Nvidia's RTX Founders Edition Coolers Support RGB - Nvidia Locks Out Feature

[WYP]

Why would Nvidia disable this feature?



Read more about Nvidia's RTX Founders Edition Graphics Cards containing latent/hidden RGB support.

 

[Warchild]

probably colours are not accurate to software or something like that, which would be a joke given its cost.

 

[AlienALX]

Nope I bet Jen saw it in red and just couldn't live with himself.

 

[demonking]

Better to release a fully working product at this price point. I mean slightly off colours for a 1200 quid card! what next over heating RAM modules....=00=

 

[grec]

This doesn't really imply NVidia ever intended to provide RGB options. Sometimes using 4-pin RGB LED(s) at a design level is just a cheaper or easier way to ensure you can get a specific colour you want on your end product. Especially from a designers perspective, where at the "drawing board" you don't necessary know what shade(s) you want or how it/they'll work with the fogged LED covers and their surrounding(Which is exasperated much greater when these designs are going off to some random OEM for manufacturing of the shells bits and pieces), this can skip some prototyping and leave some of the less important concerns till deep into manufacturing to deal with.

 

[Eddie long]

This doesn't really imply NVidia ever intended to provide RGB options. Sometimes using 4-pin RGB LED(s) at a design level is just a cheaper or easier way to ensure you can get a specific colour you want on your end product. Especially from a designers perspective, where at the "drawing board" you don't necessary know what shade(s) you want or how it/they'll work with the fogged LED covers and their surrounding(Which is exasperated much greater when these designs are going off to some random OEM for manufacturing of the shells bits and pieces), this can skip some prototyping and leave some of the less important concerns till deep into manufacturing to deal with.

Makes sense I know when GN striped a founders down the rgb control pcb is fitted under the plate between the two fan, and it would be easier to tune that to get the shade of green they wanted/required

 

[demonking]

This doesn't really imply NVidia ever intended to provide RGB options. Sometimes using 4-pin RGB LED(s) at a design level is just a cheaper or easier way to ensure you can get a specific colour you want on your end product. Especially from a designers perspective, where at the "drawing board" you don't necessary know what shade(s) you want or how it/they'll work with the fogged LED covers and their surrounding(Which is exasperated much greater when these designs are going off to some random OEM for manufacturing of the shells bits and pieces), this can skip some prototyping and leave some of the less important concerns till deep into manufacturing to deal with.

Somewhat agree with this. On a prototype level agreed, but surely when it comes to the ordering of the parts if they never wanted any other colours it would have been cheaper to buy several million single coloured leds with the exact colour you wanted apposed to rgb ones as well as integrating the rgb connection on the pcb?

 

[Davva2004]

If you watch the cooler tear down that Gamers Nexus did, you can see all the electronics underneath the black plate between the fans which control the lighting. Now we know what it was for!

 

[grec]

Somewhat agree with this. On a prototype level agreed, but surely when it comes to the ordering of the parts if they never wanted any other colours it would have been cheaper to buy several million single coloured leds with the exact colour you wanted apposed to rgb ones as well as integrating the rgb connection on the pcb?

They can't really just buy off-the-shelf "NVidia green" LEDs unfortunately. In order to to get the specific shade of green they required (Colour schemes/palettes are a massive part of brand recognition and identity) they'd usually use brighter white LED with a translucent green cover above it(White LEDs often still arn't quite as cheap as their much older roughly-single-wavelength brethren, especially if you're having to use brighter models due to the extra light filtered out by the translucent shading).
The difference in upfront cost between a 2-pin LED and a 4-pin RGB LED, as well as wiring them, is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things (When you're bulk buying LEDs you're usually talking in the region of low double digit pence per unit).

The gaming portion of this launch certainly seemed fairly rushed(Given the card was launch with half its silicon basically dead) so it wouldn't surprise me if the founder's edition cooler for this had a pretty short prototyping to manufacture window(You'd be surprised at how common it is now to leave the fine tuning of elements of a product until manufacturing has already begun to drastically shorten the overall development cycle).

Also, given that AIBs seemingly already requested RGB support on the reference PCB for their custom coolers, the work was seemingly already done for the most part. Even if they did consider originally allowing the RGB element to be user controlled but didn't like how the shading turned out, it still implies they never really made a prototype cooler.

 

[AlienALX]

Looking at the FE cooler? there is some serious over-engineering going on there. TBH? that is the most impressive part of the launch to me. Not overly on the looks, but the design that has gone into it. It kinda reminds me of Homer Simpson's car design. And I know that doesn't come cheap.. Seriously, it's like a super car. Some really hi-tech gadgetry going on.

You could be right TG, they could have done it simply to experiment with shades of green. The rest of the cooler is pretty anal, so that would make sense.

Ed. I did predict Nvidia would stop using blowers ages ago, for this gen. The blower on my XP could just about make it behave at stock. Overclocking? it got loud and hot, fast. So anything more than that needed a new cooler.

I wouldn't surmise they rushed the cooler. Not looking at it.

 

[grec]

I've no doubt they put a lot of effort into the vapour chamber & VRM cooling design under the hood (Especially given the RTX Quadro's would still be using a blower style), and the cooler itself is clearly built on years of experience. I'm just not so sure they wouldn't have put quite as much work into the R&D of a little light as they would into the cooling apparatus of a 300W+ chip that has to somehow maintain a reputation of being cool & quiet. If they already needed RGB circuitry on the board then I guess they felt they may as well add on an extra $0.20 per unit and use an RGB LED instead of a pure white one than spend too much time and effort on it.

 

[AlienALX]

I've no doubt they put a lot of effort into the vapour chamber & VRM cooling design under the hood (Especially given the RTX Quadro's would still be using a blower style), and the cooler itself is clearly built on years of experience. I'm just not so sure they wouldn't have put quite as much work into the R&D of a little light as they would into the cooling apparatus of a 300W+ chip that has to somehow maintain a reputation of being cool & quiet. If they already needed RGB circuitry on the board then I guess they felt they may as well add on an extra $0.20 per unit and use an RGB LED instead of a pure white one than spend too much time and effort on it.

TBH they might have even been cheaper than ordering a custom colour. I notice when something is in trend it's obviously being mass produced like crazy (RGB strips for example) and then whatever isn't (like cold cathodes) shoots up in price.

Seriously, I remember years ago needing to replace one of the 4 leg RGB LEDs in my Alienware and it cost me £9. Nine pounds for one LED.

Now? you can get two strips and a controller for about £7.

 

[grec]

Yep, it's worth noting that traditional coloured LEDs aren't a white LED in a coloured casing (White LEDs are in fact a relatively recent breakthrough in this technology) but rather the colour is an intrinsic property of the semiconductor material at the heart of the LED. Red, green and blue LEDs are fairly mature and simple now, while more complex colours like white and certain shades of other intermediate colours generally require a semiconductor that emits non-visible wavelengths onto a phosphor material that then emits light(Not ridiculously complex or prohibitive but given a RGB LED is just a portion of three traditional LEDs crammed in a single case you can see why the cost isn't going to be very far apart).

 

[UnawareLlama23]

I'd say that the OEMs wanted RGB on the reference PCBs & Nvidia added it. They would have locked it out on the Founders cards because Green is part of the branding.