these barely lighting up the room.

RGB Toilet Seat Light 

First off, what the hell did you ingest, dude? Nuka Cola Quantum is not for general household use, except as a drain cleaner. For real, I bought one of these for my Mum because she thought they were nifty and, for the next few weeks, peeing in the middle of the night was a wholly ominous experience.

You step into the bathroom and, in avoiding the standard retina-searing fluorescent lighting, you're instead greeted by this sinister glow emanating from the toilet bowl. Do you sit down, or are you going to fall into some pipe network nether-world of demented horrors?

Not the kind of decision you need to be making if you've just come back from a heavy night of partying. Right, Mum?

RGB Headsets

Lets face it, unless you're a streamer or pro esports athlete, is there really any need for RGB on your headset? Sure you can ogle at it while its resting on it's stand but once you put it on it ceases to be in your line of sight. Thence why would you bother placing it on your bonce? 

Simply knowing you have RGB on your head might amuse some, but in general it just tends to hike up the price, and in the case of wireless cans just wantonly drains the battery. I just bought some pretty candles and placed them in a box never to be used—do ya see the irony here?

And one thing that should have more...

Gaming monitors

It's been a wild ride, for sure. But here we have the one application that makes sense with a little RGB accenting: Gaming monitors. This has been capably highlighted by the excellent Ambilight tech, especially that used on high-end TVs. This exclusive Philips tech adds another level of immersion to your gaming or cinema experience, and is the only thing I've seen anti-RGB peeps swoon over, even at the heights of their contrarian disdain for all things RGB.

Essentially it takes the colours at the edge of your screen and emits them as a gentle glow on the wall behind, in order to expand your sensory experience beyond the frame of your display. 

AmbiLux takes it a step further (see above vid) and actually projects part of the action out the back of the panel using an array of pico-projectors. This is exceptionally cool tech, although I feel the latter may be a little distracting at times. Still, it's something that actually adds to your gaming experience rather than just encrusting your setup with arbitrary colours.

This is something we'd love to see used in more gaming monitors, especially at the top end. There are imitators, with NZXT offering a kit to retro-fit your display with LED strips, but that doesn't react with the speed of Philips' tech. And that's key.

C'mon Asus, Alienware, Acer, LG, pull your fingers out and give us some shiny RGB LEDs that actually do something for us gamers. 

In the end though, while many of you still don't see the point of RGBs, you have to admit they at least succeed in one thing: giving you something to moan about on reddit.

It's easy to hate on RGB LED lighting in PC gaming tech; to simply go down the negative route, spurred on by outlandish product marketing displays of rainbow-vomiting hardware, or images of over-enthusiastic plastic products picked out from the bargain bin of an Amazon gaming peripheral search.  

But we're all here for gaming, right? The fun stuff? We don't need to castigate folk for a simple desire to imbue their rigs with a little light joy. Hell, it's been in short supply recently.

This was my reaction to reading a PC Gamer article, shared over the weekend, written by one of my erstwhile colleagues. It was published just over four years ago and, while it was maybe a valid argument at the time, today things have changed.

Like all of us, PC gaming tech had its difficult teenage years; that time where it was struggling to balance a desperate need to fit in with the nascent desire to stand out from the crowd. But now it's time to stop being so po-faced about gaming hardware, and give it props for coming out the other side as a more refined, elegant version of itself.

The gear we've seen rolling off the production lines over the last few years looks far more grown-up than the overblown, overly angular, overly aggressive designs that have preceded them. And pretty much all of it is still replete with RGB LED illumination.

Look at the latest lineup of Razer gear, and sure, you can still sneer at the colour wave RGB lighting if you so wish, but the overall design is restrained in a way PC tech hasn't always been. NZXT chassis are simple and clean too, and y'know come with that added frisson of danger from their potential to spontaneously burst into flames too. The new Nvidia Founders Edition shroud (which I'll admit to initially hating) actually looks stunning in-hand, with its two-tone styling and straight lines. Logitech too has been creating pared-back designs for all its gaming peripherals, designs that are less brash and more elegant than the likes of the resolutely old school G15.

Okay, Mad Catz—whoever owns the brand now—is still, well, mad. But those companies are increasingly becoming the outliers in PC gaming hardware, with manufacturers en masse finally understanding that 'gamer' doesn't have to mean '12 year-old boy'.

Just look at the growing trend of gaming laptops that seem designed to masquerade as office notebooks, created so you can sit in your meetings or lectures (remember them?) and look like you're taking notes while you tame boars in Valheim. Or the modern gaming chairs which look like actual designed furniture; more like classic task chairs, and not something that's only meant to look good in the background of a stream.

Pfft, you might froth, however restrained the actual design of modern gaming hardware might be, it's still strewn with hundreds of little RGB LEDs, making it look for all the world like a unicorn has shat multi-hued poo all over your desk.

While it's certainly true some of us love our keyboards exploding in bursts of different colours under every key strike (Steven, I'm looking at you here), there are also those of us who quietly revel in the understated simplicity of a single-colour glow of lighting around our rigs. Of course I know there are those who would rather do without even a single sliver of light on their desktop, bar the LCD glow of their gaming monitor, but most RGB LEDs come with a software-based off switch too.

RGB lighting is almost now so ubiquitous that it's not really coming at a price premium any more, and it has actual utility as well.

Personally speaking, I would be at a loss using a keyboard without backlighting. My touch typing still needs work, and my machine is in the darkest part of my wee home, so I would otherwise barely be able to see the ends of my fingers without it's gentle pink ambience. I did try using an extreme Das Keyboard Ultimate for a while—it was also one of my first mechanical keyboard loves way back in the mists of time—but while the lack of backlighting or any characters on the keycaps at all made for a very simple aesthetic, it was tough to be confident on that final one of my three password attempts before lockout.

So yes, I'm an RGB LED apologist, with my rig and peripherals all gently glowing a soothing magenta, but then I'm also not naïve enough to believe it's been perfectly implemented yet either. 

I don't think you should necessarily be down on the ever-expanding use of RGB lighting on our gaming gear, but I'm totally with you if you'd like to reserve a little righteous ire for the hundreds of megabytes of software we're expected to dedicate to our rig aesthetic.

A bunch of companies have tried to create their own one-stop-shop for RGB LED control, but inevitably gear will slip through the support cracks. On my own rig I have software for my Mountain Everest keyboard illumination, another app taking care of the Asus motherboard—though Corsair's iCUE seems to think it's in control of that too, while it also looks after the single RGB strip on my Nvidia FE GPU and disables the resolutely white 'GeForce RTX' logo. Then I have another bit of software making sure the LED fans inside my desk-chassis are the right shade of pink. 

And I think I need all that running, but at this point I'm actually a little afraid of pulling the software plug on anything lest it all falls over and I'm plunged into darkness. So yeah, even just a seemingly simple single-colour setup can be a nightmare to arrange.

There are still software issues then, but I'd argue now it's not gaming hardware that needs to grow up. It's us. We need to stop defaulting to sneering, pubescent rage and accept the beauty of the PC is in its consistent acknowledgement that one size does not fit all. It's not cool to automatically neg on something, I think that is itself kinda childish. We should take RGB illumination on its merits, accept humans and PC tastes can be different, and then decide if you want a disco on your desktop, a stylish one-tone setup, or just a little help finding the off switch.

I don't have a whole lot of RGB on my PC or accessories. My Corsair keyboard glows but I'm mainly about the functionality (I can see the keys when the lights are off in my room) rather than the swirl of colors endlessly parading behind my keys. My PC's fans glow red, but I'd turn that off if I knew how (I should note that I'm too lazy to find out how). Honestly, the only light I actually want on my PC is on the power button, and my case unfortunately doesn't even have a light there.

So RGB isn't really my thing, and last year when I discovered an RGB toilet light I didn't hesitate to make fun of it on our site. This year I spotted a different toilet bowl lighting device, so I included it in our Cyber Monday deals under $50 guide as a joke (the same joke, because remember, I'm lazy).

But then I had a rare moment of honesty with myself. "Hey, this glowing toilet light is actually cool, and I genuinely want it," I decided. So I bought it (it's only $11) and it's now installed on my toilet. And it's great! I now have a Cyberpunk toilet and I'm extremely happy with it. Every time I pee, I'm peeing into the future. I don't just poo, I cyberdump.

The device is, essentially, a motion activated night light. You clip it onto your bowl and point the sensor at the door. It detects movement so when you walk in and it's dark, your toilet begins to glow.

For trips to the bathroom at night, it's much nicer than turning on the light. My Cyberpotty's glow isn't blinding, so it won't mess up my night vision when I'm done and have to walk back to bed through the darkened house. And it's preferable to standing or sitting in the complete darkness, too. (Though while sitting, most of the light is blocked out. By my ass).

Since the light doesn't turn on during the day, and only activates when someone walks into the bathroom in the dark, it'll presumably have a nice long life from the three AAA batteries it runs on (not included).

There's also a strange comfort to the soft glow of the water. Yes, I realize it is glowing toilet water, but in addition to feeling futuristic there's some sort of nostalgic memory it triggers, too. Maybe I'm dimly recalling the pool at our house growing up that had a light we could turn on at night, which made swimming a sort of magical-feeling experience.

Do I want to swim in my toilet? Not really, but also, kind of?

My new Cyberpotty has some nice options, like the ability to pick one of seven different colors, with several brightness levels for each. You can even set it to alternate colors every few seconds. With the colors alternating, my glowing toilet more reminds me more of Christmas than science fiction, but having a holiday theme when you take a dump isn't such a bad thing, either.

A few downsides to be aware of should you buy this toilet light (which you really should). First, having a light shining inside your toilet is a good way to display how maybe your toilet isn't quite as clean as it really should be. Second, the light turns off pretty quickly once it stops detecting motion, so if you're gonna be sitting there for a while in the dark with a cyberlight shining on your butt, you're gonna need to wave your hand in front of the sensor pretty regularly to keep it turned on. It's sort of like this place I used to work, where the break room had automatic lights, so I'd be eating there alone and the lights would go off and I'd have to wave my arms until the sensor saw me so I could continue eating with the lights on like a real person instead of feeling like a raccoon hurriedly eating some trash in the dark.

I like my glowing toilet. We never got flying cars or hover boards or moon colonies or AI for our houses that welcomed you home and asked about your day. At least my toilet takes me to the future, even if the rest of my house doesn't.

These days, RGB LEDs don't have to be contained to just your CPU cooler, graphics card, RAM, headset, keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. Not at all—it is perfectly fashionable to outfit your entire living space with RGB LED strips, which you can do for cheap with this Cyber Monday deal on remote controlled LED strips as long as 32.8 feet from Amazon. 

I know you animals are thinking about doing it. You're imagining your kitchen in aquamarine, your bathroom bathed in red like a nightclub, your whole house or apartment or bedroom pulsing and flashing at you like the floor of a Vegas casino—and why not? The longest kit is just $16.37.

Don't forget to grab some RGB rollerblades, too. You wouldn't want to have everything glowing but your feet.

• Amazon Cyber Monday deals 2020

(Here are some other, better Cyber Monday deals on regular PC gaming stuff. Or are they better?)

It had to happen, and it did—a battery backup designed specifically with gamers in mind, or what hardware makers think gamers are all about. That's to say, Schneider Electric's new APC Back-UPS Pro Gaming UPS delivers electrical impulses to help with overclocking your GPU, to achieve faster framerates in games! No wait, that would be silly. What I meant to say is, it has (*checks notes*) a dozen RGB LEDs that you can customize.

To be fair, I wouldn't want an uninterruptible power supply that offers to zap my PC. That's not what they do. UPS units are intended to protect PCs and other electronics from sudden surges in electricity (the good ones do, anyway), and of course provide some emergency power if the electricity goes out for any reason, like if someone crashes into a utility pole outside your home and knocks it down, along with the power on your block (speaking from experience). 

In such a scenario, a UPS gives you time to save your work and properly shut down your PC. Or as it applies here, to also avoid making your virtual stuff vulnerable to opportunistic opponents.

"Tens of millions of gamers suffer from unexpected disconnects due to power issues every year. The device will be a must-have to guard one’s gear and their reputation in online multiplayer games (whether playing casually or competing in professional esports tournaments); it also keeps homes connected in case of an emergency," Schneider Electric explains.

The RGB lighting is just icing on the cake, and let's be frank, it's what constitutes this as a gaming UPS, as opposed to a regular UPS. Schneider Electric's stated intent with the RGB light ring (and overall design) is to "enable gamers to match their unique gaming PC and console designs" to the UPS.

I'll say this—it's certainly a sleek looking UPS, as far as battery backup designs go, at least from what I can tell from the press renders. It's also well equipped for a UPS. The sole model being offered (in black or white) is a 1,500VA / 900W unit with true sine-wave output and automatic voltage regulation, both of which are desirable features in a UPS. That's enough power for even the beefiest gaming PCs (unless maybe you're running quad GPUs)—generally speaking, it should give you a 10-20 minute window (depending on your setup) if the power goes out.

There are 10 outlets in total, including six that offer battery backup and four that deliver surge protection only. It also has an RJ45 LAN/data port on the rear, and three USB charging ports (two Type-A and one Type-C) on the front to charge your headset, smartphone, or whatever else.

On paper, at least, it matches up with the best UPS battery backups for PC gaming, offering similar features and specifications as CyberPower's CP1500PFCLCD (our top pick, currently). It's a little more expensive though, at least out of the gate—Schneider Electric's new UPS is available now for $260 (MSRP) at Amazon, B&H Photo, and Newegg, where's as CyberPower's model can be found for $210.

Now joining the Elgato lighting family is an exciting new addition: the Elgato Ring Light (inventive as ever with the names, there). Alongside the Key Light and Key Light Air, the Ring Light has all the fantastic smart functionality of other Elgato products, plus a central camera mount for that sought after beauty light look.

Not only does the Ring Light boast fully adjustable brightness of up to 2,500 lumens, and a wide range of colour temperatures like the other lights in the range, but here you’re also looking at 17 inches of double diffused, flicker-free, edge lit, OSRAM LEDs with a central (quarter inch screw) ball mount for your camera. That means you can move your camera independent of the light, but still have it dead centre, giving your eyes that sci-fi gleam when you stare into the lens.

Although there are a few, cheaper ring light alternatives, such as the host of Neewer ring lights, I cant seem to find any with the same level of compatibility and adjustability. With Stream Deck compatibility, app and onboard controls, it seems so simple to integrate any of the Elgato lights into your control center streaming workflow. You can even use Siri to set the scene, for a hands-free experience, which is pretty cool.

A lot of led ring lights out there are also pretty harsh on the eyes, but the Elgato Ring Light, being edge lit and having two diffusers—the opal glass and translucent grid panel—is designed to be a lot more gentle on your retinae.

This one comes with the Master Mount S, a telescopic pole that can shift from 17-inch to 29-inch and is also compatible with Elgato's modular, Multi Mount rigging system, for some serious customisation. There’s also a padded, expandable clamp so you can attach it to your desk, behind your monitors (as long as your desk is thinner than 2.35in, that is).

Backed by a two year warranty, the Elgato Ring Light looks to be a decent option for streamers, videographers and anyone looking to get that snazzy beauty/sci-fi look—for a price. It retails at around $200 on the Elgato store. It may be a little kinder to your eyeballs, but maybe not so much your wallet.

Computer hardware makers are running out of things to apply RGB lighting to, so Corsair said, 'Screw it, here are some RGB towers, go to town'. Only the company was a bit more elegant in its pitch, saying these RGB towers allow you to "surround yourself in a symphony of color."

I felt like we could already do that, what with RGB being applied to case fans, keyboards, mice, RAM, motherboards, coolers, speakers, LED strips that you can attach to the back of your monitor, and the list goes on. Hell, there's even an RGB wig, as our friends at Tom's Hardware highlighted a couple of years ago.

There are very few stones left unturned. Now thanks to Corsair and its new iCUE LT100 smart lighting towers that "bathe your room in immersive ambient lighting," there's one less.

For $130, the starter kit packs two aluminum towers, each with 46 LEDs. They stand around 16.6 inches tall and are attached to a 3.74-inch base. A cable connects them to each other, and there's a separate micro USB to USB-A cable that plugs into your PC. They don't draw power from your right, though, as you also need to plug an AC adapter cable into an outlet.

You can face the lighting side towards you and pretend you're rocking out on stage in front of a crowd, or turn them around to bounce the lighting off your walls for subtler illumination. And if you need to kick things up a notch, you can purchase single units, billed as expansion kits, at $59.99 a pop. Each starter kit supports up to four towers in total.

Both are available now.

Nvidia’s RTX Global Illumination SDK v1.0 (RTXGI) is now available to developers. Included in the new ray tracing toolkit are the tools necessary for scalable lighting solutions in-game across any DXR-enabled GPU—including Pascal cards— without “prohibitive run-time performance requirements”. 

The idea being that the RTXGI SDK will allow game developers to integrate RTX features that scale from the least intensive illumination to the most glorious (and hard-hitting) in-game lighting you’ve ever laid your eyes on. All without excluding those of us not lucky enough to own the very best graphics cards.

The SDK offers developers access to optimised memory layouts and compute shaders, support for multiple coordinate systems, and hooks for engine and gameplay events to make the most of its dynamic lighting. The idea being that after baking some probes into a scene you can trace and shade rays from active light sources, thus removing the need for too much pre-baked lighting trickery and saving precious dev time.

“The fundamental advantage here is that it's a scalable SDK that allows low-end hardware that may not have ray tracing capabilities to produce global illumination,” Tony Tamasi, SVP of content and technology at Nvidia, says. “Then hardware that has ray tracing capability gets progressively better, meaning the updates are higher quality and more frequent. 

“It works off of very traditional flows the game developers are very familiar with, which is light probes. Think of it as baked lighting. But then it allows you to trace rays from those light probes so you get more accurate lighting, more real-time updates, and you don’t get some of the artefacting that you normally get through those light probes, such as light leaking.”

RTXGI will run on any DXR-enabled GPU. That’s any graphics card capable of Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing API now included with the DirectX 12 Ultimate specification. With AMD also working on its DXR-compatible graphics cards later this year in the shape of RDNA 2.0—coming to a PC (and console) near you by the holiday season—this would suggest Nvidia’s SDK will offer scalable global illumination to team red, too.

“Developers are particularly excited about that one because it’s scalable, which means you can enable those kinds of effects across all hardware and all platforms and things just get better as the ray tracing capability of the platform gets better,” Tamasi continues.

The RTXGI SDK joins the ray tracing party at a pivotal moment. Ray tracing is slowly creeping toward an inflection point, the moment when it will no longer be exclusive to Nvidia’s own RTX 20-series hardware and Microsoft’s DXR API. 

The Khronos Group announced official Vulkan RT ray tracing earlier this month, and we can expect to hear more from game devs making the most of that API later in the year. As for hardware, AMD will bring its own spin on the ray tracing formula with RDNA 2.0 in discrete Navi 2X graphics cards, the Xbox Series X, and the PlayStation 5 in the Winter.

It's no secret that there's a diverse set of opinions on the topic of RGB. Some might express support and admiration, others outright disdain. But love it or hate it, someone must be buying all the best RGB accessories, and that someone is me.

You might be wondering who would take the time and spend the money to put a bunch of unicorn barf inside a PC. It's not like RGB lights will actually make your PC faster. (Or will they?) So, I set out on a voyage of discovery, to pimp my PC. As a first-semester college student with a limited budget, my journey had its ups and downs. I also learned a few things, like the fact that I have little self-control when presented with shiny objects.

Starting down the RGB path

Before heading off to school, I sold my trusty gaming PC to help cover future expenses like books and food. I downgraded and ended up with a cheaper and perhaps questionable old mining rig, What could possibly go wrong with a PC that at one point was cranking away on cryptocurrency calculations 24/7? But the hardware was reasonable, with a Core i5-7600K, Z270 motherboard, and an RX 480 graphics card. The real problem is that it was an aesthetic nightmare.

I'm almost ashamed to even show you the PC, but I do have this image sent to me by the seller. View at your own risk, and don't blame me for your nightmares. For those that don't dare look, the PC was packed into a skinny Zalman case, with an ugly PSU and a $5 boxed Intel cooler, and the RX graphics card was on its last leg. Literally. It mostly died within a month of my starting college, probably with blown VRMs.

I won't be getting any cool friends at college if my computer looks like it was sitting on a Best Buy shelf for the last five years. Something had to be done, so I collected my spare change and set about sprucing it up.

The first step to improving my standing in the PC community was to get a new case and cooler. These are two simple upgrades that have an immediate impact. I chose a Metallic Gear Neo Micro from Phanteks, a smart-looking brushed aluminum chassis with tempered glass, underglow, and nice cable management—and it's surprisingly affordable. The case paired nicely with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black, too. (You can't go wrong with the classics.) One quick and painless case swap later, and everything is already looking much better.

Kicking it up a notch

I had a beautiful blank canvas to work with, and my paint of choice is RGB LEDs. My plan was to cram as many LEDs into the PC as possible, and this is where the fun truly begins.

It's easy to add RGB to some areas, like RAM. Many RGB kits only cost $5-10 more than non-RGB variants, which makes them a very budget-oriented upgrade with lots of flair. I flipped the 8GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX for 16 gigs of Vengeance RGB Pro, an improvement in speed, capacity, and aesthetic.

Another component that can help light up your life is case fans. Not only do you get to taste the rainbow, but RGB lighting also contributes a 10 degree drop in temperatures. (Okay, not really, or at least not from the lights. The fan part might help, though.) The single stock case fan was replaced with a kit of Cooler Master's A-RGB fans: three for $40 with a hub.

Lesson 1: Hardware compatibility

Unfortunately, here's where I learned an important lesson about RGB bling. There's run-of-the-mill RGB and the newer addressable RGB. Early RGB solutions from several years back were simplistic; all of the LEDs would end up with the same color. That was a good starting point, but addressable RGB (ARGB) entered the fray in 2018. These newer light accessories have individually addressable LEDs, with an integrated controller that allows every light in a strip to be individually modified. This allows for more interesting effects and creativity.

Unfortunately, ARGB tech requires a shiny new ARGB motherboard header. Most current-gen motherboards on the market should have this header, but my 7th gen Intel setup had no such amenities. That can also be true of budget motherboards, where ARGB and even normal RGB headers may be omitted in pursuit of a lower price.

With no fancy ARGB headers, I was forced to control the RGB in the fans through the tiny hub and controller. That leaves me with a pre-programmed color cycle mode, a temperature mode, and not much else.

Taking it too far

This is the point when any reasonable person would have stopped their upgrade spree. I'm well over $100 into upgrading my PC almost entirely on visual bling, and the joke has run old. But I couldn't stop here, and unfortunately trouble would soon strike again.

I decided the finishing touch to my upgrade would be some nice RGB strips and sleeved PSU cables. RGB strips haven't changed much since their introduction, though there are some fancier options. Thankfully, using Phanteks' own RGB strips made life a breeze, as they were designed to integrate directly with Phanteks's existing RGB lighting. They are non-addressable and have a smaller color palette than some other hardware, but I chose them for their easy integration and low price.

For PSU cables, I stayed in the Phanteks ecosystem as well, as the price was right. In hindsight, there are better options, like AsiaHorse. You can get higher grade sleeving for about the same price, or instead of using extensions just go all-in and buy fully sleeved cables from a place like Cablemod. (Do keep in mind that only select fully-modular PSUs work with this solution.)

Installing a magnetic light strip and extending a few power cables should have been the easiest part of my build. However, this particular build is housed inside a micro-ATX chassis, which is not ideal for cramming in the extra cable clutter. Eventually, thanks to the good case design and some inventive cable management, over the course of an afternoon I was able to fit every cable I needed into the fun-sized case. Time well spent, though I blocked the 3.5-inch drive bay so goodbye cheap HDD storage.

Lesson 2: Software compatibility

With a properly blinged-out computer, it's now time to turn it on and get those lights flashing. If you're looking for something other than just full-throttle rainbow mode, however, you'll have to dive into software to get everything working together.

The first step is to check your motherboard. Each of the major motherboard manufacturers has its own RGB control ecosystem. Asus has Aura Sync, Gigabyte has RGB Fusion, MSI has Mystic Light, etc. I've got an Asus Strix motherboard so I knew I'd be doing most work through the Aura Sync software.

Next, check your other hardware. Most simple parts like fans and strips are compatible with all of these control methods and simply need to be plugged into your RGB header. However, some brands like Corsair or Logitech have their own specific control systems that don't like talking with your motherboard. One solution is to look for settings to relinquish control to the motherboard (eg, "enable full software control" on Corsair's iCue, with similar names on other platforms).

After getting every peripheral and component synced up, you can create your own effects or browse the internet for premade profiles with nifty effects and colors.

Remorse, missed opportunities, and planning for the future

Over the course of a month, my PC went from looking like absolute trash to being the toast of the town. But at what cost? In the end, I spent around $250 on this massive upgrade process, which is no small sum. After flipping my original PC, I ended up spending around $100 out of pocket for the experience, which is still a crazy amount for pretty lights in a college dorm.

I've also had some buyer's remorse. I grabbed the vanilla Hyper 212 Black, but I really should have just spent the extra $10 for the RGB variant. Additionally, just days after my Phanteks LED strip arrived, Phanteks announced and released a new Neon ARGB strip line. That's the single greatest improvement in RGB strips for this generation, for the same price as Phanteks's fairly average RGB strips. It was disappointing, sure, but these surprise announcements and intense buyer's remorse are just a fact of life in the PC building space.

Is RGB for everyone? Yes, unequivocally. Okay, not really, but you can have my RGB lights when you pry them from my blinking, technicolored hands. There are pros and cons, but even when you're ready to throw a bunch of lights into your PC, there are items that are easy to overlook. Does the software line up? Do you have the right headers on your motherboard? Is there room for all the extra cable management?

Even after all the strife and headaches encountered along the way, I am proud of the end result. With the right lights, you can rep your favorite sports/esports team on gameday, turn on full rainbow seizure mode to impress house guests, and even save energy by replacing the need for a desk lamp. Who doesn't want to do homework by the strobing rainbow light of a PC?

And the best part is that I now have +5 karma on PCPartPicker to show for it. Truly worth every penny.

It's the year 2019 and RGB lighting has completely taken over the PC hardware space. Nowadays, it's hard to find yourself a component that doesn't come with an RGB variant. It's a topic that's debated over and over again, but the sales numbers don't lie. Like it or not, disco party battlestations are here to stay. 

NZXT has been at the forefront of this movement for over six years now following the release of its original HUE lighting sytstem. In late 2015, the company released the HUE+, an industry first for smart addressable RGB lighting controlled by its CAM software. Now the company has unveiled its HUE 2 lighting ecosystem and we couldn't be more impressed.

The HUE 2 ecosystem is comprised of the main HUE 2 RGB lighting unit, the HUE 2 Ambient, HUE 2 Underglow, HUE 2 LED strips, HUE 2 Cable Comb and several other yet-to-be announced products. We've spent some time with all of the currently released products and its clear the company has made significant improvements since the HUE+.

Akin to the similarly named Phillips Hue lighting system, HUE 2 products communicate with each other seamlessly. NZXT's CAM software has come a very long way since the company's first "smart" products, and the breadth of easy to use lighting configurations and presets that effortlessly spill across the products proves this. We were most impressed with the HUE 2 Ambient. It's essentially a much more effective version of Logitech's G560 speakers, sampling colors from the edges of your monitor and creating a soft glow that extends the lighting outward.

NZXT actually wasn't the first company to come up with this idea. Lightpack has been doing this for a few years now, but we found NZXT's solution to be much more robust and cost effective for larger monitors. HUE 2 Ambient supports monitors ranging from 21-35 inches in size and is very easily configured through the CAM software. All it takes is a couple of minutes to calibrate the software with your LED placement behind the monitor and you never have to mess with it again.

For those that prefer custom or NZXT's preset lighting effects over the screen sampling, you can easily swap between traditional HUE 2 lighting and Ambient Mode in CAM. The great thing about the HUE 2 Ambient is that it's a standalone product which doesn't require the original HUE 2 Lighting unit to work. 

On the surface, it doesn't look too different from the HUE+ but the HUE 2 lighting unit features a few hardware improvements that make it compatible with the Gen 2 LED strips and accessories. While the LED strips aren't too different from their HUE+ predecessors, the HUE 2 Cable Comb is a completely new addition.

They may not be as flashy as Lian Li's fully RGB PSU cable, but the HUE 2 cable combs add a beautiful accent to your sleeved PSU cables or extensions. With 18 individually addressable LEDS to configure, the Cable Comb already produces enough light to brighten up your build quite a bit. Once you add the regular HUE 2 strips and the HUE 2 underglow to the equation, that's when the real party starts.

Out of the box, the HUE 2 lighting kit comes with four LED strips for a total of 40 individually addressable LEDs. When combined with the 18 LEDs from the Cable Comb accessory and 30 LEDs from the HUE 2 Underglow, the HUE 2 ecosystem produces a staggering amount of RGB lighting. They are all easily controlled through CAM, which is important as you're definitely going to need to tone things down a bit to prevent too many distractions while gaming.

There's already an excess of RGB going on with the HUE 2, but we would've liked to see a bigger improvement in the LED strips. The HUE+ strips already had 10-LEDs each, so we were expecting higher LED density strips to produce smoother and brighter lighting animations with the HUE 2. Perhaps this is something NZXT already plans to address with one of the unannounced products.

Whether you're a diehard RGB fan or someone that prefers a subtle touch of accent lighting, NZXT's HUE 2 ecosystem has something for everyone. It's definitely on the pricier side of things when you compare DIY options, but unless you're an expert on Arduino, we believe the HUE 2 is the quickest and easiest way to completely flood your battlestation with RGB goodness.

Have you heard, RGB lighting makes your PC run faster! Okay, that's not actually true, just as adding an underglow to your Civic won't make it zoom any quicker (Vin Diesel's gang might dispute that). RGB lighting can improve the aesthetics, though, and for DIY types, NZXT's Hue 2 is the best RGB LED lighting kit available. It's also now slightly improved with a new version 2 release.

Yes, we have reached a point where even RGB lighting is seeing generational upgrades. That's okay, because the Hue 2 is a really nice kit, if you're looking to add ambient RGB lighting to your setup. We reviewed the Hue 2 last August and found that it offered a good amount of lighting and was generally easy to install and configure.

The Hue 2 Ambient RGB Kit V2 is designed to be even easier to mount, courtesy of a stronger adhesive. NZXT said it upgraded the 3M LED strip backing tape with so that it is now thicker and stickier.

"It is more compatible with the different surfaces and textures of monitors on the market," NZXT says.

NZXT also replaced the 150mm corner connectors with ones that are L-shaped for the top-left and bottom-right. Until circular monitors become a thing (and hopefully they never will be), L-shaped connectors are the way to go.

The kits also now come with alcohol wipes. It's a good idea to wipe down the back of your monitor before applying an LED strip, and this will save you a trip to the store when you realize you're out of alcohol (the rubbing kind, that is).

NZXT's kits are still expensive—the press release pegs the price at $99.99, though on NZXT's website, the one that's in stock is listed for $109.99. There are two to choose from—one for 21-inch to 26-inch monitors and 34-inch to 35-inch ultrawide displays, and a separate kit for 26-inch to 32-inch monitors.

The kits are available now in the US. Buyers in Europe will be able to pick one up starting April 12.

RGB lighting is everywhere these days, and especially in computer cases, where it's easy to stick an LED strip or a bunch of RGB fans. Raidmax's new Galaxy chassis is no exception. However, it takes a slightly different approach, one that invites you to look into its soul.

Instead of sticking a bunch of LEDs on this thing and calling it a day, Raidmax inserted a "magic mirror" into the front panel to deliver an "optical illusion of unlimited lighting effects into a gloomy space."

What exactly makes it a magic mirror rather than a standard mirror? I'm not sure—maybe when you stare into its soul, it steals yours, and it's not really an optical illusion at all but the souls of mortals transformed into RGB lights. Yikes!

Raidmax calls it "vogue" but I'd call that downright evil, if that's in fact what's going on.

Beyond its soul-sucking capability masquerading as an optical illusion, the Galaxy is a mid-tower case measuring 423.6 x 191 x 408 mm. It can accommodate up to a standard ATX motherboard and has room for a CPU cooler up to 145mm high and a graphics card up to 255mm long.

There's also room to stuff three 2.5-inch solid state drives and a pair of 3.5-inch hard drives. You won't find an optical drive bay, though, as the entire front is dedicated to the magical mirror of souls.

On top, there's a USB 3.0 port and a USB 2.0 port, along with a couple of 3.5mm audio jacks (headphone and microphone), plus power and reset buttons.

Cooling looks to be a concern. I don't know if RGB souls run hot or cold, but because they occupy the entire front panel, there's no room for any intake fans. Raidmax also neglected to implement any fan mounts in the side, top, or bottom. The sole fan mount is in the back, which is occupied by a paltry 80mm fan.

I haven't tested this case, but I'd definitely be hesitant to fill it with high-end hardware with only a single 80mm exhaust fan. Maybe that's why it's so cheap—according to TechPowerUp, this is a sub-$50 case.

In a surprise announcement during a press conference today, Corsair revealed its innovative Capellix LEDs, a new way to attach LEDs to RGB components. The new method promises to give users a better RGB experience through higher density LEDs that are brighter and more efficient, and have a lower power consumption along with a longer life-span.

As explained during the press conference, traditional LEDs are mounted into a large SMD package, which requires a large surface mount. Basically, that limits the total surface area to which LEDs can be attached. The more limited the space, the less efficient and less bright the LEDs will be. With a partnership with Primax, Corsair developed a new manufacturing method that allows the miniature LED dies to be placed directly onto a PCB. The results speak for themselves.

The new Capellix LEDs are just 0.2mm cubed vs 2.8mm cubed in size, up to 60 percent brighter and up to 60% more efficient, with up to 40% lower power consumption and up to 35% longer life. But that's not even the half of it.

Corsair not only has plans to roll out its new Capellix LEDs to all its RGB components and peripherals, but it also announced that they will be a part of their new Dominator Platinum RGB memory, which features 12 individually addressable RGB LEDs per module and will be fully iCue compatible. 

Corsair plans to officially launch the Dominator Platinum RGB in February 2019. We'll have more information on other Corsair Capellix LED RGB components and peripherals as it becomes available.

At CES today, Elgato unveiled a new product aimed at helping streamers build high-quality video studios in their homes: the Elgato Key Light, a desk-mounted light that provides the kind of adjustable illumination needed for great looking video. 

The light is software controlled, with adjustable brightness up to 2,500 lumens (for reference, 100 watt-replacement LED bulbs are about 1400-1500 lumens) and a color temperature range of 2500K to 7000K. It's powered via a traditional wall outlet,  clamps to your desk (Elgato says you can stick it on the back of your desk and still push the desk all the way against a wall) and is easily adjustable to get your lighting setup just right. It's also compatible out of the box with Elgato's stream deck, convenient for streamers who've already integrated that controller into their setup.

Elgato says the light will output less heat than soft boxes, the type of lights traditionally used in video studios. The trade-off for the Key Light's great size and easy compatibility is price. Soft boxes can cost less than $50. The Key Light launches next week for $199. 

Corsair's software has come a long, long way in four years. Early versions of Corsair's software made customizing lighting for RGB keyboards a confusing, overly complicated process. And as Corsair was growing and branching out to different products, it started to get messy. Why did its smart power supplies use different software than its keyboards? Finally, that's all done with: everything's finally linked up in iCUE, the latest version of the Corsair Utility Engine, and controllable in a powerful and straightforward interface.

I got a short demo of iCUE at Corsair's suite at Computex 2018, and it's a vast improvement over the version of CUE I remember debuting a few years ago. Granted, CUE had already improved greatly since then, but iCUE is still a significant update. Almost every hardware company is chasing the same dream: put RGBs in everything, and make sure you can control all of them with the same software. But Corsair has the distinction of making more products than anyone this side of a giant like Asus, and is more component focused. The point is that if you're all about Corsair, you can control just about everything in your system using iCue. That includes: 

• Lighting on mice, keyboards, headsets, fans and coolers, and even RAM
• Fan and cooler speed, temperature modding etc.
• Mouse settings and keyboard macros
• Power supply monitoring and fan control

I especially like how drag-and-drop the interface is, and how peripherals are laid out with clear, large icons. The software gives you complexity if you want it, but is also pretty approachable if you just want to slap on a lighting preset and call it a day.

Corsair lighting and fan controllers make those customization options listed above more powerful, if you want everything integrated. I think most gamers likely have more of a hodgepodge build; maybe a Corsair case and power supply, but G.Skill RAM and a Razer keyboard and Logitech mouse. But when you buy new components, Corsair's software makes a compelling case for why you might want to stick with their gear, if you want all your RGBs to play nicely together or simply like your peripheral settings consolidated in one place instead of being spread out across half a dozen apps.

All of Corsair's future peripherals will support iCUE, and anything that supported CUE in the past should work as well. The same goes for the "i" series power supplies that used the old Link software. Corsair demoed iCue putting on a coordinated light show between fans and even its RGB-equipped RAM, which is pretty slick. For pre-programmed light routines, the software can compensate for RAM's slower reaction time and make everything look good in sequence.

Corsair also demonstrated the lighting changing in real time with an integration in Far Cry 5, an idea hardware companies have been trying to push for years without much success. I still don't think this will ever really take off, and unfortunately here the RAM's lighting isn't fast enough to react with the rest of the lights to what's happening on screen in real time.  

iCUE's available now, so if you're rocking the older version of Corsair's software, it's a good time to upgrade.

Have you ever been told you need to lighten up? Depending on your interpretation, you can do exactly that with Asus' new ROG Aura Terminal, a standalone RGB lighting control box that supports a whole bunch of LEDs.

It's a four-port controller, each of which supports up to 90 LEDs max, and a total of 210 LEDs throughout. The math doesn't add up there, so if utilizing all four channels, you can't have all of them beaming 90 LEDs.

What you can do, however, is mount LED strips to the back of your monitor for ambient lighting, and have it react to in-game events. Asus calls this Halo lighting, and along with the controller, unveiled it at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year.

"Perhaps the most compelling application for the Aura Terminal involves matching ambient lighting with on-screen gaming. Dubbed Halo, this effect uses four addressable RGB strips affixed to the back edges of your monitor. Special software detects colors displayed along the edges of the screen and changes the LEDs to match, creating a dynamic glow that reaches far beyond the boundaries of your monitor. The reactive lighting enhances immersion, especially in colorful games like Overwatch, elevating the Aura Terminal above conventional RGB controllers," Asus said at the time.

The controller plugs into your motherboard's USB 2.0 headers to interact with the company's Aura Sync RGB utility. It also requires either a 4-pin molex connector, or plugging into a wall socket by way of a 45W power brick.

Asus includes two 30cm and one 60cm ROG addressable RGB light strips, plus three extension cables, some stickers, a couple of cable ties, and various cables.

The ROG Aura Terminal is up for preorder at OverclockersUK for £69.95. It's not clear when it will be available in the US and for how much.

Updated 2/16/2017

Once you’ve put a little razzle-dazzle into your rig, it’s hard to go back. When we build PCs, we’re usually only thinking about one thing: gaming performance. Every so often we get fancy with watercooling or take pride in a compact build, but we don’t have the skills or ambitions of the incredible case modders who build amazing rigs for Computex every year. If you find those case mods as inspiring as we do, you might be wondering how to best start down the path of customizing your PC. RGB lighting is a great entry point, and theming your entire PC around a color scheme can be surprisingly fun.

RGB lighting your rig isn’t as simple as throwing a light strip into the case. Almost every component you choose for your PC has a part to play.

Case

For our example PC, we asked In-Win to send us the beautiful In-Win 805, which is a perfect candidate for RGB lighting thanks to its tempered glass. If you’re RGB lighting your PC, consideration #1 is having a great frame to show off that lighting. The 805’s glass is tinted enough to cut down on RGB glare and provide a smooth distribution of lighting around the interior of the case. It’s also very open and spacious, which is nice for custom builds (especially if you go down the route of a custom watercooling solution).

Here are the main considerations for picking a case to light up with LEDs:

• Case color: Theme your lights to match the exterior of the case. Black is easy to match with anything, while a red case like the NZXT Phantom 410 might look best with white lighting instead of more red. A white case interior will better reflect your RGB lighting, so consider that if you want brighter lighting.
• Side panel Window: A full glass panel like the In-Win 805’s is ideal. Glass requires more care than plastic, but makes for a classier final product. Make sure you like the shape of the window in the case you pick, and plan how you light the interior accordingly. A tinted glass or plastic panel will cut down on the glare from the lighting and provide a smoother, though darker, interior.
• PSU shroud: Smart lighting means hiding the components you don’t want people to see. Cases with a shroud for the power supply help keep cables and the boxy power supply out of sight.
• Cable management space: Like with the PSU shroud, having other places around the case to cram or tie off cables is a big benefit. Look for cases with space along the top rail where you can stash excess cable length, and you obviously want the bulk of your cables tied off completely out of sight around back.

Here are some cases we really like for showing off an RGB-lit PC: 

• In-Win 805 ($170 mid-tower ATX): One of our favorite tempered glass cases from In-Win, with enough space for an ATX build.
• In-Win 901 ($160, mini-ITX): A smaller (and much more affordable) version of In-Win’s gorgeous aluminum and glass full tower design.
• NZXT S340 Elite ($85, mid-tower ATX) - A new version of the S340 case with a tempered glass side panel. It has a nice splash of color with a red cable management bar inside. There's also a variant with a completely white interior, which is great for a bright RGB build.
• Lian Li PC-08 ($300 ATX, includes RGB LED lighting built-in): A unique cube design that looks absolutely gorgeous when RGB lit and watercooled.
• Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ($190 mid-tower ATX): This case comes with either tempered glass or plastic side panels.
• Corsair Crystal Series 570X RGB ($180, mid-tower ATX) - Corsair's new top-of-the-line tempered glass case with glass panels all around and RGB LED fans included. Your cable management game better be on point, but this can give you a stunning build.
• Corsair Carbide Clear 400C ($100, mid-tower ATX): A more budget friendly full window case with a nice door side panel and PSU shroud.

LED strips

While other components will all be helping accent your case, LED strips are going to be doing most of the hard work. You have a ton of options here. Do you want RGB strips that you can change with the press of a button on a remote? Do you run colored lighting or pure white for illumination? How do you attach them to your case?

We kept it super simple with our example build and used a single white Alchemy LED strip from Bitfenix. Some double-sided tape keeps it attached to the top of the case, where it’s out of sight, but illuminates the entire interior. We could’ve put another strip at the bottom of the window for more lighting, or along either side, but one gave us a nice, soft glow.

We have a guide to the best RGB LED lighting kits that gets into the right options for different kinds of builds. The most basic option, similar to our example above, is the DeepCool RGB 350, which comes with a pair of 12-inch RGB strips and a remote for controlling them for less than $20. The strips have magnets for easy mounting.

The go-to for smart RGB LED lighting is NZXT's Hue+ lighting kit, which comes with a control box you mount inside your PC and four RGB strips to go along with it. Extension kits can add more to the mix, and you can do a ton of customization with this kit. You can create extensive custom lighting effects, and since the RGBs are individually addressable, that gives you the option to have rainbow effects and other fanciness. If you don't mind the higher price, this will give you tons of control over how you light your case—or your entire desk, if you want to.

Motherboard

In the recent trend to make sure absolutely every PC component is outfitted with RGB LEDs, the major motherboard vendors have kitted out their boards with lighting. We built our example PC with the MSI Z170 Gaming Pro Carbon, which has a fairly subtle LED line tracing around the board and an RGB zone along its right edge. The color is configurable with MSI’s software. It’s a minor lighting element compared to an LED strip, but it does help to illuminate the small details of the motherboard surface. And motherboards are cool!

MSI, Asus, and Gigabyte have all embraced the LED lighting craze, so your options here are good. If you’re building an expensive X99 system, you can even get a motherboard with an LED power header for plugging those RGB LED strips directly into the motherboard. That’s a great way to unify everything around a single color scheme.

The newest round of Z270 motherboards for Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs are embracing the motherboard lighting trend, and recently motherboard makers have been changing their design language and color schemes a bit to freshen things up. It's a great time to pick up a new board that fits the look you want. Black is still the standard, but you now can choose colors like silver (or titanium, as they call it).

RAM

The RAM in our example build is some perfectly adequate Corsair DDR4. It’s a nice black that mostly disappears into the build. But you can add some RGB flash to your RAM, too. Avexir and Geil are two of the go-to brands for RGB-lit memory sticks. As with the case, remember that color coordination is important. Pick a color scheme and RAM that fits it.

The flashiest of the bunch are Avexir’s Raiden sticks, which have a flickering fluorescent-esque tube mounted on top. The more subdued Core sticks are lower profile and offer a nice, subtle glow. 

CPU coolers and fans

Yep, your cooler can join in the RGB party, too. For our build we used an NZXT Kraken cooler, which has an RGB LED built into its pump. The color of the LED was easily configurable with NZXT’s CAM software in Windows. Corsair’s line of liquid coolers mostly have RGB LEDs, too. Unless you go for a more specialized cooling setup, those are both great options, though we prefer the design of the Kraken. 

Plenty of other cooler companies make coolers outfitted with LEDs (Cooler Master, for example) but with single-color LEDs. Remember if you buy one of those, you’ll need to plan your color scheme around it.

Prefer air cooling? There are RGB air coolers, too. We recently tried out Phononic’s Hex 2.0 cooler, which has a side-mounted RGB logo controllable via software. Most other CPU air coolers we’ve seen don’t have lighting built-in, or are paired with a single-color LED fan, like this one from Deepcool.

LED fans are a cheap addition that can add a lot more light to your case, and they come in plenty of colors. We threw a simple red LED fan into our case, but you can also buy RGB LED models if you want to be able to customize. That’s much more expensive than single color LEDs, though. Our advice is to figure out the color scheme of your case first, then sort on Newegg by that color. Want a svelte purple and white setup? Grab some purple fans!

Now if you want to get real fancy, pair some of NZXT's Aer RGB fans with its Hue+ lighting kit. That will let you control and sync the lighting colors across your system. 

Graphics card

If you don’t plan carefully, a graphics card can be an obstacle to overcome. Nvidia’s reference card designs, for example, have lime green LEDs that do not pair well with a blue or red color scheme. Keep in mind the color of the LED on the GPU you own or plan to buy, and make sure your color scheme will work in harmony with it.

In the latest generation of graphics cards, with Nvidia’s GTX 1070 and 1080, several GPU models come outfitted with RGB LEDs. EVGA’s FTW 1070 and MSI’s Gaming X card are two examples. Those have LEDs you can control through software.

Keep in mind other GPUs outfitted with LED logos won’t necessarily give you that sort of control. The Asus Matrix 980 Ti in our example rig is a hell of a graphics card, but its LED display changes colors based on the GPU load, cycling through blue, yellow, green and red. No color scheme you concoct for your PC will pair well with all of those colors, so it’s the kind of minor imperfection you’ll have to live with or plan around.

Wrapping up

If you’re diving into RGB lighting for the first time, look online for inspiration. See what colors work well together. Aim for something simple to start—pair a red or blue with white and you really can’t go wrong.

Later on you can get into the complicated stuff. Play around with case modding with custom painting. You can paint LEDs with glass paint to adjust their color. Outfit a shielded motherboard with custom LEDs. Match the colors of a closed loop watercooling setup with your LEDs. Just have fun—even if your PC mostly sits under your desk and runs games, you can still take pride in its appearance. 

Remember Microsoft making some noises about the Xbox One's cloud-rendering power? To somewhat offset the fact they're jamming a weaker GPU into their gaming slab than Sony is with the PlayStation 4, Microsoft is employing 300,000 servers to bolster processing of “latency-insensitive computation”. And now Nvidia has just announced CloudLight , something which sounds more than a little bit similar.

Nvidia released a technical report on CloudLight on their website outlining what it could mean for games. They call it a system “for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D applications on a user's local device.” In practice, this means Nvidia can use GeForce GRID servers to compute a game engine's global illumination to ease the load on your gaming device of choice.

And that seems to be key here - CloudLight is being designed to run across both tablet, laptop and desktop gaming rig, and adapt the way it works according to the device you're using. A gaming rig, for example, would use photons to represent global illumination, which is a more hardware-intensive than the irradiance maps Nvidia use for tablets. Both would still utilise cloud-based computing to aid the lighting of a level, but the higher quality option would require a higher-powered PC.

Lighting is a useful process to move to the cloud, because lighting lag is far less noticeable than other game elements like sound, or physics. In Nvidia's video presentation they show the impact of latency on moving light sources, and it's not until they get above the 500ms mark that lag becomes an issue.

“We found, empirically, that only coarse synchronisation between direct and indirect light is necessary and even latencies from an aggressively distributed Cloud architecture can be acceptable,” the technical report states.

One of the big worries about this sort of tech is what happens when our connection to the cloud drops out, as it inevitably will - I'm looking at you [Dave's ISP redacted]. Nvidia claims that as indirect illumination is view-independent, it's robust enough to stand up against short network outages. “In the worst case,” the report claims, “the last known illumination is reused until connectivity is restored, which is no worse than the pre-baked illumination found in many game engines today.”

It sounds like a rather neat way for Nvidia to get around their current hardware's limitations when it comes to processing global illumination, especially for rigs with weaker graphics hardware. But quite what it's going to be like for developers to code for - and whether those Nvidia cloud services will still be serving your games a few years down the line - is still up for debate.

I've got my own questions for Nvidia about this, but what would you like to know about CloudLight?

As a fully paid up member of the glasses-wearing wearing gamers' club, anything that will allow me to stare at a computer monitor for longer before eye-strain kicks in sounds like a good thing. Which is why I'll be reviewing Antec's new soundscience halo 6 LED bias lighting kit as soon as I can get one in.

The halo 6 is a USB powered strip of six LED lights which stick to the back of your monitor and brightness depending on what's going on on screen. The idea is that by filling your peripheral vision with ambient light, it's easier to focus on the on screen activity, and your perception of colour is improved.

The principle is nothing new - Philips have been doing this with their Ambilight TVs for a long time now, and developed the amBX PC gaming kits which work to bathe a whole room in colour*. Antec's system is different in that the light is constantly white, but my experience of these has been generally positive although not something I'm sure I'd pay for.

Antec, however, has directly addressed this last problem. The halo 6 is listed as being available for £10, which means it could make a neat stocking filler if it works.

* In case you're wondering, amBX was spun off as a separate company in 2008, with most of the Philips team that developed it joining the new company. I've not actually spoken to them since, but as far as I know there haven't been any new products released since then.