SETUP TOUR: Do you care about the aesthetics of your setup?

[Corsair Crimson]

We all have our preferred aesthetics when it comes to our setups, whether it be needing everything in your PC to be a certain color/pattern/brand (I'm sure yours is CORSAIR 😉) or just having peripherals that match.

Since monitors are often unmentioned, do you prefer them to match with the setup or are you okay with whatever color it comes in?

What monitor size and resolution do you prefer when you game as opposed to when you work 🖥️?

How about your PC? Are you just a specs person, someone that doesn't care about RGB and only focuses on getting the best BANG for your BUCK 💸

Personally, my setup and PC are all white and I care a bit (a lot) about the aesthetics (I even put vinyl on the bezels of my 2 monitors so they can match the rest of my setup). And yes, my PC is RGB decked out, BUT it is also a powerful machine that can game, work, and stream flawlessly 😎

Lets hear your opinions down below and show off your set up!

[jbbardoles]

I care about the aesthetics a lot and so far this is my current setup but I am working on to make everything white. I hope Corsair would make more white peripherals and PC parts though, that would make many of us happy 😆

[Corsair Crimson]

On 6/19/2022 at 5:39 PM, jbbardoles said:

I care about the aesthetics a lot and so far this is my current setup but I am working on to make everything white. I hope Corsair would make more white peripherals and PC parts though, that would make many of us happy 😆

Your Setup looks amazing 😮😍 and I also agree, hopefully more white peripherals are coming out! But wow I love your set up, its super clean. Wished my own white setup was that clean and organized 😅

[LadyLucy0]

Short answer, Yes. I wouldn't have spent 3 hours cable managing Sophie if i didn't. Please for the love of all that is holy, Figure out less cables...

[Kontio]

Corsair....Mehr muss man nicht sagen, oder ? 😇

[Corsair Crimson]

2 hours ago, LadyLucy0 said:

Short answer, Yes. I wouldn't have spent 3 hours cable managing Sophie if i didn't. Please for the love of all that is holy, Figure out less cables...

I hear ya, I too wish for less cables.... I do have my setup cable managed but not as good as I want it, just dont have time lately 😢 hopefully sometime soon I can make it more tidy.

[Corsair Crimson]

2 hours ago, Kontio said:

Corsair....Mehr muss man nicht sagen, oder ? 😇

Awesome! RGB looking good 😁

[SilentConsole]

I have my PC tower under my desk to block the noise from the fans and to give me more space on my desktop.

I've had my PC cases under my desk ever since the early 2000's, and it just makes sense to me to have it on the floor. I can't imagine putting a computer case on my desktop now, in my eyeline and near my ears. It just seems so stupid.

I started off my PC modding and building career with one of these, the myth, the Legend:

So I am used to a "desktop" PC meaning exactly that, a flat, ugly box you sit the enormous heavy monitor on top of. Not something modern, not something desirable, more of a neccesity.

Back in the day my 386 would make an array of cheery beeps and rattles. You almost needed to be able to listen to the hard drive and floppy disk drives clattering and spluttering away to understand what was happening. I could hear when floppy disks were starting to wear out and needed to be copied and thrown in the bin, and I could predict with deadly accuracy when my clattery old hard disks were about to fail. I guess you could say I developed a mild form of PTSD by listening to various computer sounds, and knowing that some of them meant impending doom and expensive trips to the shops to buy 100MB hard drives, packets of 1.44MB floppies, and other such nonsense.

This has likely fed into my obsession for silent PCs. Over the years my quest has been mainly a quest for more power and more silence, and various advancements have come into play to help that quest:

• Hard drives and floppy drives eventually made way for silent SSDs, SD Cards and USB memory sticks.
• Violently loud power supplies with whining capacitors, terrible airflow and 40MM cheapo fans made way for beautiful high-efficiency open-mesh PSUs with low-speed 120MM brushless fans.
• Nasty stock CPU coolers were replaced with AIO water coolers or 140MM silent beasts
• GPUs with triple-fan cooling solutions targeted at low noise operation became the norm

My collection of crappy beige boxes and cold-rolled steel hand slicers have evolved over the years, over and over and over, 486 to Pentium to K6-2, to Athlon to Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo to Core 2 Quad, to i5s and i7s and i5s and i7s and again and again and again! until we get to this beauty, a 10-core, 4.5Ghz-capable beast with 32GB of RAM and 10GB of video ram, and enough GPU shaders to render GOD HIMSELF:

Sorry its a little underwhelming.

But what's most important to me about this case are not the aesthetics. I think it looks cool enough in its boring black cuboid way, but what gets me off are the 4 slabs of noise-absorbing foam that are attached to it, and came pre-applied by the factory.  You don't even know they're there. You can't tell just by looking.

This case doesn't show off, it doesn't scream to passers-by that its owner has filled it with processing power to rival a space station, it just sits there quietly... an unassuming little dark grey box. Humming away to itself oh. so. QUIETLY!

But LEDs. Christ. I don't get it. If you could buy high-end gaming gear without any LEDs attached to it, I would, but it seems to be the default these days that anything you plug into a PC should immediately start cycling through all the colours of the rainbow. My motherboard is in there, flashing away, and my graphics card as well, it's a freaking nightclub inside there, but I'll never see it

Yawn. A PC should sit under the desk, out of the way and most certainly out of sight. I don't need to be distracted by a flashing light show when I'm gaming. Even the coolest setup gets boring after the first few days of looking at it.

Don't get me wrong. I've tried it. I've put perspex sheets on the side of a case instead of lovely solid metal and plastic and sound deadening foam. I could see all the stuff in there alright. I could see the fans moving and so on. Woo. I spent a good few hours getting the stupid lighting software to sync up and make pretty patterns etc. I even had the thing sitting on top of the desk, not underneath. But ultimately I got annoyed. Annoyed that I could see the flashing in my peripheral vision when I was trying to play a game, annoyed I could hear every hum and whisper from the fans, annoyed that I could hear when the CPU was under load and when the GPU was heating up, I found myself listening to the inside of my PC again, like I used to do in the bad old days of the 386. 

So at some point I decided enough was enough, and back under the desk it went.

And then I disabled all the LEDs.

And then I got rid of them completely.

And then I bought a plan black case that was just a solid black cube, but had lovely lovely sound deadening foam all over it.

I don't miss the lights at all. And I used the extra space on my desktop for a massive, wraparound monitor instead.

The end.

[SilentConsole]

On 6/21/2022 at 6:58 PM, LadyLucy0 said:

Short answer, Yes. I wouldn't have spent 3 hours cable managing Sophie if i didn't. Please for the love of all that is holy, Figure out less cables...

I think we have already figured out less cables.

I only have 3 cables plugged into my PSU, the two motherboard ones and the GPU one.

For fans, one cable goes from the motherboard CPU fan header to my H80i, which powers its own fans, and my two case fans are also plugged into motherboard headers.

Finally there's the cluster of annoying little ones which I just cable-tie into one and hide in the nooks and crannies of the case; Power button, reset switch, HDD LED, the front USB3 and the front audio jacks.

Other than that? I have nothing.

I only have an NVMe drive, so no SATA cables or SATA power cables needed, I was able to take out all of the drive cages etc. since there's no need for even 2.5 inch drives any more. I think that has made the biggest difference this time around, going from 3 SATA drives down to one NVMe wiped out 6 like cables in one fell swoop. And the NVMe drive is so fast it's like having 4 SATA drives in RAID0.

Definitely no RGB, no rats nest of wires required, in fact barely any cable management needed at all.

This PC definitely has the fewest wires I've ever had in a PC before.

[LeDoyen]

other companies are doing fewer cables. They understand that we do not need individual control over all the fans.. so daisy chaining works very well, whether it's for RGB or just PWM, or both like the lian li unifans or the new EK vardar.

Corsair has always had a messy connection scheme, it's pretty much the worst in existence ^^' and if you want to make your life easier with iCUE and not buy a ton of controllers you have to use powered PWM hubs on top of the RGB mess. My last corsair build was a rats nest. I honestly believe Corsair should just throw backwards compatibility down the drain and start fresh with connections that make sense and don't require an electrical engineering degree to figure out.

for newcomers it's super daunting and overly complicated at best, and unreliable at worst.

[SilentConsole]

Yeah Corsair seems stuck in the past with these horrible little plastic boxes:

Imagine selling something like this in 2023 and expecting people to actually use it 😅

And for what? To make the same dumb glowing colour-changing fans that literally everyone else has?  You spend weeks and weeks setting up this crap, programming in a light show for yourself to look at, then you look at it maybe 2 or 3 times and get bored of it and turn it off.

Facts.

[LeDoyen]

Well RGB is sweet, and you have the option to turn it off completely anyway 🙂

I personally use a flame effect (not sure Corsair has something similar) and it gives a little fireplace vibe to my desk which is pretty relaxing when working. But yes, i don't spend my life looking at it and the tower is way to the side. Definitely an ambient lighting thing more than a nerdy light show.

And in terms of customization, yea with iCUE it's very difficult very fast when you try to get away from the lighting presets and make your own from scratch.