written by Ivan Alenko

published under license Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)copy! share!

posted in category Technology & Dystopia / Graphic Designs & UX

posted at 28. Sep '21

last updated at 18. Apr '24

Armour Crate By Asus Is a Piece Of Shit

Couple of weeks ago I bought Aura-compatible LED strip, because I liked the idea to have internals of my PC lit by RGB light. Yes, I like RGB. I plugged it in, and it worked! Well, sort of. Worked but without “change color” effect. Since I use Linux, downloaded OpenRGB, got frustrated why the hell nothing works. What the fuck is wrong with the application? (EDIT: OpenRGB 0.9 works well in Windows and Linux)

Since the motherboard is Asus Crosshair VII Hero, I wanted to download Aura Sync, now included in a software named Armour Crate. Old Aura Sync no longer works in Windows 10. It is possible to install it, but user interface won’t start. After some investigation i found out Armour Crate installs Aura Sync and all pieces of shit old one came with anyways. You’ll see in the list of installed software something like:

Armour Crate
Aura Sync
Patriot RGB
Asus Grid
Asus Live
5 other

I started Armour Crate and was happy since I could set the effect. But after program exited (like restart) all Aura devices went black. So much for setting the effect and be happy with color change effect in Linux. I restarted the computer like 15 times to be sure and got so fucking angry. FUCK YOU ASUS! Whoever designed this piece of shit of software should go think about life choices. Fuck, I hate vendor-lock in and no RGB effects. Then I uninstalled it.

Armour Crate won’t uninstall itself completely. You have to go do installed software and remove anything named Asus, Aura or RGB. And then remove the whole fucking C:\Program Files\Asus directory and also 32-bit one C:\Program Files (x86)\Asus. And kill Asus and Armour Create processes. And fire up Ccleaner and disable all Asuses services. Here I want also to say Razer to fuck your Synapse shit even though I love my Razer mices and keyboards. Asus Live is same. Some fucking software which does suspicous things, calls home, sends private data to cloud and behave like backdoor.

How large software to control these can be? 30 MB? And cut off old shit. I’d say software development in Asus is a nightmare.

Then I tried to install every Aura sofware I could find - from MSI, Corsair, some weird shit. But in the end all of them required Aura Sync to be installed in order to work. Pity, I thought the ecosystem was more open than this nightmare.

Since my situation was worse than before I installed Armour Crate, spending 2 hours searching for solutions, power off computer, cut the power for 30 minutes, reset BIOS, I tried everything. Nothing helped. Fucking custom control circuits.

Lots of people wrote their RGB effects were broken and couldn’t get them fixed. Also said Armour Crate doesn’t work for them. I was kind of lucky in this aspect.

Afterwards I downloaded OpenRGB for Windows and tried again. Didn’t work. After I sat frustrated for some time out of options I got the idea to start it as an administrator and then it worked! But user experience and communicating errors is fucking crazy in OpenRGB. More acceptable than Armour Crate, because it works and don’t have the obsession to drive the effect itself.

And now I can live with “color change” RGB effect for always and forever.

Armour Crate.