The RGBeast Build
It’s been years now since RGB lighting began to innocently creep into the PC world. What started as another way for motherboards to stand out--both on store shelves and inside builds with windowed cases--has saturated just about every crevice of the component, gaming, and accessory market.
We know there are plenty of people who hate the incessant creep of RGB, and sometimes so do we—particularly when a case fan or other component light competes for attention with an HDR movie or a game that we’re trying to enjoy. But clearly RGB everything isn’t going away anytime soon. And there are two ways to tackle change: You can either hide in the darkness, pretending it isn’t happening, or embrace the rainbow to see where it takes you--and maybe learn something in the process. In case it wasn’t obvious by the photos and video sprinkled throughout this story, clearly we went the latter route with this build.
We weren’t aiming for the slickest collection of RGB parts with our “RGBeast,” and we definitely weren’t trying to keep things tasteful. Rather, we wanted to immerse ourselves completely in the world of RGB, to see what’s available, how it all works together (or more precisely, doesn’t), and what the craziest collection of RGB everything we could get shipped to our office would actually look like when assembled.
We also didn’t want to stop with just the PC. So we tracked down several RGB accessories, including input devices, a headset and headset stand, a mouse bungee, and even an RGB chair. When we decided to immerse ourselves in the world of RGB, no amount of unicorn vomit was spared. But that doesn’t mean we went light on the core components.
We wanted our RGBeast to be a colorful monster PC with enough CPU power and pixel-pushing might to stand up for itself--and then some. So at the core of our rig sits an Intel Core i9-9900K CPU (the only component here that doesn’t have any lights) and a liquid-cooled Gigabyte-made 2080 Ti that’s a rainbow world unto its own, with lights on both its cover, the backplate, and the fans that move air over the radiator.
We’re not saying our build is the most powerful collection of parts you could put together and load up with lights—there’s no AMD Threadripper CPU or Nvidia RTX Titan card here—but we’re confident that the RGBeast can tackle any modern PC game at 4K and high settings, or make quick work of any video editing task you could throw at it.
Let’s take a stroll through our parts list before we get to the build process.
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