 All right, what's up internet? So I run hardware sugar and I talk about tech a lot but I do have a confession to make. Hi! My... My own computer is super, super old. Like my CPU is an i5-4690K. That's an Intel 4th generation and I'm sure most of you know we're about to hit Intel 10th gen already. My graphics cards are cross-fired AMD GPUs but they are RX 480s and I got them second hand. I used them to crypto mine and now I use them for gaming. So they're really great cards, they're still going but they have been abused a lot. My case, it's a TT Core View 71 and the power button no longer works. To turn on my computer, I used the switch on the motherboard and thank God my gigabyte motherboard has a switch otherwise I would need to jump it every time to turn it on. The two massive intake fans in front don't work anymore, they don't spin. So all of the parts in my personal rig are old, the case is old. It's a war machine, it's coming apart. It's still running but it's quite rough around the edges. So my PC is very old. Ito yung PC no utod ko. So if you know, I can't afford the parts that he has but maybe I can make my case pretty a little bit. I thought maybe let's get some nice RGB stuff inside my case and you know, it won't affect performance at all but you know, these will be nice to look at. Get some cooling in there since the intake fans are not working. And that's really the point of this video. Can we install some sweet RGB in a five year old system? Or to put it another way, can we teach an old dog new tricks? And I just wanted to put that line there so I have an excuse to put my dog in the YouTube thumbnail. If you've seen some of my other videos, you do know that he helps me out sometimes installing components. So shiny RGB in an old system, how hard can it be, right? Basically they're just fans with lights. And back in the day, even before RGB, we already had that. We had fans and they had lights but they were just single colored lights. You know, you would plug them into the fan header on your mobile or you would plug them into the DC chain of your power supply. So these things were really sort of straightforward. You didn't have to think about them. You buy a fan, you add a single light and you stick it into your system basically. No mass, no fuss. And approaching it at first, that's what I thought RGB would be. It's just another colored fan. Unfortunately, what I discovered was it's not so simple anymore. And what makes it complicated to put RGB in an old system is basically control. The RGB systems now, you need to control so many different things. You need to control the color of the lights. You need to control their mode, whether they're pulsating or breathing or reacting to sound or reacting to the temperature inside your case. You need to get them to sync with other RGB components. So there's a lot of issues regarding control of RGB. And control is really the main issue why it's very difficult to get RGB into an old system. Most RGB these days are controlled by RGB headers on the motherboard. If they are for RGB products, then the header is a 12 volt 4 pin. If they are for addressable or digital RGB, that's a 5 volt 3 pin header. Most high-end motherboards nowadays have both, have at least one RGB header, so that's 4 pin. And one ARGB header, which is 3 pin. But none of the old motherboards have those headers. I'm not aware of any product on the market that can function as an adapter or as a bridge. There's no product that will connect your RGB products to that motherboard that doesn't have a header. And that's basically the main stumbling block here. Yes, you can get the fans to spin, but you won't have that RGB, which is the whole point of trying to make things pretty in a 5 year old or older system. But if you really, really want RGB, we found at least three different ways to get it into old systems. The first one is with physical control. There are some products that come with physical controller, so you actually press buttons to change the color or to change the mode of the RGB. There are at least two downsides to this, though. Number one, usually the controller is left inside the case. So every time you need to change anything, something about the color or the mode, you need to open up your case and press those buttons, and then once everything is clear satisfaction, you close it up again, so that gets very clunky quickly. You can sort of thread it depending on your case and the controller. You can thread it through the back of your case so that there's a wire sticking out and then the controllers are depressed on top of the case. There's really no easy or pretty way to sort of hide the controller that it is easy to reach, but at the same time it is hidden from view. So that's one drawback of having a controller. Although there are some smart manufacturers I've noticed where they integrate the controller either to the back of the case, so that's one option, or they do some magic with the wiring where the reset button instead of connecting to your motherboard connects to some part of the controller, and so now you're able to use the physical button of the controller to interact with the RGB. So there are solutions like that, not as easy to get as having the more common controller types, but there are options like that. There are also some options which are remote controls, so that might be better. You don't need to open up your case and it's not ugly to look at, you just have a small controller with you that you basically like a TV remote control where you press a button and the lights change and things like that. The second problem with these physical controller types is that you don't have the same granular control as software control. With software, it's really like anything basically you want to do, you can like change the play of the lights and just the exact color of the light in question. For example, there's a particular shade of evergreen that you want. That's probably possible through software control, but with the physical controllers, you're limited to their presets. So it's just green, blue, violet, red, whatever. So you don't have the same level of fine control as you do with software control. But that's one way of getting RGB into an old system. You get RGB with physical controllers. A second way is to buy RGB products that do not need mobile RGB headers. And usually these are the proprietary products from NZXT or Corsair. And basically the way those things work is that they plug into a hub. NZXT has a hub, Corsair has a hub. And then these hubs in turn plug into a USB header on your motherboard. So you don't need to worry about having an RGB header as long as you have a USB header on your motherboard, those things will work, those hubs will work. But usually Corsair and NZXT are premium products so you'll pay a premium as well if you will use their RGB products. Some AIOs don't need RGB headers. Some of them, especially the high-end once again, just plug into the internal USB header on your motherboard. And this controls the RGB on the CPU block that scuba-like respirator thing that goes onto the CPU. So some of those don't require RGB headers. And finally, the third option, if there are some RGB products that don't need to be plugged into a RGB header to work, RAM does come in RGB now. And in theory, you should be able to just, you know, if it's DDR4 RAM, just plop it into a DDR4 board and you are good to go. Although I must stress that this is only in theory. I've never done this in real life. And maybe software control support might not be as robust depending on how old your motherboard is because each motherboard manufacturer has its own software suite for RGB. So MSI has Mystic Lite, ASUS has Aura Sync, Gigabyte has RGB Fusion. So I don't know actually if they've updated, you know, if their software will work on their old boards and maybe we can do another video about that. But in theory, you know, it should work. But again, I haven't tried it out myself. If I'm wrong, I'm sure somebody will let me know in the comments. So those were three ways that we sort of thought of how to get RGB into an old system. But the bottom line is it's very difficult to control RGB with an old system and it's not as simple as I would have thought. Again, I'm coming from the back in the day where, you know, things were simpler. Yes, they were colored lights, but the colored lights weren't. You didn't need to control them actually. I mean, if you think about it, those things were just on all the time. And I came to RGB with that mindset and I mean, how hard can it be to get those fancy things swirling around and, you know, all pretty and, you know, rainbow-colored and whatnot. But actually, it's quite difficult and it's not practical maybe to, you know, to invest your effort in getting RGB into an old system. So, as I did research for this video, I sort of became curious when did RGB become popular? The one article I saw dated Logitech coming out with an RGB keyboard in 2014 followed closely by Corsair. I found a tech roundup of RGB products from May 2017. So, this was a roundup of products already on the market. So, they must have been around for at least six months or so before that roundup. So, that puts it around late 2016 or early 2017. Some people date them back to the early 2000s where modders started putting customized lighting systems in their cases. But generally, off-the-shelf products, you know, from brand manufacturers came about around late 2016, early 2017. And the last major build I did was my own computer, the i54690K. So, that was around five years ago. So, there was really nothing like RGB back then. And when we set up the shop and suddenly everything was RGB from the cables to the fans to the AIOs. And, you know, there was a lot of... we really had to sort of figure... try to figure out like, what is this RGB and what can it do? And even now, to be honest, we get confused. We're doing builds and we're like, oh, how do we do this and how do we do that? And so, we really have to look it up as well. And so, even though RGB might be a bit mature, I mean, you know, it's basically three years or so old, the market is still quite fragmented and they added ARGB or digital RGB, which makes things even more confusing. RGB really is quite complicated even for those of us like the shop where we deal with it on a fairly regular basis. Is it a good idea to put it in an old rig? Probably not. Probably you could spend your money on something else. Although, as we did point out in the three instances, it is possible if you just really want RGB in an old system. Finally, before I go, this is the first video ever that we have a proper microphone and thanks so much to Henry's camera. I know nothing about cameras and microphones, so the staff that I spoke to was really a big help. I felt like I was a hardware-sugar customer, you know. We get customers that just want a really fast computer, they don't know much about specs and things like that. And so, we try to explain what's best for you and what's good for your use case. And the staff at Henry's was like that. And so now, this is the first time wherever you sing a proper microphone. If the audio quality is still bad, that is my fault. My voice is just really bad. It just sucks. It's not the fault of the mic. And lastly, I had two people on YouTube ask for shout-outs and I find it a bit funny because this is the first time the people have asked for a shout-out but anyway, here you go. Team Maninipit, Shawarat, salamat na pinelawanag mo sa akin anay-bisuliyinon. I did not know what that meant. And Wok Barok, shout-out also. I hope Diyon na Barok sa video nato. And everybody else, thanks for watching. So I hope that these basic tips helped you. If you found this video helpful, please drop a like and hit the subscribe button. For your PC needs, consider buying from us, at Lazada or on our website. You can find links in the description below. And thank you for watching. See you next video.