UV was the original RGB

[Jaw709]

Was watching some random old Youtube videos from our favorite butter-fingered technology titan.. It struck me that UV lighting in PCs was how enthusiasts would bling out their rigs in the old days. Might be cool to see if anyone is rocking UV in the year of our TechTip 2024

 

 

 

bibliography:

 

 

[manikyath]

the reason UV went out of fashion is because it drastically wears out a lot of materials. it's just generally not a good idea.

[Caroline]

Nah, coloured T5 CCFL were the original RGB.

UV was weird, with the "slim" IDE cables covered in fluorescent material and painted fans. It indeed degraded some plastics after years of use.

 

I have a bunch of F15T12 "black light" tubes, you know the fat ones, but of course they aren't cold cathode like the ones for modding back in the day. I suppose you could mod a case to fit some (2?) of those but it'd need some AC wiring job for the ballast and starters, and a case big enough to fit all the gear.

[OhYou_]

I wonder if you can use IR instead and coat things with phosphor that reacts on ir and emits visible light
Similar to how UV works but safer.

I think its a non issue now though because LEDs are a single wavelength emitter and you can just buy a led that emits in UV-A spectrum which is safe for plastics, and people.
Back when this was a thing, people would use all kinds of stupid shit like desert animal lamps that emit bad stuff like uv-c

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, OhYou_ said:

phosphor that reacts on ir

There basically isn't such a thing at a consumer level (if there was it'd be used all over the place because it'd convert the large amount of IR in daylight etc into visible light).

UV's high energy is the key to... both phosphors working and things degrading.

[Jaw709]

3 hours ago, manikyath said:

the reason UV went out of fashion is because it drastically wears out a lot of materials. it's just generally not a good idea.

How quickly are we talking here with degrading and wearing out? If it's years then it could still be well worth the trouble if you enjoy the time

[da na]

I run blue cold cathode tubes in my 2008 system. I swear they use more half as much power as the graphics cards but they look so much nicer than LEDs imo.

[Jaw709]

1 hour ago, da na said:

I run blue cold cathode tubes in my 2008 system. I swear they use more half as much power as the graphics cards but they look so much nicer than LEDs imo.

Well you know we got to see pics

[wONKEyeYEs]

When I was a kid we called UV black light and lit our posters with it.

 

 

 

 

[da na]

19 minutes ago, Jaw709 said:

Well you know we got to see pics

Don't have it with me now but I use these 12" Logisys tubes, one on bottom and one up top

Spoiler

There's the guy, powered on for the first time right after building it. I didn't have the tubes in at this point, bought them a few weeks later... I don't know if I have any photos, I will keep looking.

[Spindel]

8 hours ago, Jaw709 said:

How quickly are we talking here with degrading and wearing out? If it's years then it could still be well worth the trouble if you enjoy the time

Some plastics will become brittle in months if they are close to the UV source. 

[Jaw709]

7 hours ago, Spindel said:

Some plastics will become brittle in months if they are close to the UV source. 

Wow, only a few months? RGBmeSurprised.gif

[aggie113]

One of my original PC mods.  The UV cathodes were not enough so an external black light was added to make the photo pop :)

[manikyath]

20 hours ago, Jaw709 said:

How quickly are we talking here with degrading and wearing out? If it's years then it could still be well worth the trouble if you enjoy the time

it depends on the materials ofcourse, but the problem is kind of that most components are made of a lot of different materials, so it can be assumed at least some of that will start to yellow EXTREMELY quickly. (as in months, not years.)

pat the yellowing comes that flexible stuff (cable insulation, flexible watercooling tubes) will become brittle, and eventually most plastics will just snap at a touch. the most problematic things will take years, but the beauty of a UV system wont make it anywhere near said years.

 

also, these days we have the power of LED.. you could literally just fill your case with purple LED's, and everything you'd want to be phosphor illuminated, be LED illuminated directly.

 

impossible you say? let me introduce you to this cable:

[thrasher_565]

i dint run uv but i had leds... i looked it up the other day and found nothing so... i can put uv in but nothing to light up...

 

 

[tkitch]

On 3/26/2024 at 4:38 PM, Caroline said:

Nah, coloured T5 CCFL were the original RGB.

UV was weird, with the "slim" IDE cables covered in fluorescent material and painted fans. It indeed degraded some plastics after years of use.

 

I have a bunch of F15T12 "black light" tubes, you know the fat ones, but of course they aren't cold cathode like the ones for modding back in the day. I suppose you could mod a case to fit some (2?) of those but it'd need some AC wiring job for the ballast and starters, and a case big enough to fit all the gear.

Neon Tubes were the OG.

CCFLs were second gen (and waaay thinner, brighter, and easier to work with, once they weren't just super fragile bare tubes.)

These were OG:

 

CCFLs were def gen2 upgrades:

[aggie113]

One of my better uses of cold cathodes in a case mod...

[Jaw709]

1 hour ago, aggie113 said:

One of my better uses of cold cathodes in a case mod...

That looks sweet, really gives dimensions to the light color.. is it a hackintosh or just the case?

[aggie113]

17 hours ago, Jaw709 said:

That looks sweet, really gives dimensions to the light color.. is it a hackintosh or just the case?

Case that was used for a LAN gaming PC.
Biggest challenge was a cooler short enough to fit when closed up.

[8tg]

Cathodes were absolutely the primary thing, but there’s a ton of stuff that was done with PCs cosmetically before rgb was the norm.

Even relatively recently, full color scheme builds like pre 2016 or so. Corsair made that really accessible around the time of haswell. You could color match all your corsair parts:

You could’ve gone further with whatever color scheme you wanted, with leds being fairly minimal. Could go full blue with that build using an HX1000i power supply, blue corsair vengeance ddr3, gpus of the time offered different color schemes like this sapphire Vapor-X R9 290x

 

And this is just what you did with high end PCs of the time. Color matching. RGB makes the same thing easier but if you were going for aesthetics, you bought components that matched different color schemes. And because that was the norm, there were way more options in terms of colors for motherboards, gpus, ram, coolers, cases, fans etc. Now it’s just black or white with rgb with some outliers, but before, you had options. 
Ive got parts lying around for a black and yellow pc build, avexir ddr3 with yellow leds, an asrock z97m oc formula in black and yellow, sapphire toxic r9 280x’s in black and yellow, and so on. You could do the same with a lot of builds.

 

[8tg]

Going further back, there were other things to do besides cathodes as well. The early 2000’s you see some early led equipped components, lots of glossy or shiny metals or plastics, chrome, copper, parts that just look visually different.

 

Here is my 2003/2004 gaming pc, it’s all era except for the case and cf card storage. It’s a 2ghz pentium 4, 2gb of ddr 400 and an fx 5900 xt

This pc has LED ddr1, it has load indicator meters on the sticks, from green to yellow to red, indicating usage. There’s also xms xpert from the time which has led 7 segment displays for text readouts.

 

The GPU has a rotatable status display lcd, including fan speed and temperature monitors.

 

The cables are uv reactive, though I don’t use a cathode in this system.

The cooler is a peltier cooler. It has a pci slot mount power supply, but the cooler itself is a block of polished copper.

The motherboard is metallic flake, sparkly silver colored.

And then that power supply:

It’s an apevia aspire 500w unit from 2004. It’s aluminum shelled with a blue plastic wrap around window showing the internals. It has a chrome fan speed knob, polished brass fan grilles, and blue led fans.

Which is absurd in comparison to any modern power supply. It looks like nothing else. And it’s not even the craziest looking power supply of the time. Logisys made an entirely transparent one. Ultra was making psus with multicolored windows and glossy gunmetal shells at the time

rgb is arguably a curse for consumer pc aesthetics, so much more could be done, though plain and simple the convenience factor has won

[Jaw709]

1 hour ago, 8tg said:

Cathodes were absolutely the primary thing, but there’s a ton of stuff that was done with PCs cosmetically before rgb was the norm.

Even relatively recently, full color scheme builds like pre 2016 or so. Corsair made that really accessible around the time of haswell. You could color match all your corsair parts:

You could’ve gone further with whatever color scheme you wanted, with leds being fairly minimal. Could go full blue with that build using an HX1000i power supply, blue corsair vengeance ddr3, gpus of the time offered different color schemes like this sapphire Vapor-X R9 290x

 

And this is just what you did with high end PCs of the time. Color matching. RGB makes the same thing easier but if you were going for aesthetics, you bought components that matched different color schemes. And because that was the norm, there were way more options in terms of colors for motherboards, gpus, ram, coolers, cases, fans etc. Now it’s just black or white with rgb with some outliers, but before, you had options. 
Ive got parts lying around for a black and yellow pc build, avexir ddr3 with yellow leds, an asrock z97m oc formula in black and yellow, sapphire toxic r9 280x’s in black and yellow, and so on. You could do the same with a lot of builds.

 

Nice, I think this is what Linus was going for in the original video with everything green. Funny I think he mentioned at some point on WAN his favorite color is purple now? I think "neon" green is probably my preferred "tech color," then Blue, then Orange etc. 

[Spindel]

On 4/4/2024 at 7:38 PM, 8tg said:

 

but if you were going for aesthetics, you bought components that matched different color schemes.

 

This brings me back down memory lane, the time period you talk about was way after I stopped building computers. But I do remember when the standard colour mother boards and PCI/AGP/ISA cards was green. It felt so cool when you got a ATi card with red PCB, a Hercules card with blue PCB or a SoundBlaster Audessy with a black PCB with gold traces. 
 

Back then we (absolute majority of people) gave zero fucks about aesthetics so we admired how cool all the non green stuff locked while assembling the computer. Then we put on the side panel (made of sheet metal) and never looked at the build again. 

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

On 3/27/2024 at 12:15 AM, Jaw709 said:

How quickly are we talking here with degrading and wearing out? If it's years then it could still be well worth the trouble if you enjoy the time

Depends on the materials in question and the lightsource, the exact wavelengths it emits and the intensity. UV light is highly energetic, meaning each photon carries more energy than those of visible light or infrared. So it will chemically degrade plastics, especially transparent and white ones; black and opaque might be a bit more resistant. But we are talking anything from years to just weeks (extreme cases).

 

On 3/26/2024 at 9:41 PM, OhYou_ said:

I wonder if you can use IR instead and coat things with phosphor that reacts on ir and emits visible light
Similar to how UV works but safer.

 

This is really difficult. The mechanisms behind UV active phosphors rely on the fact that UV photons are more energetic than visible light. Basically a UV photon gets absorbed by the material, which yeets an electron in the material into a higher energy level. From there it can either fall back and emit the same energy back as a photon, or if it stays there for a while some energy will get 'lost' as vibrations (heat) before the electron falls back to the lower energy state again. In the latter case the photon is now of lower energy, meaning it is now in the visible light spectrum.

 

If you want to go from IR photons, which have lower energy than visible light photons, to visible light photons you need to find a way to add energy. This is not impossible, green laser pointers are a prime example where the IR light of the actual laser gets "frequency doubled" by passing it through a nonlinear optical material. But it is a much more complex process and usually only works on coherent light, such as in lasers. Similarly, the color of the emitted light is not dependent on the material, but also the source. So you'd need a lot of different 'color' IR lamps.

 

 

[weeblord]

On 3/26/2024 at 6:29 PM, da na said:

Don't have it with me now but I use these 12" Logisys tubes, one on bottom and one up top

  Reveal hidden contents

There's the guy, powered on for the first time right after building it. I didn't have the tubes in at this point, bought them a few weeks later... I don't know if I have any photos, I will keep looking.

500 watts was enough to power two Quadros back then?? That seems wild to me. Unless the case is concealing a 1 before the 500 lol