Govee’s latest offering to light up your game room is a take on its highly popular DreamView TV backlight set up, but instead of using a camera to create the backwash color, it’s using AI. Enter the Govee AI Gaming Sync box, which creates the backlight using AI and an HDMI pass-through. But how does it work in practice?
Specifications:
- Cost: $299.99 on Govee Website (Currently on sale for $234.99 as of the time of publication)
- Compatible Monitor Size: 27-34 inches
- Color: RGBIC
- Control Methods: App Control, Voice Control
- Features:
- AI powered by CogniGLow algorithm
- Compatible with Govee App, Google Home, Alexa
- Supports 1080p240; 1440p144; 4K60 pass through
- Comes With 2 x Govee Light Bar, 4.6ft RGBIC Light Strip, Govee AI Sync Box
First Impressions
Upon opening the box for the first time I was actually surprised at the amount of kit that Govee sends along with its AI Gaming Sync box. The box itself isn’t too large and doesn’t take up a ton of space on the desktop, and the kit comes with much more to light up your desktop to your heart's content. Two long light bars sit on the desk flanking the monitor, while the almost five-foot-long light strip makes lighting the back of the monitor a breeze.
Unlike Govee’s DreamView product which has a real design to take over the living room, the company is angling this more for PC gamers. As such, the light strip is large enough to support monitors from 27 to 34 inches, though it could potentially work on smaller monitors if you really shoehorned it in.
The box itself comes adorned with its own RGB that reacts with the rest of the lighting, as well as inputs for two USB-C connections from Govee products, three HDMI 2.0 In connections, and an HDMI 2.0 Out port. The device is powered using an external power brick and not through a USB connection to the PC.
I like that Govee doesn’t require you to already be in their ecosystem to get up and running here, providing three separate lighting solutions in the AI Gaming Sync box kit from the get-go. Naturally, that drives up the cost, but it puts you squarely in the powerful RGB lighting ecosystem that Govee has been building over the last few years. Thanks to that ecosystem, the lighting here isn’t just limited to what’s in the box, as it’s very customizable with Govee’s home app.
Color My World
So how does it work in practice? Where the Govee DreamView used a camera to show the backsplash lighting around a TV, the Govee AI Gaming Sync box uses direct capture via the box’s passthrough to do this. As a result, the lighting is effectively projecting what the box is capturing on the way to the monitor.
This means that the AI Sync Box has near instantaneous response, with the lighting reacting with every window change, every motion in a game, or every frame of a video. It’s an elegant solution that doesn’t require anything more than just plugging it in and seeing the results yourself.
This is geared toward PC gamers, but there’s nothing stopping you from hooking a console up either. With three HDMI-In ports, you can feasibly have your PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X hooked up at any time, each one giving becoming more immersive as the lighting extends the game world onto the wall behind the monitor.
Pardon the wires, but the Aetheryte looks particularly cool extended onto the wall behind the monitor.
I tested this out at my rig on both a curved 34” 1440p Ultrawide monitor as well as a flat 32” 4K monitor, and I definitely recommend sticking with the flat variety. The curve on the Ultrawide display caused the lighting to be lost in motion, and it didn’t feel nearly as bright as it could be, despite being at 100% brightness in the Govee app.
However, when powering the 4K display, the brightness I was expecting was there, fully immersing me in the experience.
Colors popped as I would run through The Shire in The Lord of the Rings Online, and taking damage in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 filled my office with a splash of red, really hitting home the point that I needed to bandage up or end up in the Gulag.
The backlighting isn’t just limited to games, either. Since the Govee AI Gaming Sync Box is capturing all the color data passing into the monitor, Windows itself took on an extended glow, the myriad colors of my desktop spilling onto the wall behind my monitor. YouTube videos also got the Govee treatment, bringing an added splash of color to the experience.
The AI in the gaming sync box is what really is exciting here, as the CogniFLow algorithm aims to provide near-zero lag response in titles that are supported, from Apex Legends, Overwatch and League of Legends. Like any good AI algorithm the CogniFLow algorithm is trained using hundreds of thousands of images from the games it’s supported to provide the most immersive experience in those titles.
Unfortunately, there is a very, very small list of supported titles, unlike competitor Razer’s Synapse compatibility which, while it doesn’t use AI to create that colorscape, it’s immersive all the same. Additionally, only one of the HDMI ports seems to support the AI passthrough for the game, meaning that if you’re wanting to take advantage of the CogniFLow in the box, you’ll need to swap to the ARC-supported port.
Some Technical Limitations
Because there is only a small sample of games, the AI part of the AI Gaming Sync box might feel a bit underused. Hopefully, as Govee supports the product they will continue to add games to the platform.
More concerning to me is the lack of forward-facing I/O on the box itself. This is a product squarely targeted at PC gamers, yet there is no HDMI 2.1 for high refresh rate monitors, or even DisplayPort, which is more ubiquitous on modern GPUs. Because of this limitation, the actual passthrough can leave much to be desired.
While 1080p users will be able to power their high refresh rate monitors, I did find some limitations on my ultrawide 1440p and my 4K monitors. Both of those are rated for 144hz, and neither one could achieve their full potential using the Govee box.
While the company does state that 4K passthrough is limited to 60fps, it feels odd to target an audience where high refresh rate 4K gaming is more and more commonplace. With GPUs like the RTX 40-series and even AMD’s RX 7900 models capable of 4K performance at much higher framerates, capping the passthrough just feels like I’m leaving performance on the table.
While 1440p is rated for 144hz, my ultrawide monitor was limited to 100fps. Which, I mean, is no slouch, but it just feels limiting. I have to wonder if using something like HDMI 2.1 would easily solve this, or just including DisplayPort which most modern PCs support more anyways.
More concerning is that the Govee AI Gaming Sync box doesn’t appear to support variable refresh rate. On both monitors I tested with the product, the GSync options weren’t available to me in Nvidia Control Panel, completely taking away a feature that could smooth out framerates during intense gameplay.
It feels odd to target PC gamers with these limitations in place. The targets here feel much more at home in the living room with consoles, as 4K60 is still the high watermark there. With most TVs only supporting HDMI and very few models supporting VRR, these limitations aren’t as felt there as they are at a beefy gaming rig.
As a result, buying the Govee AI Gaming Sync box will come with the choice for many PC gamers: leave some monitor horsepower behind for the immersive lighting.
Conclusion
All in all, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the Govee AI Gaming Sync box. It does the job and really immersed me in every game I played. The near-instant response from the lighting really heightened this experience as nothing felt like it was playing catch up, especially in fast-paced moments.
I really love seeing my screen basically extended around my gaming area, bringing more color to my world and further immersing me in the experience. However, the more I used the product, the more I felt it wasn’t doing everything I needed it to do at my set up. High framerate 4K gaming is normal on PC now, so leaving so much horsepower from both my RTX 4090 and my Gigabyte M32AU 4K monitor on the table for the sake of backlighting felt rather bad.
It makes me wonder whether there is a disconnect between the marketing and product teams, since Govee already has a competent product for the living room. The design decisions to use older HDMI 2.0 ports and not include a single DisplayPort input heightens that disconnect.
That said, it’s a powerful product and one that I’m sure in the right scenario flourishes. For those still using 1080p and 1440p displays and don’t care about VRR, this product is perfect. And while it’s not really marketed towards TVs, the HDMI ports make sense for console and TV set ups, provided the TV is within the size limits for this to work natively.
The price might put some people off - especially if you’re a PC gamer worried about the restrictions that the box places artificially on your system. At $299 MSRP (though it has been on sale recently), it’s not a cheap investment. That said, you get a lot of kit for your money and given its compatibility with the broader Govee ecosystem and smart home kits, there’s a ton of functionality there.
All told, the Govee AI Gaming Sync box kit is an interesting little piece of kit. The backlighting effect really ups the immersion in the games I played, and while the AI part feels underbaked, that is coming with time. The biggest disconnect for me, though, is the I/O itself and the technical limitations placed on those with faster refresh monitors, especially VRR support.
Hopefully, these are problems Govee can solve in time, and they really might only affect a small segment of the PC gaming community. For 1080p and 1440p players, I’d strongly recommend this for the added immersion alone, though if you’re running a high refresh rate 4K display it might be one to watch for a model refresh down the road.
