PC Power Supplies (Part 5 Aesthetics)

As i have said before PC gaming enthusiast have driven a lot of innovation in the pc hardware market, but also have created a kind of branch evolution of hardware aesthetical upgrades. It's kind of funny some of the options that have emerged. A fairly recent feature that hardware manufacturers have started adding have been “RBG” or red green blue LEDs that add lighting effects to pc hardware. The reason i’m filing this in power supply category is that RBG power supplies have existed for a while, but recently Lian Li has been showing their Strimer branded RBG power cables. While they haven’t modified the cable themselves that have created a kind of shroud of RGB wires that go over a set of white cable that give the effect of having RBG cables. I think they look pretty good, but i don’t really go for the RGB aesthetic. Some higher end motherboards have started including RBG headers which will allow the user to change the color schemes of their RGB parts. The Lian Li Strimer prototypes come with pci slot controls but i would imagine they would eventually interface with these RGB headers, but we won’t know for sure until they release them.

RGB aside power supply cables themselves have been another area of innovation in the PSU markets. In the early days power supply cables have been simply wrapped in a standard color scheme. The scheme is pretty simple where black was ground, yellow was 12 volts, red was 5 volts, and orange was 3.3 volts. They used fairly standard material this is of course to insulate the cables from shorting out. The components are fairly protected from interference from these plastic insulators. While these material are vulnerable to wear and tear they rarely move at all so that is not really an issue. I’ve seen an instance where cables were pniched so bad that it created a short the PSU refused to power on at all until that issue was fixed. To prevent some wear and tear/fraying and shorts cables have been sleeved in other materials nylon, stainless steel for real durability. But there are now companies that will do this for aesthetic reasons. I don’t think they really provide and practical benefit though normal PVC or PE wrapped cable will serve you just fine. You can even do this yourself by buying kits and crimping tools you can also change the “molex”-style connectors to different colors or UV reactive materials.

PSU themselves offer RGB fans inside their cases. I believe the reason there hasn't been transparent PSU cases is because of possible interference from the PSU electricity leakage. The metal casing should provide good shieling for the processing components. I’m sure that manufactures will eventually find a material that will allow them to RGBize their PSU fully soon enough. It reminds me of a funny story where camera flashes where interfering with older raspberry pi’s because their processors weren’t shielded from the photoelectric effect you can read more about it here.

I find it slightly amusing but also exciting that innovation is pushing these type of products.