Anyone wanting to unleash the full RGB potential of their PC would do well to take a look at the numerous colourful and vibrant RGB components available on products that have, over time, come to include everything from motherboards to mice. Yet even powerful, high-end gaming PCs can still benefit from the addition of some motherboard-configurable and even synchronised RGB lighting. But here’s the rub: What do we need to take into account regarding the selection of hardware and other peripherals, when there’s simply no unifying standard? What products are worth recommending and which connectors are compatible with one another? These questions, and several more, are what we’ll be doing a deep-dive on in this RGB guide - followed by specific product recommendations for the most important components for a complete RGB build.
RGB Lighting and Motherboard Synchronisation
RGB-LEDs have been available across many kinds of hardware and peripherals for a while now, allowing users the ability to use a compatible motherboard and its bundled software to coordinate colour and lighting effects with one another. Whether we’re talking about ASUS Aura Sync, MSI Mystic Light Sync or Gigabyte RGB Fusion: the systems behind RGB strips or RGB fans, the lighting of which is controlled using a 4-pin RGB header, all operate in the same manner – electrically speaking.
In this case, manufacturers provide one or several 4-pin RGB headers whose pins are assigned the three colour channels as minus pins and a common plus pin (actual pin assignment: 12VGRB). Depending on the manufacturer, these are called RGB headers, JLED1 headers or 5050_RGBLED1-headers and principally work with commercially available SMD 5050 RGB-LED strips, as long as they have an appropriate connector and are connected in the 12VGRB scheme. Gigabyte also offers a so-called 5-pin GRBW header, which can control pure white LEDs via a separate channel to increase colour accuracy. Thanks to the free programming of the pin assignment via the RGB Fusion software, it is also compatible with 5050 LED strips with a 4-pin RGB connector. But you have to pay attention to the correct polarity! Otherwise, all r-pin RGB headers on current motherboards are electrically and mechanically identical.
Recently ASUS, ASRock, MSI and Gigabyte also offer motherboards with a 3-pin RGB header for digitally addressable RGB-LED strips, which consists of three pins placed next to each other with Gigabyte, in contrast to the headers from ASUS, ASRock and MSI. With these LED strips, each LED can be individually and independently controlled by means of a special transistor circuit, which makes much more complex and spectacular lighting effects possible. However, 4-pin RGB headers are not compatible with components using 4-pin RGB connections, but can only control RGB components with digitally addressable LEDs. In order to avoid compatibility issues, you should always check for the appropriate logos when selecting peripherals and hardware components that offer RGB lighting. Better strill, vidist the motherboard manufacturers’ websites for a list of compatible products and to download the controller software:
RGB Controllers for Multiple Lighting Effects
If you don’t have a motherboard with the appropriate headers, you can use RGB controllers, which have a variety of connectivity options and functions . An RGB controller or a splitter cable may be useful for expanding RGB lighting if the motherboard lacks the requisite number of headers. Alternatively, splitters can be used to pass the RGB signal from the motherboard across to multiple RGB-LED components. At this point it is again important to focus on compatibility between different manufacturers, if you want to synchronise the whole PC’s lighting scheme with one click at any rate. Should this not be possible due to pre-existing incompatibilities between components, different systems can be combined together to allow users to synchronise the lighting manually.
