Aorus RGB

If you have an Aorus motherboard then you probably noticed a few things

• • RGB Control sucks
• • RGB Fusion app sucks
• • RGB is not set until app is loaded
• • BIOS/UEFI has no control over it

So the next question is almost mandatory, why should we run an app and waste system resources just to set an LED colour once and forget about it?

Looking into the issue, I found a webpage (Rich's Blog) that says the actual RGB settings are stored onto a hidden setting in the BIOS. But the page says this method only works for these Motherboards/BIOS versions

• • Gigabyte Aorus X570 PRO (non-WIFI), BIOS F20b
• • Gigabyte Aorus X570 ULTRA, BIOS F20b
    Sadly mine is an Aorus X570 Elite, nevertheless I tried to peek at the values to no avail, the address does no even exist for this board.

However, I found a way to do it that may work for even other boards... probably. So now the mandatory disclaimer:

Don't attempt any of this if you don't understand what you're doing

If you mess up with these settings and change something that's not the right values you may change voltages, frying your CPU in the process!!!

I cannot stress enough how dangerous this is if you go randomly changing things in your BIOS! If you're still here and won't hold me liable then please continue reading.

In Rich's blog we have the default values for the Gigabyte Orange default colour, which are:

• 0x03 -> Mode (Static/Solid)
• 0x00 -> Blue Value
• 0x21 -> Green Value
• 0xFF -> Red Value

So the next logical step would be searching for these values on our current BIOS, for this we're gonna use a tool called UEFITool and an image of the current BIOS, open it with the UEFITool and search for the hex pattern 030021ff Ideally you should get only two hits, the current NVRAM values and the Default Values

Don't get fooled by the address shown in the search results, we need to open the Body hex view (we need to skip the header to get to the proper address)

Here you should find the pattern somewhere

In this case, you'll see it is at address 0x218 (again, this is for an Aorus X570 Elite, BIOS version 38b your may vary). So now we know what and where we need to change, we're only missing how.

The easiest way I found is to use the method Rich proposes on his blog using a USB drive:

• -Format it in FAT32
• -Create a folder called efi
• -Inside that folder create another called boot
• -Download a modified GRUB shell from here
• -Put that file in the previously create boot folder, and rename it to BOOTX64.efi
  
  
  Now restart your computer and hit F12 like a madman (jk, once should be enough) to choose you boot drive and pick your USB drive. Once at the grub> prompt you can write setup_var_3 [address] where address is the one you found in your BIOS file, in this case 0x218, and if everything is fine the value there should be 0x03
• Then address 0x219 should contain 0x00
• Address 0x21A should contain 0x21
• Address 0x21B should contain 0xFF
• 

If all of this is true, we should be on the right track, now you can change these values to whatever you like and on rebooting the LED should change to the selected mode/colour. Also these changes should be permanent until you update or reset your BIOS.

The mode (first address) accept these values

• 0x00 Off
• 0x01 Pulse
• 0x02 Cycle Colours
• 0x03 Static Colour
• 0x04 Flashing
• 0x05 Double Flashing
• 0x06 Demo Mode
  
  The other addresses hold the Blue, Green and Red values, in this particular order.