Daria

(Hey you. If you're going to reply with something like "rgb is dumb lol" please don't click the read more. That's not what this post is about and you can safely skip over it.)

Aesthetically pleasing lights in PCs have come a long way since the cold cathode tube days. For one we no longer have to take a dremel tool to our pc if we actually want to see the inside as even the cheapest pc cases often have windows built in. For another we now have individually addressable RGB LEDs which are dirt cheap. PC parts manufacturers have been engaged in an arms race for years now on building a RGB lighting ecosystem, and most of them are incompatible with each other because no one has slapped them financially for building vendor locked ecosystems. Off the top of my head we have:

• Corsair and their iCue system, which is was compatible with Asus Aura Sync.

• Asus and their Aura Sync system, which is licensed to other manufacturers

• Gigabyte has RGB Fusion 2.0 which I haven't tried and doesn't seem to be compatible with anything but gigabyte products.

• Razer Chroma, which I have some experience with and only seems to work with Razer products

• Logitech has Lightsync, which seems to be locked to logitech devices.

All of these have various compatibility with non pc peripheral rgb lighting systems like Phillips Hue, Nanoleaf, Govee etc. If you just want some pretty colors and don't really care about syncing them together (with music or otherwise) you could mix and match and probably get away with it. The issues come in when you do want to sync these, as the various vendors refuse to work with each other to develop an open standard. Of course not to mention that none of these manufacturers make the whole cow; corsair makes fans, keyboards, mice and ram, but doesn't make motherboards or graphics cards.

(asus actually does now; I just discovered they sell ROG branded fans, which was the last component they didn't actually sell. Point still stands though)

I've been locked into the Corsair iCue ecosystem for the last six or so years. In 2018 when I did a completely new PC build I specifically chose all corsair products so I could use sync them, but I was disappointed by iCue for a number of reasons:

• Buggy as hell program that crashes all the time

• iCue abandoning support for pre-iCue devices, leaving my water pump uncontrollable.

• Lack of music sync (Honestly the biggest what the fuck of the whole mess).

Still, I kept on, because iCue has some nice features. For instance, I play Final Fantasy XIV keyboard only and part of what helps me achieve that is I can use iCue to disable or remap the numlock key while FFXIV is the top window. In the past I had to rip off the key cap in order to not accidentally press it in the middle of a frantic rotation. I also use it to disable the extra buttons on my (corsair) mouse, which I can never hit reliably when I want to but accidentally press them all the time.

Over time, I began to feel the annoyance with being locked into corsair products (the water pump issue was the turning point). It also didn't help I had been gifted a set of nanoleaf lights which were incompatible with corsairs system, but could work with Razer's chroma software. So I began to look into alternatives. Eventually I was led to SignalRGB

SignalRGB started its life as RGBeat, a RGB music visualizer that had a curious feature; it worked across ecosystems (Provided said ecosystems were not running at the same time). Eventually the creator Alex Krastev began working with pc peripheral manufacturer WhirlwindFX on signalRGB, an all in one RGB lighting app that promises to break out of the walled gardens and allow RGB sync for all. It works really well (Provided said walled garden software is not running at the same time).

The workflow is fairly simple; it auto detects your devices, and you lay them out across a canvas. Then you select your RGB effect which is basically a visualizer that plays behind your canvas, and your peripherals light up based on where they are on the layout. Some are music reactive, some are just aesthetic.

In fact, SignalRGB hands down has the best reactive music visualizer of the bunch, Pump Up Beats, which has multiple zones that react to the music differently, so you can have different devices do different things based on the music playing.

Of course, it's not without its flaws. While they've added water pump and fan curve settings to manage cooling, the ability to reassign keyboard keys is non existent, meaning when I play FFXIV I have to close SignalRGB and run iCue. It's also a subscription service, which I'm not a big fan of. It also requires Razer Chroma to run in the background if you want to integrate it with Nanoleaf, which is less than ideal since I have no connected Razer devices.

I wrote all of that to talk about the newest development in the space though. SignalRGB must have scared the shit out of Corsair, because recently the newest iCue update threw away their entire RGB system for "murals" which is the exact same layout system that SignalRGB uses

Except...it sucks so much. First, there appears to be no way for users to create their own mural (fake edit: You can add your own video file as a mural, so that's the only current way to create your own effects), so you're stuck with the 8 that corsair currently provides. The configuration of each mural ranges from slim to non existent. They did add a music reactive Mural, but it's only is a spectral view of the music, which has none of the good beat reactive stuff that Pump up Beat in Signal RGB has. This update also broke compatibility with Aura Sync devices, so you can't add your motherboard or any lights connected to its headers to it yet. It's also still buggy as hell.

But they did add native nanoleaf support, which makes me hopeful that I can easily add it to my setup in SignalRGB without having to run Razer Synapse.

I'm curious to know what the people over at WhirlwindFX think of this development. To see your idea taken and implemented far worse must suck.