It's been just about a decade since MSI launched the first RGB-lit motherboard, the X99A Godlike Gaming, with its "2,000" glowing colors to choose from being a far cry from the 16.7 million that were promised not long after. But at the time of the X99A Godlike's launch, I had spent the previous decade of my PC building days buying single-color cold-cathode fluorescent lights (CCFLs) to illuminate my windowed PC cases, from sites like FrozenCPU and Xoxide.com. These were typically available in five colors: red, blue, green, white, and UV (my favorite), with other colors arriving as the years progressed.
Back then, if you wanted to change your PC's internal lighting from one color to another, you had to buy a whole other set of lights and install them behind the case door (usually with double-sided tape that was about as reliable as an untested overclock). So the idea of being able to change your PC's lighting color by going into the BIOS or firing up your motherboard software in Windows and choosing a hue and / or a lighting effect preset was a revelation.
Plus, PC CCFLs were rigid tubes that can't be cut, and they required a bulky inverter box that was often hard to hide in the case, and even harder to keep from crashing down onto your hard drive or other component when the sticky tape inevitably failed. Unless you bought short CCFL lights and got really creative about placement, in those days, you were really just lighting up the edge of your case window, not specific components or areas on your motherboard. Still, there was little denying that in-case lighting just looked cool – at least to a subset of PC enthusiasts, myself included. So I understand why motherboard RGB took off.
