Gadgetory

there are plenty of things in the PC enthusiast space that people love to argue about AMD vs. Nvidia AMD versus Intel AMD versus the 1980 US Olympic hockey team okay but seriously aside from these more practical concerns aesthetics are just as important to many people with there being no real consensus as to what looks good after all what's tacky to one user might be Michelangelo's David to another so in the past few years many component manufacturers have decided hey why not just give people the ability to customize the look of their battle station on a whim by adding RGB lighting the RGB craze mostly started out on keyboards and mice but these days you can pick up motherboards CPU coolers and even Ram sticks that claim to offer millions of colors but how does all of this work and what features should you be looking for if you're going to trick out your rig like the Griswolds christmas tree well if you think back to kindergarten you might remember that the three primary colors that combine to form all the other colors are red yellow and blue but this is true only for pigments light works a little differently with the three primary colors of light being red green and blue hence the name RGB so when you fire up your favorite RGB device what's happening is that separate red green and blue LEDs are lighting up at different intensities to produce different colors as there currently isn't a single LED bulb that can cycle through different colors on its own so there are a couple of different ways that you can see this principle in action if you set your favorite RGB device to white you might be able to see all three colored LEDs lit up if you look closely enough this is the same reason that when you get a drop of water on your phone screen you can see a rainbow like effect on white spots neat huh but how do these devices adjust the brightness of each LED to produce the color you want well usually RGB gadgets work with a technique called pulse width modulation or PWM which you can learn more about here although you might be more familiar with PWM as a way to control your fan speed in your computer the same concept can control colored LEDs so when you want to tell your control software boom I want yellow it sends a signal to your device that tells both the red and green LEDs to light up and blue to sit down and shut up and PWM also control something called the duty cycle essentially how long the light is on during each refresh a shorter duty cycle means that specific color of LED will be dimmer so if you want your keyboard to be a highlighter yellow sort of color your green and red LEDs will have longer duty cycles while your blue LEDs will have very short cycles or just be turned off completely but depending on its implementation especially if the LEDs are refreshing too slowly using PWM control with equal parts of red green and blue to achieve white can result in a distracting rainbow effect similar to what some people experienced when watching a single tip DLP projector to comp at this some manufacturers are introducing RGB W strips that have entirely separate white LEDs but enough about the nuts and bolts what should you actually look for when buying RGB gear well perhaps unsurprisingly this depends almost entirely on your personal preference as long as you buy something of good quality an important thing to research is what kinds of customization a certain RGB product offers as many manufacturers bundle software that can control RGB effects which may or may not be to your liking hardware solutions also exist such as NZXT hue plus which serves as a central hub for your systems LED strips and the RGB headers on certain motherboards which provide similar functionality through software to take things a step further unified RGB ecosystems like Asus aura and Razer chroma are starting to become popular allowing you to sync up RGB effects on your lighting strips your motherboard your memory your fans or even supported peripherals and room lighting and considering that our GB LEDs can often be configured to change colors depending on important variables such as system temperatures your perfectly harmonious RGB setup can actually be functional as well just make sure you don't go too crazy want to browse a more open Internet and use online services as though you are in a different country anonymously check out tunnel there they've got easy-to-use apps for iOS Android PC and Mac they also have a Chrome extension and turning it on is as simple as clicking a button boom there you go your bear tunnels your internet connection to a new location which means two things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address gets switched so you show up as though you're in a different country and it lets you bypass all the annoying bullcrap that usually comes with using a VPN for personal use no port configurations DNS or other router settings tunnel bear handles all of that stuff in 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