Every expense is an education fee
Image by TheDigitalWay from Pixabay
Have you ever had second thoughts about whether it was the right or wrong decision to buy a product or a service? Or have you been lying awake at night, trying to read up and learn as much as possible about your potential coming purchase? I sure know that I have. However, some years ago I changed my mindset and approach to these questions. Just look at it as education and the price you pay is a course fee. If you are buying a “real” course and paying a fee for the education you get, this is obvious. But can it be education to buy RGB fans and mount them in your 12-year-old PC? It turns out it can!
Perhaps you aren’t familiar with the PC building scene, but if you have seen the Fast and the Furious movie series, you know that the tuned street racer cars are usually covered in colored lights below them. I suppose the purpose is to make the extremely modified cars catch more attention, because if no one sees the long hours you’ve spent tweaking your car, why bother? This is precisely what happened in the PC gaming world some years ago. Manufacturers started to design the heatsinks and PCBs of the components to make them look more bad ass. And if you’ve got a 5000-10000$ computer, you probably want to show off your build. Unless you are building a “sleeper” (i.e., a rusty old heap that can outrun a Porsche by the red lights). As you see, there are many lingual similarities between the car and the PC gaming world!
So, when people started fitting better and better looking components in their builds, it felt somewhat stupid to hide it all in a case never to be seen again. And that’s probably when the case manufacturers started making windows in the side panels and nowadays we have got so-called “aquarium PCs” with glass panels so you can see everything. Preferably you should combine it with water cooling, pumps and reservoirs as well.
I kind of liked the idea of building a tidy aquarium PC with my old X58 work-horse from 2009. So I planned out the build and went for a no-compromise RGB build with nine illuminated fans and four LED strips and a ROG STRIX GPU covered in RGB. I have now got several hundred LED’s that can emit any colour in my case. Each fan has 34 (!) I also had some red components, so I finished off the build with custom sleeved PSU cables that are black and red. It ain’t cheap to build something like this. The fans are ridiculously expensive. So how do you justify something as pointless as adding a bunch of RGB components that will add exactly 0% performance benefit? By considering it education.
Here’s just a few of the things I have learned. Colour theory, Heat transfer, Cable management, PWM or Voltage regulation, Synchronizing fan controllers and hubs and creating temperature controlled cooling profiles. But the most unexpected lesson came a couple of days ago. I was playing around with the RGB settings in iCue and tried out a “rainbow” pattern where the colours changed simultaneously throughout the spectrum. And to my surprise, the black and red PSU cables suddenly turned 100 % black! And then suddenly they shone as bright as a red traffic light. What was going on? It turns out that when you illuminate Red sleeves with light from the opposite 1/3 of the colour wheel, the Red colour turns black. And that looks extremely cool! I created a pulsating scheme where the RGB colour shifts slowly between two close shades of blue, but one of them a little more purple. The colour shift in the LEDs is hardly noticeable, but it now looks as if the PSU cables emit light themselves and pulsate from darkness to strong red light in a sinusoidal wave. I haven’t educated myself on what is going on exactly, but in essence it is just physics in action. My curiosity has been sparked. You don’t have ideas, ideas have you.
I have absolutely no idea on how I would have discovered this very fascinating optical phenomenon if I hadn’t built a completely pointless RGB aquarium PC. That’s why I look at every expense I make as an education fee. You can apply the principle to any area in life. Don’t think about the costs. Think about what you learn instead. Knowledge is invaluable. And that makes it a LOT easier to accept a business decision or investment that didn’t turn out the way you wanted.