In my youth, I spent some stupid amount of money on cold cathode tubes for my PC, the equivalent of RGB LEDs in the early 2000s. I had my system lit up like a Christmas tree, if only because I was at university and wanted to show it off at our gaming parties with 40-60 other people. Fast forward almost two decades, and RGB has gone through a number of phases from being garish, to tasteful, to gaming, and to driving sales of PC components. Almost everything today has RGB LEDs, even storage drives and power supplies – the stuff that usually gets put into the back of the system. When I woke up this morning, I thought that everything had been RGB’ed. I was wrong.

Insert what could be a good product in its own right, tainted by the brush of RGB. Cooler Master’s new ‘ELV8’ (elevate) is a PCIe bracket for a system designed to prop up heavy graphics cards that might cause bending to a PCIe slot just because of the mass. It sounds simple enough: a strong piece of steel that is coated black to aesthetically fit into various systems.

But they went and put RGB LEDs on it.

I have no idea why. Your guess is as good as mine. It takes a 5V input, which I assume means power comes from a USB port (which means additional control with most motherboard RGB software).


(yes, this is actually one of the stock photos)

It’s going to be available for $25 from Amazon and Newegg on October 7th.

The question now remains, what is left to RGB?

Cables have RGB: See the Lian Li Strimer
SSDs have RGB: See the Team Group T-Force Delta Max
M.2 Storage has RGB: See the ADATA XPG Spectrix S40 RGB
Power Supplies have RGB: See FSP and Super Flower

Network cards? Wireless cards? I hope I’m not giving anyone ideas here.

Related Reading

 

Comments Locked

20 Comments

View All Comments

  • valinor89 - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    That would be a very fast printe indeed. But imagine having to load paper every 5 or so seconds...
  • HollyDOL - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    With da mighty overdrive, 10% color space coverage and necessary document generated for each page printed to tell you what that thing on paper was supposed to present :p
  • boozed - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Hah!
  • Slash3 - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Gaming chairs with battery packs and wirelessly synchronized RGB has yet to show up. You used to be able to buy USB cables with LEDs, too, so there is still room to make things worse.
  • drexnx - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    ahhh, cold cathodes... that brings me back to the socket A days.
  • GreenReaper - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Network equipment is going in the opposite direction and is (unfortunately) having the LEDs taken off for power saving and "stealth" purposes, at least if Virgin Media's Hub 4 is anything to judge by.
  • Threska - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    People most likely got tired of the overly bright blue leds most used.
  • boozed - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    A what?
  • Deses - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    Is there a gaming phone charger?
  • tiggers - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    How about a gaming chip-bag holder? As the bag gets lighter, the RGB lights start to cycle faster.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now