GeForce Garage: Cross Desk Series, Video 4 - How to Install LED Lighting

By Logan Decker on 2014-10-24 GeForce Garage, Videos, Guides

We’ve come a long way from ye olde flickering neon tubes. Now we’ve got LED strips that are brighter, turn on faster, conform better to your case, and can cycle through all the colors of the RGB spectrum—automatically or by remote! So in a single afternoon you can go from dim, fragile bulbs that make your rig look like something out of of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation to one that would’ve been right at home at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Even the fanciest LED kits are inexpensive and easy to work with. In fact, the more substantial challenge will be determining the best way to connect the strips to your PC’s power supply. Fortunately, the fundamentals of creating your own custom power cables were covered in a previous skill guide, How to Sleeve Your Cables. You could even skip this step by using standard, pre-made power cables with Molex connectors, but custom cables will give your case the most precise and professional look.


A complete Remote Controlled RGB 50x50 LED kit available from bsmods.com.

Guest modder Bob Stewart founded BS Mods and has devoted his life to the honorable quest to make the coolest case mods with LED lighting. In this How to Install LED Lighting skill guide, he walks you through the process of planning, preparing for and installing LED lighting.

We strongly recommend that you watch this video before buying any lighting kit, LED-based or not, since factors like the need for passthrough holes or line-of-sight for your remote control receiver could have some bearing on your decision about what kind of kit you want to buy. And don’t forget to download the accompanying cheat sheet (PDF) to refer to during installation.

And once you’ve gotten than hang of working with LED strips inside your case, feel free to light up the back of your display, underneath your desk, or even around the doghouse if you feel like it (and if the doghouse has a PSU). One of the best things about LED strips is that they’re affordable and user-friendly enough to experiment with!

And keep checking back here at GeForce Garage as we update the site with more videos and cheat sheets in the Cross Desk Series. There’s more on the way!

For other skill guides involving the Red Harbinger Cross Desk: