Lighting the Perfect Computer

|Lighting the Perfect Computer⁠

⁠This blog post is part of a series on my experience building the perfect computer, where I cover the various decisions and research that I did as I figured out how to best setup my lighting.

The Corsair Commander Pro is great because it allows you to control two lighting channels, six fans, and it also has 2 USB headers, which are great for adding additional Lighting Pro Nodes to have extra channels. There are four temperature sensors, but these seem pretty pointless since you can use the sensors built into your motherboard (for CPU, GPU, etc.) to control your fan speed, which seems like a much better option adhering the temperature sensor to somewhere random.

I ultimately went with the six Corsair QL120 RGB Fans. Each three-pack comes with a Lighting Node Core, which you'll need to run the fans. Each fan has a Corsair RGB Connector and a Fan Connector. The built quality of the QL120s is excellent, albeit not quite as good as the beQuiet fans that I had tried initially).⁠

UV Lighting⁠⁠

One thing that was not clear to me in the beginning, was how to get my components to glow.

The gist is that you need a UV Light (also known as a Black Light) inside your case. Traditionally, this has meant putting a Cold Cathode Light in your computer. These work great and are inexpensive, but I couldn't find any that were super high-quality and require a little box to go inside your PC somewhere.

Alternatively, you can get LED UV Lights. These aren't as bright as Cold Cathode Lights, but you can line them up in rows to add as much light as you need – I ended up putting four of the LEDdess PC UV Lights. Note that most UV Lights are just always on; they cannot be addressed individually like your other RGB LEDs.

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Note: UV Light gives off a faint purplish color that is in the visible light spectrum. Many manufacturers will call their UV Light "UV Purple" when what they mean is that it is just a plain black light.

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Another option is CableMod's WideBeam Hybrid UV LED; these are brighter than the LEDdess UV, but not by a lot. They are also a lot wider and cannot be controller by your computer (unless you have a Gigabyte Motherboard compatible with 5-pint RGBs).

Series⁠

⁠Lighting

⁠Water Cooling, Part 1

⁠⁠Water Cooling, Part 2

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