RGB lighting is all the rage right now, with everything from cases and keyboards to fans and even RAM sticks having RGB lights. While looking very cool, they don’t offer any performance benefit at all, but you can still have a lot of fun tweaking the lighting to look exactly the way you want. There are a few things to go over before getting into how to control your RGB lights, though.

First, even though RGB is pretty common and widespread these days, there is no standard for how RGB should work, so each manufacturer has their own implementation of RGB that is usually incompatible with other manufacturers. For example, Asus uses their own implementation of RGB called Aura, which won’t work with RGB accessories made by Corsair such as an RGB keyboard, as Corsair uses their own RGB control program called Corsair Link. Manufactures can’t even agree on the number and arrangement of pins for RGB connectors, with most having four but sometimes, and some even use GRB instead of RGB. The reason all of this is worth mentioning is that if you have RGB accessories from several different manufacturers you will need the control programs for each of them. Not only is this a pain to set up but if they are all set to run on Windows startup they can slow down your boot times. Whenever possible, try to use RGB accessories from the same manufacturer, not just for the reasons we just mentioned but also because you can do some really cool synchronized effects if you have matching devices.

Second, as stated earlier, RGB lighting has absolutely no effect on system performance. While it is generally true that RGB fans are better in terms of cooling than non-RGB fans, the lighting itself does not give any measurable performance gain. Some RGB control programs do allow you to have the color of the RGB reflect system temperature, such as blue for cool and red for hot.

So, let’s get into what you’ll need to control your RGB lighting. If your system has an Asus motherboard with RGB lighting, then it will have Asus Aura preinstalled. In Aura you can tweak individual areas of the board as well as the speed of the RGB transition or set everything to a single color if you like. Play around with it and see what you like. If you bought a Corsair mouse or keyboard with your Velocity Micro computer, then you need the Corsair Utility Engine (CUE) to control the lights on those. CUE is a more comprehensive program than Asus Aura, not only allowing you to adjust the lighting but also update the firmware and change the key bindings of your Corsair devices. Devices from other manufacturers will need their own utilities to adjust their lighting, such as Logitech or Crucial. Some accessories will list on the box if they are compatible a certain manufacturers RGB program, such as Asus Aura. When in doubt, either check the manual or contact the manufacturer for more info.