Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today I have a very special product for you guys it is the NZXT hue plus here it is look at that what is a hue plus Kyle well you can see right here it says advanced PC illumination and they got a fancy picture with an NZXT cooler and a geforce card over there so what is this thing well you can see what it does right here in fact I've got a little bit of a different format for today's video I just thought it would work given the walkthrough that we're about to take so here is the LED setup here's the hue plus in action you can see the unit is actually installed right there next to my SSD so SSD Q + right there but the white LED on it and then I've got three LED strips right now connected circulating the entirety of this H 440 case right here and it's it's just going wild and I've got the software right here you can see on the screen we're going to be going through and taking a step by step look at what exactly this software and device features and kind of how you can change and customize the look to match your aesthetic for your your particular system now exactly what is this by definition it's an LED strip kit that does come included with for the four LED strips so you can buy it for about 60 bucks 60 USD with the included four strips or you can pay a little bit extra to get the one that has all eight strips this does support only up to eight total which i think is enough for pretty much any case for the most part but this is this particular one came with four so I only was able to fit three in this case which is a you know a fairly decent sized mid-tower so I think you'll be fine unless you're dealing with a super large you know case labs case or something like that with getting the four LED strip version but essentially you get four LED strips with this that are RGB capable and as you can see definitely RGB we're not we're not talking about like a bit phoenix alchemy strip that you know does red green blue orange or purple or wieck's and you got to kind of just pick which one you want to go with and you're stuck with that color for infinity and beyond but the this is actually the main highlight I mean beyond the scope of all the cool features and LED effects of this thing is able to achieve I just think the fact that we're seeing now this mainstream RGB strip kit arrived on the market is is a huge huge leap forward because I'm sick and tired of having to swap out LED strips because I decide to change the look of a particular system it also limits the functionality of that strip you know I've got it I've got three LED strips that in my in my box back here that are that are red and I can only use them when I'm going with a you know red or you know somewhat red color scheme of a build which is very limiting so this kind of allows you to reuse it and repurpose it for different builds in the future older builds that you know or your current bill that you want to change the look of you know every every so often however often it may be but I'm getting a little bit off-topic here I think you've got a pretty good idea of what this thing is we're going to get into what it can do in just a moment but first I want to talk about the actual unit itself because it's not just the LED strips the hue plus unit is a two and a half inch form factor more or less a unit that is kind of the heart of this product that everything revolves around so as you can see from this image you can actually mount it in pretty much any space in a chassis where you could otherwise mount a two and a half inch drive now I say almost any space because it is quite a bit thicker than a regular seven millimeter SSD it's actually almost more than twice the thickness of the seven millimeter m5 Pro here so that kind of limits you as to where exactly you can fit it and in most places it should be fine in any given chassis but for example a lot of cases these days are allowing two and a half inch drive mounts behind the motherboard tray so support for that where you've kind of got a very limited height clearance in terms of you know fitting the side panel on with all the cable management and whatnot it makes it limiting and I don't know if this would be a really good size to fit behind the motherboard tray I think it's a little oversized for that so maybe in a future revision I would like to see this slimmed down quite a bit NZXT if you're watching make it the size of an SSD next time or or get it a little bit closer to that so we really have some more flexibility and customizability of where we want to mount it we can get more creative with it and the places we want to fit it inside of our case especially mini ITX or small form-factor users are not always going to have as much clearance as you otherwise would in the case such as the h4 40 here additionally the unit does come in a kind of two-tone style it is half matte and half glossy I'm not a huge fan of the gloss but I'm okay with it being half glossy especially since it's in this case literally towards the back end you can't really see it as much I'm not a glossy fan whether it's you know the bezel of a monitor the screen itself or on any product that's meant to be showcased I just think it looks a little bit tacky but here they've actually managed to pull it off and it looks quite nice especially since this thing is really going to shine during the night time or when it's a dimly lit environment and you're not going to have too much glare or reflection on that glossy surface anyway so it's not too big of an issue I do think the unit looks pretty stylish so I'm not going to dock it for anything there I think it looks good enough also you'll notice that the white LED I've been talking about now that's just to indicate that it is in your case I shouldn't even say that it's an indication it's a power LED because this thing actually stays on even when your system is completely powered off I mean it'll even stay on when you unplug the AC power cord from the computer now I'm just kidding it doesn't do that that would be terrifying but yeah you can turn the system off completely and the white LED stays on which some people might not mind at all some people might hate it so that's just something to be aware of especially if you're going to have it on display in your side panel window coming bleeding through your side panel window as is the case right here now what I thought was really odd and kind of interesting and a little bit disappointing quite frankly is that you can't actually turn the LED off at all whether it's you know a switch on the back or something or you're within the software it just has to stay on but even more than that is that you can't change the color of it it's just fixed at in that white color so I thought that was kind of a disappointment just because this is really a product that revolves around tailoring the look and the customized feel of your system and I just felt since you can do all these fancy things with the LED strips themselves in terms of you know LED effects and whatnot I thought you know it would just make sense for you to be able to customize the white LED there but unfortunately that's not the case hopefully again in a two or three point Oh model that later down the line we see some adjustability for that now on the back of the unit itself you do get a few ports including a DC power port that does connect to a molex power cable from your power supply they do give you they do include all of the necessary plugs and cables to get this thing up and working you know to power it on that comes with a DC to molex adapter it is 5 volts you just plug it in you're pretty much ready to go it also has a mini USB ports that connects leads to your motherboard a USB 2.0 port on your motherboard and that's just to allow it to communicate with the cam software which is NZXT s in-house software that controls this whole system and then finally on the back of the unit you get to channel ports each of these channels are capable of hosting up to 4 LED strips giving you support for a total of 8 LED strips altogether why don't we talk about the LED strips themselves because there's been a lot of questions in regards to how they mount to the case and things like that these ones in particular they are magnetic and adhesive they are both so you get the three 3m backing adhesive that you can peel off and stick it pretty much to any case regardless of the material and then you also got built you also have built in magnets for steel cases obviously this isn't going to work on aluminum but about the magnets I think the the magnets are a bit weak they're on the weaker side they do work they are functional but something is a slight as the weight or the angle of the channel connector that the LED strip actually connects to that can drag the the magnet away from the case it can pull the strip down even the connectors themselves for the LED strips I wish there was a magnet inside of those it's kind of just hanging there unless you have some way to adhere it to the side panel or the back of your case or the front of your case wherever you're mounting it BitFenix does this really well they have built-in magnets into their alchemy 2.0 strips their magnetic line of LED strips which works out beautifully and I think NZXT could take a page out of the bit phoenixes book in terms of just finding a way to secure these these cables down a bit more so that that would be my one critique there but that's pretty much all I have to say about the LED strips again we're going to talk about how they look later on so now let's make our way over to the NZXT cam software which is really the driving force or the beating heart of this device and what really makes it tick so here it is right here this window above my head the first thing I noticed is that is that the window itself is not resizable it's pretty much at this fixed size which i think is really annoying because there's a lot of information here a lot of good information you know especially when you're trying to configure your LEDs I keep having to like scroll up and down to you know look at certain settings or just certain things and it would have just been easier if they'd allow you to just stretch out the window just down a couple just a few pixels more and it would have been ace but unfortunately that's not the case that being said there are certain things about this software that I do like it is very functional it's smooth it does lag every now and then when you're just when you're adjusting certain settings for example when you hit Save Changes sometimes the the button doesn't turn gray right away making you think that you haven't actually clicked it nor does the color picker always now of course now that everyone's watching it is completely flawless and there's no lag whatsoever but I did experience a little bit of slowdown from time to time when I first started using it nothing detrimental though so that's good now let's take a look at the first kind of the homepage of the the cam software if you will this is kind of just a comprehensive at a glance look for your system stats things like your CPU and GPU temps and load percentages and you can also have you also have an advanced menu here where you can look at your CPU each core individually if you want and it gives you mins and Max temperatures which is nice GPU same deal and you get motherboard Ram hard drive I'm not going to go into all this stuff because it's really not the bread and butter of the software but it is something to be aware of it is a nice feature and you can even pop out this window which is much better I like this much better because you can actually extend it well I'm my face my my body and face are blocking it but you can kind of I didn't really plan this out well did I but look you've got all these different stats this is much more akin to Hardware monitor because you can resize it even the layout is very similar I also really like that there's a reset stats button that's very crucial for me when I'm benchmarking is to be able to just leave the software open and just reset the stats anytime I run a new benchmark instead of having to close it out and open it again gets really annoying and frustrating so this actually makes it a very viable solution or alternative I should say to something like hardware monitor especially because as we're going to take a look at later you can actually sync the led colors to the GPU or CPU temperatures in your chassis so because of that you are going to sometimes need want to look at you know the temperatures of your particular components so it's a good thing that they've made it easy here for someone who might not be running hardware monitor or you know who doesn't know about it so everything is already here you don't have to go ahead and download a new monitoring app if you're gonna be taking advantage of those led effects moving on you've got specs here in case you forgot what your system was built with I guess you know just gives you a look at that why not they've included it there for you also some advanced information here again more nitty-gritty details I mean tells you the max TDP of your video card so yeah you get specs specs specs are good now moving on to the FPS tab over here you do get a bunch of overlay settings to choose from this is very similar to MSI Afterburner for those of you who are familiar with it it just displays a bunch of different information in the corner of your screen while you're either gaming or benchmarking so you do have FPS things like average FPS CPU and GPU temps your memory usage very useful information here and you can also change the font color depending on the scene or the background of what you're going to be testing or gaming on just to make sure that it's legible and visible you can also change the font you can also change the overlay position to different corners of the screen let me change this to something a little bit more visible so you can kind of see it move around so this is also great if you've got a particular game where there's a HUD or there's a mini-map in the corner of your screen it's always in the bottom right so obviously you want to switch it up so that it's not covering there's no interference there also get some shortcut keys which you can change just to toggle the overlay on and off which is very handy indeed all right folks now this is where things get all fun and colorful and stuff because we're finally going to take a look at how each of these LED strips can be configured in terms of the different lighting effects that they're able to achieve inside of the can of software so taking a look right here under our hue tab you can see we've got our two channels which are each again capable of hosting up to four LED strips and as I mentioned before I've got two of them I've got three connected in the system total two of which are on channel one and then I've got a third one on channel two so basically the check boxes allow you to edit that particular channel of LED strips so if you have one of them selected then any kind of changes you make under the the color wheel or under the fixed presets here are going to be applied to that channel only if you check both channels then anything that you change down here is going to be applied to both of them so you don't actually have to duplicate manually just takes care of it automatically which is nice so I'm just going to be doing I'm going to check both channels just to make things simple let's go ahead and take a look at our preset so these are all the different presets that you're able to configure in the software starting with fixed which is pretty self-explanatory you can see I've got a fixed color right here which is blue now forgive the different color temperature of the camera it does look a bit purple here on OBS but rest assured I can tell you right now I'm looking at with my own eyes it is very blue and in fact the color picker here in the software is very true to what the LED color displays which is something that I very much appreciate because I've dealt with a lot of different software and other LED products where you know you go in the color picker like I want this shade of red and then it's like it's like a hideous orange or like what that's not that's not the color I picked at all you don't get that so much at all with this device I'm sure you could find a few geez motorcycle I'm sure you could find a few colors in there of course it's probably not perfect where you know it doesn't really match quite as nicely but for the most part I didn't run into too many issues on that front now moving on to our breathing effect still nothing earth-shattering here we're all pretty familiar with this this look so again it just you pick a color and all of a sudden it kind of dims in and out from going all the way black to the brightest setting of a particular color now you can adjust the speed of this I'm going to go ahead you can go from right now was on normal so you can go from slowest to slow normal faster fastest let's do it at its fastest speed all right so that's about as fast as you can go now obviously there's not as much granular control here as in something like the k70 RGB software right you can't make it go at pretty much any speed you want in terms of like the exact millisecond it is it is a lot of it's as pre fixed but that's okay because I still feel like there's enough customizability here to feel like you're not too limited so I'm happy with this so far also a really cool thing that you can do with breathing is add another color look at that add another color here let's go with a red boom Save Changes so now it kind of breathes between those two colors but wait you can add a third color whoa and a fourth this is getting crazy what my acting is on point today by the way so look you've got all these different colors that you can add I actually haven't even tested how many colors you can do is it is it eight I think it's eight yes you can do up to eight different colors which is enough for me and then let's go ahead and save changes whoa I had to go ahead and cycle through all those first before it went went through it and applied the the effect but there you go now it's going to cycle through all eight custom colors that I selected and NZXT sexually made this pretty easy for you to switch around let's say you want to keep the the selected eight colors that you have but you want to change the order of them you can just go ahead let's say I want the red to go at the bottom you've got these little up-and-down arrows which you can just go ahead and click and easily move that color to the eighth spot and then just go ahead and update the changes and you'll see that the eighth color will be red this time around obviously it switches place with the other LED and that's pretty much it for breathing let's move on to fading fading same deal kind of like breathing except instead of going from super bright to all the way black and then to a different color entirely it just kind of transitions it does a cross dissolve if you will editor's will know this term between the different colors so I've got our red green and blue here what better colors than RGB we're going to go ahead and I'm just going to make this on fast because I feel like that just allows you to see the effect happen a bit quicker the thing I want to say about performance is that these LEDs are good they are very saturated they give off a really rich color and very accurate color as I was saying you pretty much pick anything from the color spectrum and you're good to go in terms of accuracy the one shortcoming that I would say that I found in this in these LED strips is that they could be a bit brighter and the reason why I say that is because even with these three strips I feel like it's just bright enough I would have to add a fourth or maybe even a fifth LED strip to feel like it was really bright and intense like the BitFenix strips I will say are brighter than these ones or at least they seem that way and okay Kyle well you can actually install up to eight LED strips so why does that matter well it matters because first off you have to buy more LED strips it's going to cost you more money to get that that level of brightness that you want and also not every case is going to be able to house up to eight LED strips you might be dealing with a smaller form factor case or even this mid Tower which can only really fit three of them comfortably and then you're kind of limited in terms of brightness on that and so there is no brightness adjustment inside of the software this is especially important if you're dealing with a side panel window that's tinted for example you might want to have a brighter LED be cut to make up for that tint on your side panel window so I'm just looking at for everyone just just so you know again it's not a deal breaker I wouldn't say that they're too dim I just I'm saying that it would have been a plus had they made them a little bit brighter that's that's pretty much how I feel about that but that's not to say that they are not super rich and saturated and they do have a beautiful color to them I just would have liked to see a bit more intensity overall moving on to the marquee effect this is again I have to delete some of these profiles I also wish that it was easier to delete whole profiles at once because you can see here I've got to delete each of them one at a time it would be great if you could drop down and then like check check check you know and then you know group delete all of them or however many you need instead of doing it one by one a little side note there so I'm dealing with this custom profile marquee is essentially a the marquee effect it gives you a backlight color to choose from so I'm going to go ahead and save this one so you can see here I've got this teal color as my backlight color which is a fixed color that just stays on all the time and then you've got your marquee color which essentially is the traveling color it's the LED that travels across your strips and it kind of gives a moving or motion effect as you can see here from the image now I've got hot pink or magenta going across the teal backlight and you can go ahead and switch this up if you want comet I'm not sure exactly what comet does I think comet just makes it a bit more oh it makes it more like Tralee and so see how there's a bit of hardness with the magenta as it passes by there's not much fading I should say the comment gives you a bit more of a fade as it goes across the the backlight which i think is a nice effect you can also change the LED group size I've got it maxed out right now to 10 so 10 magenta LEDs pass at a time so that kind of gives you a longer comet if you will or a longer trail you can reduce that all the way down to two and you can see here it's very minimal now it's a very small little dinky marquee color that's going across and you can also again change the desired level of speed now I will say that when you go when you go below slower than normal let's say you're on slow or slowest setting in terms of speed it does start to look a bit choppy because you can actually see the LEDs switching colors as you can see here it kind of gives a more flickering effect it doesn't look as smooth for certain for certain LED effects with the fading in the breathing that's the slow the slowness is perfectly fine it's smooth and it transitions from color to color just fine but when it comes to the more key setting it can look a little bit choppy just depending on your preference it's good to note but there you go now wouldn't it be nice if you could actually add more colors to the SmartKey effect well yes you can speaking of which the covering or key effect allows you to do that so we've got two two of them here by default to blue and green you can add another one simply by clicking it just like we did with the with the fading effect I'm just going to do six colors here by the way to change a color you simply click on the slot that you want and then click on a color you want alright so I'm going to go ahead and save changes and let's see what happens here again it's just like the marquee tool or the marquee tool thing in Photoshop here it's just like the marquee effect except it gives you more colors it gives you more flexibility but how many colors you can include again you still get speed adjustment and direction I forgot to mention direction you do get direction with marquee as well so you can go forward or backwards you can see right now it's going forwards the LED tracing is going in one direction now I can go ahead and select backwards and then all of a sudden the lights are going in the opposite direction so you can really get pretty detailed with what you want here but that's pretty much going to cover it for the covering marquee effect there's not too much else to say about that oh also I did want to point out I don't even see this or I didn't even remember to talk about this but you do get the RGB code and hexadecimal code option if you know exactly the hexadecimal you know code that you want to put in it's a six digit code that corresponds to a particular color and for that you know the one I just typed in is this ugly blackish red which no one would ever use but if you know your hexadecimal code you can just punch it in or if you know the RGB the three numeric value code that's just an easy way to fully customize the look of your of your kit here now moving on to the pulse effect this is very similar to the breathing effect in that it you know fades to black but instead of fading back up to the next color it actually just jumps off jumps back on instantly like a pulse for example so it's a bit more jarring it looks a bit more aggressive if you will but there it is you can also add additional colors right now I've got just white enabled I'm going to go ahead and add in a purple some blue and a green and a yellow and Save Changes now you can see pretty much like the breathing effect but a bit more of an abrupt transition to the next color it just cycles through those four colors I kind of picked Easter colors that's kind of funny and again you can adjust the speed here as well we'll go fastest that's the fastest you can make it voila pulse pulse everyone moving onto the spectrum effect this is probably one of the coolest LED effects that you can make with this device in my opinion it's very similar to the covering Marquis effect in fact you can actually replicate this I'm pretty sure with the with the covering Marquis effect except the spectrum wave effect just already includes every or you know allegedly every color on the spectrum with with the effect so it's it's just a wave it goes through cycles through all the colors it's really smooth the transition is just beautiful it is much nicer looking in person than the video does it justice it's just a really beautiful effect obviously again with the spectrum wave effect there is no tuning to be done it just kind of takes care of itself but if you want to do that you just want to rainbow everything out you got your you know your Corsair RGB keyboard that's all rainbow effect rainbow wave doubt and now you can have your system do the same thing with with the software here lastly you've got alternating this is the last preset that we're going to go over and it's it's pretty self-explanatory again you can alternate between two different colors just like that you can change the LED group size let's go to 10 and you can see it's a bit more flashy oh this gives me an idea bad boys bad boys what you're gonna do what you're gonna do when they come for you bad boys bad boys get it it's like a siren I don't know I'm done I've been alone for too long in this room so that's pretty much all I have to say about those presets so now we're going to take a look at our smart LED effects now as I mentioned earlier in the video you can actually synchronize the color of your LED strips to a given temperature threshold of your CPU or your GPU you can even change the LED color based on your fps but unfortunately I was unable to get that to work with the only game I have installed on this system which is rock League but I'm sure it works just the same I have tested both the CPU and GPU temperature modes and they work perfectly well they do function exactly the same though so I'm only going to show you the GPU temperature one you can see right here you've got these temperature zone colors so you've got a corresponding color for every temperature threshold for the GPU here so the cooler it gets the the bluer the the LEDs groups LED strips the Streep's strips get and then the wor work the the chip gets the redder or hotter the LED color and of course you can adjust all of this you know you can make it turn green if it's if it's super cool or whatever what have you actually if you see right now you can see that the the LED color is a bit more on the purpley magenta side which means we're residing right about you know anywhere from 50 to 60 obviously we're not at 70 degrees yet but right here it says we're at 58 and that's right about where we see ourselves on this color zone but we're going to go ahead and fire up Unigine Heaven 4.0 and see if we can put a load on it and then we're just going to see if the LEDs do in fact change color as the temperature of the chip inside of this 390x warms up to that threshold let's go ahead and see it looks like it already changed so we're fast approaching 70 degrees Celsius so close in fact that we are seeing a very red hue now with the LED strip so that's basically how that whole ordeal works um I was a bit I mean I guess there could have been more smoothness in the transitioning of colors it kind of just seems like it just hops from one color to the next as soon as it hits that temperature threshold in my head I was kind of expecting the colors to seamlessly transition from one to another very much like the very much like the fading effect that we saw earlier but instead it kind of just you know abruptly changes to the next color which doesn't look as cool in my opinion but it does offer a nice at-a-glance indication of how hot your systems running so very cool effect nonetheless and I think that's pretty much all I have to say about the smart custom profiles now moving on to the custom tab here this is where things can get really custom what you can do here under this tab is you can adjust each individual led and make them whatever color you damn well please so for example you can change each one one by one let's say you know you want your first LED on each strip to be red you want the second one to be purple and then the third LED to be blue now you notice that when I click on one LED from channel one it automatically selects the corresponding LED from channel two to strip as well however it does not select the corresponding LED on the second strip and channel one so you have to do that manually by holding ctrl and selecting it just like that and then you can go ahead and make the adjustment to all those LEDs which I mean is a bit of an inconvenience but it's it's it's nothing too horrible I suppose so let me just go ahead and finish changing the colors so I'm on the fixed mode right now I'm going to go ahead and save changes and now you can see my crazy ugly effed up color scheme that I've just implemented into the chassis looks very horrible and hideous you can also do a breathing effect so I'm going to just leave these same LED colors here breathing effect Save Changes and that basically just does the same thing except it breeds now and you can change the speed although it doesn't allow you to go very fast you can only go slowest slow or normal it's already pretty slow on normal so I'm curious as to why they didn't allow you to go any faster than that but you do get pretty much uncompromised customizability and flexibility here in terms of what colors you can you can paint your system with this effect and finally our last LED effect tab that we have here is audio now you can see it says it's in beta so I'm not going to knock it for not functioning all that well because it doesn't it's really probably my least favorite feature as it stands right now now that's not to say that with a patch update they could fix some of the issues but what I found is that it just doesn't work as seamlessly as I would like it to by the way I should probably explain what this is it synchronizes the LED colors and the pulse of your LED strips with music or audio coming from your your desktop environment so if your watching a YouTube video or you're playing music from Spotify you can sync it up and kind of give like an EQ effect if you will however in the beta as it stands it does not give off that EQ that really cool EQ vibe where things are you know going perfectly in sync with the music it just seems kind of weak and I do have some b-roll shots that'll overlay so you can get an example of that but you probably also want to hear the audio that was overlaid while while that LED effect was going on so I'm going to shut up for a second you can go ahead and check it out and have a listen to see what it how it performs so yeah it's not the best it's it's not quite as tight as I would like it to be nor is it as precise or accurate again I'm not going to knock them for it because it's in beta but I really hope that they do fix that because that's one thing that I still feel hasn't been perfected when it comes to LEDs inch a C's is being able to sync it very fluidly with your with your desktop audio which if it the day that it actually works perfectly it's going to be great because I think that's a really cool effect that again hasn't been mastered yet but I think those are all the things did I want to say anything about the settings um no these are just you know email password settings and things like that that's pretty much all guys I think that concludes this video what are my overall thoughts on the hue plus I should probably sum up with the conclusion instead of just closing up the video this is by far not a perfect product I pointed out a lot of things here today that might make it seem at first that I'm not thoroughly impressed by it but don't let that fool you because even though it's not perfect I am it kind of in love with this thing because it's just it's really what I've been looking for in terms of LED functionality for a system where I don't have to take out or rip out the existing LEDs granted yes you do have magnetic strips now from BitFenix that doesn't get adhesive mess all over the place and can be easily reusable but you're still limited to that single color that single color of that strip which is just incredibly limiting and and it's just fixed as well it's just a fixed boring single color I shouldn't say it's boring it's just them it's just limiting and now with with this product with this device you can do a lot more and spend spend a lot of time really tweaking and kind of tuning the look and feel of your system just really gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of customization which I very much appreciate and I would recommend it apart from all its flaws I think it's a good product and I've definitely seen worse software out there then then then NZXT scam but that's pretty much gonna wrap it up for now guys thank you all so much for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I will see you guys in the next video you