-- TweakMonster Light Strips
-- Price: ~ $49.50
USD
-- 10.09.2001
-- By: GideonX
-- Page: 1
There are a lot of case mod ideas popping up left
and right at the moment. From window kits to neon lighting, a
lot of new accessories are available to totally pimp out your
case. One of best ways to show off your case to give yourself
some lighting from within.
I was contacted by Ross over at TweakMonster
when he first got his Light Strips available. What exactly are
light strips? Take your average neon tube and shrink it down to a
thin tape sized strip and that's what we have here. Bendable
and able to get around edges, something the average neon tube can't
do.
Our kit came with the light strip itself
along with a small 12V driver to power it. Good thing about this
is that since it is 12V, you can place it in your car also if you're
into that kind of thing. The driver comes with a red 12V and
black ground bare wire leads. Since this was a prototype when I
first received it, they may have changed this to include a molex
passthrough. It wasn't too hard to hook this up, I just plugged
it into my fan
bus. Might have been even better if the driver came with an
optional on/off switch to attach to a drive bay. You can do it
yourself using a bay bus if you already have one.
The strip is 7/16 inch wide and about 60
inches long. There are ways to cut this strip and have multiple
light strips, for a way to do that follow a good guide on it at TweakMonster.
An easy way to have the light strip in different areas in your
case. Here are some extra specs from TMs website:
- 7/16 of an inch wide x .020 (20 thousandths of an inch) thick
(about the thickness of a piece of posterboard)
- self-adhesive backing sticks to anything stickable
- fully bendable and configurable
- may be cut to different lengths, all of which will glow
individually
- comes in any color of the spectrum you can think of
- uses small power converter that is easily hidden, and can run
numerous Lightstrips at once
- negligible power consumption
- NO heat generated from the light (which is always good)
- fully weatherproof
- can conform to just about any type of surface, including sharp
bends and corners
- burn life of 15,000 hours (3 years straight)
- works right off your computer's power supply
- can handle heat just fine (like heatsink installations......)
- easily attachable to heatsinks, video cards, motherboards,
cases, fans, water tanks, keyboards, mice, monitors, printers,
mousepads, desks, speakers, etc.
Here are the bare leads from the driver,
since we had a prototype of the unit they aren't connected to the a 4
pin molex. The final production model available now is already
wire to plug directly into your power supply. For our purposes
in this sample, I just connected them to our fan bus.
The neat thing about this is that the
other side of the tape has an adhesive so you can place it anywhere in
your case. Convenient to have when you want to position it onto
any flat surface.
Here's a couple of shots of it in the
dark, we got it wrapped around a hand in the first one and around a
fan and case in the second shot. Its rather bright for a small
strip, and having it able to bend is a big plus.
With so many lighting products available
lately, its kind of hard to pick the right one. Best way to do
it, is to go and look at it up close. These pictures don't
really give you the full look of the light strips, or any light
product in any sense. Each case is different so these may fit
well and it may not. As for our example, it's pretty sharp and
bright which is a good thing. It bends, so you can wrap it
around like we did on the fan. If you have the cash, give this a
shot, it's a neat toy.
Thanks to Ross over at TweakMonster
for sending us this pre-production model. It's already available
at your favorite case mod stores with all the right fixings missing
from this sample.
Pros:
- Bright
- Bendable
- Driver included
- Four different colors to choose from
- Adhesive backing
Cons:
- A bit pricey for some folks
- Chopping it off and wiring it again may be a bit too much
work
- No on/off switch
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