I've long been the butt of a joke on the Tom's Hardware team that I ride my tech into the ground. It's not so much of a joke — I get nice stuff and then I use it until it doesn't make sense.
But let me tell you, my motherboard is testing me.
My system still runs on AMD's AM4 platform. My motherboard is an Asus Prime X370-Pro, which has a small RGB lightstrip going down the left side, showing off the audio circuitry. When the system is on, I have it coordinating with my RAM and CPU cooler to bathe the insides of my rig in a cyan glow. When the system is off, all of the lights are supposed to be off.
They are not.
While I've changed many of the parts in this system since I first built it, that Prime X370-Pro has been a mainstay. But now it's getting on my nerves.
I tend to shut off my desktop when I'm not using it, and that's been the case even more with a little kid crawling around. While Asus offers all sorts of lighting options for motherboards, even when the system is shut down, I think that off should mean off. But in recent months, the board and the Armoury Crate software have been denying my request not to use RGB when the system is shut down. I always get the default red strip down the side. Even though I keep my case under my desk, I can catch glimpses of that red strip through the tinted glass on my Fractal Design Meshify C.
My colleague Sarah Jacobsson Purewal has written before about how bad apps that control peripherals are, and in my case, Asus Armoury Crate also controls my motherboard. I hold it to about the same esteem that Sarah does.
