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

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

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

I have absolutely no interest in RGB anything in my computer. Yet I've occasionally ended up with all these RGB parts -- RGB LED on my mouse, RGB RAM sticks, RGB GPU -- just because it's the best alternative right then and there, it's wild. It's at the point where you sometimes have to go with a worse price/performance option or otherwise suboptimal choice just to avoid the stupid useless little RGB LEDs.

Two things that strike me.

One is the "when everyone is special, no one is special" factor, but I think that's tempered a bit by PCs becoming a status item (alongside the rise of streaming that shows the streamer and their environment) so it's important the PC is conspicuous. Also for those that have invested significant time/money it has become a point of pride for them that they want to display, and get into flamewars on the internet to defend their team. The manufacturers probably don't mind that it lets them display their brand in lights too and not be hidden away as a sticker or PCB marking.

Also that there seems to be space in the market for 'PC as a pretty lightbox', RGB systems are sophisticated now alongside LCD systems getting attached to various components. The PC becomes a decoration as opposed to a tool that fades into the background like a lot of other devices which are pure display or have enthusiasts salivating about thinner bezels. The thing I find curious is that the lightbox is constrained in the form of a PC (even if they sometimes try hard to hide the machinery of it such as wires or putting components on PCBs hidden behind panels), there's not a lot of consumer products where you could assemble elaborate colored lighting displays.

I was putting together a new PC in 2024 after not having built one for ~7 years, and browsing for motherboards, I kept saying "just give me an ugly green one, damn it!"

I’m also “old” (44) and feel that rainbow LEDs are gaudy.

Seems these days that they’re not optional for most things remotely gaming related (e.g. motherboards, graphics cards) , but fortunately can generally be disabled or if illumination is useful (e.g for a keyboard), they can be configured to be white only, which was useful for the Steel Series keyboard I purchased. (I wouldn’t recommend Steel Series keyboards though, has stupid design choices and reliability issues.)

Also did LAN gaming back in the day. Computers were so much more work to lug around when you had a CRT and HDDs. These days desktop computers are far easier to transport.

You people are just old and cranky. I’ve loved LEDs ever since I first saw a red one light up in the 80s (we didn’t have blue ones then.)

I've been a watercooling "enthusiast" for about 20 years now and, while the DIY-ness of the old school builds was a lot of fun for young me, I'm also glad I can just buy some off-the-shelf (or at worst "small batch") components that let me get really effective and near silent performance by just slamming some stuff together.

No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.

That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.

I run with no RGB in my computer case, I got a very nice $250 case used for $40 with a broken tempered glass panel that looked like it had been dropped out of a second story apartment, but a $20 replacement panel and a little bit of hammering got it looking good as new.

On the other hand, I’m building my daughter a gaming PC for her birthday, and she loves the RGB, I set everything to a pastel blue that matches her Cinnamoroll Razer mouse, keyboard, mousepad, [0] with a Cinnamoroll desk mat I got shipped from China. She only knows about half of that (hard to hide an entire PC while I’m working on debloating windows), and is super excited.

I’ll admit I’m pushing 40 and bought a red mouse to go with my red backlit keyboard, but mostly because I like the aesthetic and to get the lowest latency from click and keypress to output on the display you’ll want 8K polling rate inputs and 240hz+ monitors. I was somewhat radicalized by reading this blog [1] on Hacker News years ago, and gaming peripherals are largely the way of achieving an extremely smooth desktop experience.

[0] https://www.razer.com/collabs/cinnamoroll?srsltid=AfmBOooMjB... [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

My first two gaming PCs in high school had a side window and blue cold cathode light. My next build in my early 20s I decided that even this was too garish and went to a simple brushed black case. I understand that cheap tri-color LEDs mean fewer SKUs and infinite custom colors but in practice many people never turn off the "demo mode" color cycling and it just looks ridiculous.

Then again I'm typing this from a Thinkpad - maybe that says something about my aesthetic preferences for computers.

Any popular aesthetic will be commoditized eventually. The new frontier is SFF PCs! -Rockin a ~5L SKTC A07 with r5-5600, rtx 4060, and zero RGB.

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

Yep, there were people hand-building wooden PC cases, building a fish tank into their case, painting fancy colors and patterns on it, ... And there were colored LEDs too, but they didn't come with bloatware OS-dependent software, because they didn't need software

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

Built my first PC (for basement LAN parties) using the old family Packard Bell case. Cut my thumb on the poorly machined aluminum inside...I'll cherish that scar forever.

Ah, the good ol' days.

I still enjoy building my pc's, But I put them in 4u server chassis. they are built better and have sane airflow. I have not been 13 for a long time and it is tricky to find non rgb parts anymore. No windows on my case but it still looks like someone is holding a rave through the gaps. sigh.

For free. My main rant about desktop vs server grade motherboards. For a desktop system you really want a desktop grade motherboard. server grade is expensive, takes forever to post, the compute tends toward slow and wide vs desktop's fast and tall, and the parts(ram, cpu) compatability tends to be much more picky. My grip is why is the desktop mb airflow so bad. In a server board everything is aligned front to back. pcie, ram, cpu cooler are all aligned the same way. in a desktop board the pcie goes front to back, the ram goes top to bottom. and toss a coin for which way a cpu cooler will fit.

In other news, there are new cases in beige being produced, some with turbo buttons and mock 5.25 inch floppy drives.

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