> everything being black on modern motherboards might look cool with RGB lighting

I always figured white would look better for RGB-lit computers. I don't know why white is so rare.

I remember being a kid when standardized port colors came 'round (what was that, part of the AC'97 spec or something?). I thought that was dumb: I knew that the speakers plugged into the third hole from the top, and that was good enough for me. ;)

Back then: I would have loved black-on-black, labelled-in-black, with black cables and and black highlights on a black background. The accessories would be black, too: Black keyboard, black featureless keycaps, black mouse, with a black mousepad, on a black desk, in a black room with black walls and black windows.

Black.

I couldn't get black back then, of course. Computers were beige. The necessary floppy and optical drives were beige. Cables were beige. Keyboards were beige. Motherboards were some moral equivalent to beige. It might be possible to get one or two components in black at some points, but the rest were going to be beige so therefore the whole thing might as well just be resolutely beige.

That really annoyed me.

But I'm not a kid anymore; I'm old. I just want stuff that works well, and that is expandable enough to do some fun and unusual computing stuff with, and that I can see so that when I'm futzing around with it then my job is easier than it would otherwise be.

I don't want RGB or a tempered glass aquarium that shatters when part of it touches a tile floor the wrong way. I don't care about having multiple choices for the color of the anodizing on the heatsinks for the RAM. I don't want water cooling when a big slow-moving fan and some heat pipes does the job very quietly, with improved simplicity therefore longevity. I'm not trying to win a cooling benchmark; I'm just trying to keep the CPU within its specified thermal range while it does work for long periods at its maximum speed. I don't care what color the fans are as long as I can't hear them.

If I want to play with RGB by making or buying some party lights, then I know how to do that. Party lights for the room (or the whole house!), not the guts of the PC. :)

Otherwise: The computer is on the floor under the desk and the USB hub is on top of the desk, and that's all I need to deal with. It is purposeful and functional. There's no style points here, but I just don't care about that anymore.

(I'll be outside yelling at clouds if anyone needs me for anything.)

This colour combo is more 1970s than 80s. 80s was more gaudy neon and transparent stuff. The 70s loved their murky browns. OK PC boxes of the 80s and 90s were all beige too but they didn't have any brown. It also fit in with manufacturing in those days: In the 70s a lot of wood was still used, whereas in the 80s everything shifted to plastics.

But whether you love or hate (as I do) the brown Noctua colours, the one thing is that they are kinda polarising. They're not a "clean fit" in any build unless you really wanna show that you use Noctua and use them as a centrepiece. Which I guess is the point of their marketing. They want to make it seem their fans are so good people are willing to put up with the colour.

Stuart Semple changed his name to Anish Kapoor, because only Anish Kapoor has the rights to use Vantablack for artistic purposes.

I think there might also be export restrictions, but I'm not sure.

The beige/brown fans give me a woodgrain vibe more than anything. Straight white would probably be more popular with LED folks imo.

Funny how the world works. People once bought cheap children’s play carpets and cut them up as car mats out of poverty. Now people pay €75 to get that same look.

On sidenote: I'm quite interested in the PV5 and have only seen one in the wild so far. How is it for you? And how is the range in practice.

Some of my friends are beige

I've heard that the black fans go to more shows, but the white fans buy more albums.

Booooooooooo