how long does RGB lights last?

[mivec]

just wondering how long lights on fans, mice, keyboards, etc.last

 

i bought a razer viper ultimate and i'm considering to turn off the rgb light on the mouse, for the fear of losing the capability if i have it always turned on and changing lights. and maybe setting it to one color will give more problems?

[emosun]

leds tend to last longer than comparable sized incandescent bulbs of the same brightness.

But it's a double edged sword where companies push the leds as hard and as bright as they can go thus killing the longevity advantage the leds had in the first place. Also using cheaper low quality components to actually drive or power the leds themselves also contributes to them dying early.

It's kind of a tossup when they will die but you can make them work less hard and run cooler by using a dimmer setting if it has it.

[Blue4130]

The leds will last longer than the mouse/keyboard buttons or fan motors. 

[TempestCatto]

Just wanna add that with LED light bulbs, usually when they die it's the PCB they're connected to that dies - usually from heat. So the diode(s) are typically fine, provided they didn't short out when the PCB did. But LED lights and light bulbs actually do generate heat. Our main auditorium is getting renovated at work, and the main house lights are being converted to LED. These have a heatsink the size of an Intel stock cooler on them, with an accompanying fan for cooling (if I can, maybe I'll snap a pic. no promises tho). Our parking lot lights are also LED and also have heatsinks and fans built in. When the fans inevitably get full of dust and stop moving air, the PCB will heat up and die, thus killing the light. When you buy an LED light bulb for your home you need to be careful what you get. If you have a fixture that is enclosed, you need to ensure the bulb you buy is rated for being inside of an enclosed fixture, otherwise it can overheat. Those bulbs usually have some form of passive cooling on them. Automotive LED headlights also have heatsinks as they generate quite a bit of heat as well.

 

That said, RGB on computer components is likely to last the life of the component itself. There's no need to turn of the RGB to make it last. I turn mine off because I don't like it tho.

[Prodigy_Smit]

12 hours ago, mivec said:

just wondering how long lights on fans, mice, keyboards, etc.last

 

i bought a razer viper ultimate and i'm considering to turn off the rgb light on the mouse, for the fear of losing the capability if i have it always turned on and changing lights. and maybe setting it to one color will give more problems?

The LED's will last longer than the mouse unless they short.

[D13H4RD]

Unless something shorts or something else goes wrong, by the time those LEDs start to fail, your mouse would already be in some landfill after serving over a decade of abuse 

[TempestCatto]

Here's two photos of the lights I mentioned earlier. The second one is hard to see, but there's a fan exactly like you'd find on a stock cpu cooler.

 

[mivec]

thanks to everyone who responded. looks like there's not much to worry about

[Kisai]

On 6/23/2020 at 7:28 PM, mivec said:

just wondering how long lights on fans, mice, keyboards, etc.last

 

i bought a razer viper ultimate and i'm considering to turn off the rgb light on the mouse, for the fear of losing the capability if i have it always turned on and changing lights. and maybe setting it to one color will give more problems?

 

High Power LED's last about 5 years on a constant burn. Low-power LED's (like the RGB, front panel LED's and so forth) have a very long life because they not used at 100% duty cycle, and are probably rated for 50,000 hours (5.5 years at 24 hours.)

 

You are more likely to have an individual LED just fail for a reason unrelated to the LED itself, like the material it's mounted in cracking from thermals.

 

The LED Lightbulbs I bought when I moved into this apartment, I had the Philips one explode and die about five years ago, but the other two (different brands/kinds) are still working (these replaced the incandescent lights as they burned out, one of them BEFORE the Philips one.) 

 

 

LED backlights are different from CFL backlights, where the latter gets dimmer with time, but LED's may individually have a LED burn out, so you get un-even brightness (I saw one of these at the office, where 1/4 of the screen was black, these monitors are all 10 years old but only get 8/hrs day use.)  So it's still a YMMV depending on how they're used.

 

https://www.hyperikon.com/blog/how-long-do-led-lights-really-last/

 

LED's do dim, but they dim relative to their use, so they will still have usable brightness after 5 years, at worst.

 

 

For things like Mice and Keyboards, I wouldn't even worry about it. By the time they get dim enough to be useless, you'll probably have replaced it twice.

[tazmo8448]

My red LED's on the PC's front panel that show power on and next to it the HDD light showing the drive 'thinking' have both burnt out after roughly 9 yrs of being on every day. So they do go bad. The bad news is replacing something like this there is no plug-n-play they have to be resoldered back in place in order to be replaced.

[Lacrima]

Depends on the LED, My friends 4yr old Razer Blackwidow for instance has 3 dead LED's as in they can only display red properly where as my G403 and RGB on my 1060 are still running fine after years of continous use. The mouse would probably die first anyway so I wouldn't bother

[Coastqr]

On 6/23/2020 at 7:28 PM, mivec said:

just wondering how long lights on fans, mice, keyboards, etc.last

 

i bought a razer viper ultimate and i'm considering to turn off the rgb light on the mouse, for the fear of losing the capability if i have it always turned on and changing lights. and maybe setting it to one color will give more problems?

i wouldnt worry about it, one of my fans is acting up and changing the wrong colors, i think its iCue though so probably not a problem with the led itself