RGB Lighting, ASRock MB

orangepop · November 27, 2018

Stated on the motherboard's specs, there are two RGB headers both supporting 12v by 3A, and one iaRGB header supporting 5v by 3a. It states for all three headers that it supports up to two meters. I don't feel like burning up my board lol, so I'm looking for input on my execution.

I'm not sure if the LEDs listed above are 100% the exact same, but they should be in the ball park of what I have now, the listing from my order history was deleted.

So what I did to get my numbers was start with the mobo -

12^V(3^A) = 36^W

Then the strip -
60^W / 300^LEDs = 0.2^W
0.2^W / 12^V = 0.016667^Aroughly 0.02^A

Then checked how many LEDs fit in that spec -
0.2^W( X ) = 36^W | X=180 LEDs
0.016667^A ( X ) = 3^A | X=179.9964 LEDs
~or
0.02^A ( X ) = 3^A | X=150 LEDs

Then the density of the LEDs -
300^LEDs/ 5^Meters = ~60^LEDs

So according to the numbers I have roughly 12 watts per meter at full bright, and 60 LEDs in that meter, suggesting a total of 120 LEDs per header. So, am I to understand that the board can only push 12v up to 2m max? What If I have 80 LEDs on one side of the case and and the rest on the other, and ran an extension there to continue the stream. Would that count towards my 2m? I pretty much get that this is either a voltage drop scenario or perhaps related to load, but I'm not sure if that even matters because it would seem to me that the resistance of the wire is irrelevant at such small distances, especially at 12v to be a voltage drop issue, and the LEDs wouldn't necessarily draw more power the further away they were would they? I just want to make sure for the safety of the mobo, that the traces won't get stressed.

I was thinking of powering the LEDs directly from the PSU, but isn't the voltage throughput what directly controls its overall brightness by passing through the R,G,B common rails?
If there is a way to get RGB control form the motherboard, but power the strips separately, that'd be cool! And safe! :D
I totally was going to do that for the iaRGB strip, but idk if the 80 led hard cap is due to software limitation or not...

Thanks for reading my run on sentence, any help or input is highly appreciated!