For some, RGB is the premier ‘end-all-be-all’ of PC building, where tiny little LEDs dance around your completed build like tiny little people of all colors.
For others, it’s a gaudy (and completely pointless) accouterment that costs money while managing to be rather unpleasant to look at. Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum, there is a singular aspect that is undoubtedly true: RBG controller software is absolute garbage.
It’s bloated messes that companies prefer to use to bolster their users and the number of emails they can market to while offering fascinatingly limited scope and function that can only talk to a specific set of RGB peripherals from a specific manufacturer.
Even if they were universal in function, the software itself is prone to crashing (from Corsair to Gigabyte), and using it becomes a chore that, ideally, you’ll only use once and never need to touch it again.
So when a new open-source project made HackerNews that promises an open-source RGB controller, you can bet that people took notice. Called OpenRGB, the idea is to give full RGB control to users while protecting them from data harvesting and frankly abysmal quality control.
You should note that it’s currently in 0.5 (which officially makes it closer to release than Star Citizen) and it won’t play nice with every board and model at the current time, but it does absolutely offer far more control of RGBs than a single application if you’ve mixed and matched your manufacturers.
Further, currently there simply aren’t as many effects available unless you’re willing to use two applications in tandem, such as OpenRGB and Aurora. Without these two operating together, you’ll be stuck with solid colors and some have reported that it struggles to recognize the newest GPUs.
These two inconveniences, however, are already offering far more power than, for example, the Armory Crate or Dragon Center, and being able to touch all RGBs at once is both pleasing to users and those that are stuck building PCs for all family and friends.
The fact that this software is open source is even better, as it can guarantee safety as multiple contributors can scour the source code for anything out of place or suspicious while overall ensuring that far more functionality is incorporated in the future.
The best part is that it’s free, and will ensure the viability of RGB usage regardless of how the industry moves in the coming years, up until the point that anti-tamper is included with RGB to ensure that users have to download specific controllers and make accounts for the sake of even more selling and bloatware. It all sounds hilarious until it happens.
