Gadgetory

what's up fans welcome back to Pauls hardware today's video is called as a trouble with RGB LEDs and if you think the trouble with RGB LEDs is that they exist at all then this video is probably not for you because I'm not going to be saying no one should have our GB LEDs in fact I'm going to be advocating for them to some degree but also advocating having the right and proper amount of control over them so for that purpose I have some brief demos here to show you I'm going to explain a little bit more fundamentally how RGB LEDs actually work how you can get the best a variety of different colors out of them by using motherboard software control or an actual controller that might be included within RGB LED kits and then finally a feature that I believe to my knowledge so far is exclusive to gigabyte boards with this current round of G 270 stuff that's come out which is the addition of a fifth pin connection for the RGB LED strips themselves which gives you the ability to do not just RGB but RGB W including a specific channel just for white or RGB UV using that other specific channel for UV light I'm not a big fan of UV lighting but some people are what I do like is being able to get the actual pure white out of the RGB LEDs because often when you try to take motherboard or an RGB LED and set it to White's you get more of a bluish tone because what it's actually doing is using the three diodes that's what LED stands for is light emitting diode and every RGB LED has three of them at least if it's RGB one is red one is green one is blue so for a more precise explanation of how these RGB LEDs work why don't I just plug this one in right here basically you have a 12 volt connection and LEDs can operate on either 12 volts or 5 volts so double check a lot of most of the motherboards that have headers on them like this gigabyte z170 X gaming 7 or or z170 X gaming 7 actually has the pin outs on the motherboard and 12 volt connection some of the kits that you might buy off of eBay or something like that might be 5 volts so do double check that now each actual light that's on the strip and they're spaced out fairly evenly that's referred to as a 50/50 LED specifically referring to the size which is five millimeters by five millimeters and then each light here actually has three diodes within it each of those diodes receives a signal coming down the cable and that's why there's three other plugs besides the actual 12-volt signal coming through and then the three connections provide data that tells each little diode how bright to be so you have actually 256 levels of brightness from 0 to 255 and that is because the way computers primarily works is communicating via bytes a byte is eight bits so if you've ever adjusted color using a computer then you might have been presented with something like the color wheel the gigabyte has provided here in the RGB fusion software now the color wheel allows you to visually just choose which color you want anything to be but if you look at the RGB numbers there you'll notice that there is a number from 0 to 1 0 to 255 on each one so again 256 different values that that can be and by providing a different level of brightness to the red the green and the blue outputs those actual diodes on the LED strip will be brighter or darker combine those all together and you will end up with the color so for instance if we want it all blue we can have something like that which is 0 0 255 if we want it all red kind of the same thing as 255 0 0 all green 0 255 0 now you can actually do a little bit of math here and figure out why these all are as they should be because because computers typically communicate in bytes a byte is 8 bits and each bit can have two states that it can be at a 0 or 1 so if you take 2 to the 8th power indicating each of those separate states that each bit in a byte can be you end up with 256 and if you've ever used computers before you probably do this number all the time because it is free complete frequently used as a power of 2 so going back over to our RGB software here each of those a single byte of data can be can be transmitted to tell each diode what color it should be and what brightness I'm sorry not what color it should be but what bright message should be right now what you might be seeing if you're at least looking at me and what I'm holding up here is the LED strip which is blue and then the motherboard over here which is actually green so here's just an example of a little bit of a snafu that you can get into when you're connecting RGB LED strips which is it's not standardized you have again our G and B but those are sometimes switched flip-flopped around it's not necessarily going to cause a huge problem or fire anything if they get switched although the 12 volts is of course very important make sure the 12 volt always goes into the 12 volt plug but it just means that the motherboard is trying to say hey make it green but it's got green and blue switched around so it ends up being blue the way you can combat this is actually via adapters such as this one that ships with cable mod LEDs that are made to work with ASUS motherboards and this actually flips a couple of the wire leads in there so that the motherboards output corresponds with the input that's being expected by the LED strip now these new LED strips from cable mod actually has five connection points again one for the 12 volt that's just providing power and an RGB and W and that simply coming out there controls the other LED and you actually might notice here these are completely different LEDs there's actually two 5050 LEDs on the strips that are side-by-side one is our G B with three diodes in it and one is just a single strong white LED which only does white because you may have noticed if you've ever done anything with the RGB LED boards in the past that when you try to represent all whites which I will attempt to do here very briefly like so you notice it's not the same color in fact this has potentially a little bit of a blue tint or maybe even a little bit of a green tint depending on how colorblind you may or may not be and it just doesn't look as clean or as bright as it should so for that reason you can get these strips which are RGB W and then the software actually at least in the Advanced section four gigabytes RGB fusion software here allows you to go down here and individually control just the header that's coming out so one thing you can do here is actually calibrated which is pretty useful if you don't have that little adapter you can tell it that no the center one should be blue and this one should be green so flip flop those around if you're not getting the right color out of your connected RGB strip that the motherboard is trying to say but then here you can also tell it to enable the white LED as well which I have turned on you can disable the white LED so it's just only going to use the RGB ones if you want more consistent with consistency like for example with our motherboard here also has RGB LEDs on it but no white one so if we wanted everything to match up there a little bit more clearly we could or you can so I'll just do the white or UV only which is nice if you want have the versatility is it turn off all the RGB ones but keep the white ones on just to have you know if you want a Christmas time you know white Christmas theme or something like that you have that flexibility to be able to do that and one other thing I noticed as I was setting up for this is that you can actually take an RGB LED strip here and you can connect it up to just the four pins on the end of this five pin RGB + W strip and as long as I get that correct you can actually extend that a little bit now most RGB strips are going to have a limitation on how many of these you can actually baby chain activities I believe the cable mod strips here are limited to 3 meters in total so bear that in mind you can't infinitely connect these up but it does give you that option however one caveat here that I should point out is that again if you have flipped values like right now it's trying to be green but this one has the green and the blue flip-flop so it's blue instead so it's not always going to work 100% but I did think that was kind of fun that you can connect up vocally stuff they're getting back to the main point of this video what is the actual trouble with LEDs that I'm talking about well the main trouble with RGB LEDs in my opinion is the fact that although you can have a wide range of colors up to 16 million if you believe the marketing hype and yet you can send a signal to all the RGB LEDs to potentially represent 16 million different colors or sixteen point seven million but really these subtle changes as you adjust face one level level of brightness on one of those diodes isn't really that significant the main issue that I have though is something that you might have spotted in the system that I have set up behind me which is also RGB but is set to white is that white is never really white as it should be there's always sort of some other color bleeding into it because these LEDs can't display just like it's a combination of red green and blue so it always has kind of a bluish tinge of potentially a greenish tint now I also wanted to point out as I am giving some phrase to gigabyte for including this capability on their recent most recent series of z2 70 motherboards I'm also going to offer some heat because consistency amongst your lighting in your case it's probably going to be important to you if you've at least taken enough consideration to think I want make a stability let's peel it up so consistency with lighting is important having this connection I think it's useful in that particular respect but also a critique where pieces do even the LEDs on this motherboard itself aren't necessarily all in uniform with each other so there's a high light appear across Oris logo for example there's one down here by the sign for 3d there's other LEDs that are scattered throughout the board now the software if you go over here to the Advanced section you can go to the peripheral devices so not just the main board and controlling all the individual parts there as well as the RGB header but also the peripheral devices that can be connected up and all synchronized and controlled with this software so you might notice I have a gigabytes extreme gaming graphics card on here VGA controls also available these are grayed out because nothing's connected but you can also have to control for DDR memory there's RGB DDR memory coming out CPU fan case keyboard mouse and headset so you can really synchronize everything up together the other thing that I wanted to give them huge props for and this is a shout out to those of you guys who are like RGB LEDs suck look at that single button turns everything off and that's what I like about the new class of RGB products that come out at least in the PC market is you have the ability to like on a day when you're feeling happy and and joyful and and you want a RGB rainbow going throughout your entire computer you can do that or another days when you're like you know and I just need to get some done turn them all off and you can give yourself a much more subdued look or maybe just like when you go to bed at night and every computer in your room and you want things to be a little bit darker and not have a light show going on while you're trying to sleep but anyway guys that is going to wrap it up for this video it's been a learning experience for me as I've been testing out different varieties of RGB LEDs my final goal a little bit further down the line is to get system setup with the Giga Byte software the msi software well as the asus software and get a little bit more of a comparison but all of them are being developed sort of on the fly there's updates to lots of them but it's nice to see it being a little bit more featured full-featured a little bit more fleshed out and yes but anyway thanks again for watching this video thumbs up button if you enjoyed it I got more videos coming up too I'll put some links to this Hardware I've been showing off here down in the description and there's links to my store down there too if you want to check out shirts mugs pint glasses and help support my channel thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time