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Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro review: Turn your ceiling into art

Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro review: Turn your ceiling into art

TechHive Editors Choice At a glance Expert's Rating Pros Extremely easy to set up Two-tier lighting system Works with Matter Cons Govee’s app can be overwhelming Lofty price tag Our Verdict The Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro is a standout smart lighting solution with easy setup, vibrant two-tier lighting, and Matter support. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket I’ve been transforming my home with smart devices lately, and the Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro has made the biggest impact. In addition to its primary LED downlights, it has an LED light ring that casts a glow on the ceiling itself. It can shift the vibe in the room from productivity mode to cozy to party time in the blink of an eye. When we went about setting up offices in our remodeled loft, the decision to get a couple of these $130 Govee lights came easily; actually, I’d been eyeing them for a loooong time. We needed dimmable lights that got bright enough to fill up the space, and the 4300-lumen maximum brightness each of these puts out is more than enough. Specifications The Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro is a step-up model from the smaller and dimmer Govee Smart Ceiling Light ($80) that preceded it (available at Amazon ). The Pro model is larger (15 inches in diameter, versus 12 inches for the non-Pro model) and considerably brighter (the non-Pro model delivers 2,400 lumens, about 44 percent less). Once installed, the Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro looks as though it’s floating just below the ceiling, with that backlight casting a colorful glow onto it. Both models have LEDs behind their downlight panels, plus a ring of LED backlights around the fixture that cast a glow up on the ceiling. The LED arrays incorporate the usual red, green, and blue colors (RGB), along with independent segment control (IC) that allows for Govee’s lively animation effects. Upping the ante are cool and warm-white LEDs (WW) capable of casting white light in both cooler temperatures (up to a daylight-level 6,500 Kelvin, ideal for lighting a workspace) as well as very warm white temperatures (down to 2,200K, perfect for a cozy den). Setting up the Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro The Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro measures 15 inches in diameter and 2.95 inches thick. While its profile isn’t as svelte as the 1.18-inch-high 12-inch model, the Smart Ceiling Light Pro should still blend easily into your room design. The build quality feels solid, with a durable plastic housing that is both lightweight and sturdy. Govee says the installation process can be completed in five simple steps, a statement that I found largely holds true for those with basic electrical knowledge. The package includes a mounting bracket, screws, and wire nuts. I’ll be honest here and admit I only acted as a helper for this process as my husband is the DIY-wiz in this house, and also because I’m entirely too short to get any of this done without an extra-tall ladder. Gabriela Vatu My vertical challenges aside, the process wasn’t too difficult. We turned off the power at the circuit breaker, attached the mounting bracket to the ceiling, connected the wires (load and neutral), and then twisted the light fixture onto the bracket. This whole process is manageable for a single person, although that twisting bit took a few tries to get it done right. Once installed and powered on, the initial setup is managed through the Govee Home app. The app quickly detects the new device via Bluetooth and guides you through connecting it to your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network. The entire software setup process is intuitive and takes only a few minutes. Using the Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro This is where things get fun. As I mentioned earlier, the Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro has both a primary downlight and a ringed backlight. Once installed, the fixture looks as though it’s floating just below the ceiling, with that backlight casting a glow onto it. You can turn the primary and backlight on and off independently, but if you choose a color for one, the other will glow in the same color when it’s turned on. Gabriela Vatu The Govee app lets you choose from a palette of 16 million colors, adjust the brightness, pick pre-made scenes, sync the light to music, and a lot more. When I’m working, I usually set the ceiling light to a cooler, more energetic white color temperature; when I’m in the mood to chill, I go for one of the more relaxing, warmer temps. And if I want to read my Kindle, I usually just go for some vibe scenes. As mentioned, the lights can boast a maximum brightness of 4,300 lumens, which should be enough for rooms of up to 270 square feet. The Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro is compatible with the Matter smart home standard, so in addition to the Govee app, you can use the Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, or Samsung SmartThings apps to choose lighting scenes as well as set brightness levels, colors, white color temps, and the like. You can also create automations that turn the lights on and off or change colors or lighting scenes on schedules. Other things to consider While the Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro is an impressive product, it is not without its drawbacks. The Govee app offers so many options that you might find it to be a bit overwhelming in the beginning. And like many other smart home device, it’s dependent on a stable Wi-Fi connection. I haven’t encountered any issues with it, but everyone’s Wi-Fi situation is different. You should also consider that this fixture costs $129.99, a lofty price compared to what you’ll find from lesser-known brands. On the other hand, the premium 15-inch Philips Hue Datura Smart Ceiling Panel costs nearly twice as much as the Govee light. Should you buy the Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro? The Govee Smart Ceiling Light Pro is a top-tier smart lighting solution that delivers on its promises. Its combination of high brightness, excellent white light quality, and gorgeous RGB color effects makes it one of the most versatile ceiling fixtures on the market. The simple installation, robust app, and comprehensive smart home compatibility — including Matter support — further solidify its position as a leading product. Oh, and I absolutely love it. This is definitely not a purchase I regret. This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lighting products .

I’ll never buy a PC with soldered RAM

I’ll never buy a PC with soldered RAM

I like to build my PCs. I DIY my desktops, I over-configure my laptops, and I pick the best specs I can when choosing prebuilts. I like my systems personalized to my needs, as repairable and upgradeable as possible so I can give them mid-life refreshes and keep them going longer. That’s why I absolutely refuse to buy anything with soldered memory. I mean that for all the laptops partaking in this trend as well as the growing number of desktops that are starting to join in. Soldered RAM is entirely anti-consumer. It makes it impossible to upgrade a device. It craters repairability by adding a new point of failure. It reduces buyer choice, forcing you into more-expensive retailer and/or manufacturer configs to get the performance and capacity you need. All of this reduces the usable lifespan of a machine, making them more likely to end up in landfills sooner and leaving you no choice but to buy a full-on replacement as machines die. When RAM and storage prices are already absolutely ridiculous, the last thing we need is to give manufacturers a free pass to shortchange us even more. Here’s why I’ll never buy a laptop or desktop PC with soldered RAM and why you shouldn’t either if you care about consumer rights. It reduces consumer choice I love digging into PC specifications. I appreciate it’s my job and not everyone shares that interest, but I get a real kick out of finding the absolute best gaming laptop configurations for my money (and for my friends). Sometimes it just makes sense to buy the 8GB laptop and upgrade it later , or there might be a great deal for a laptop with larger capacity but lesser memory (or vice versa). This right here is a dying breed. Possessed Photography / Unsplash Maybe, in this current era of extreme memory pricing, you want to try buying a laptop without any RAM and adding some sticks you already have—or buy them later when you can afford it. Soldered memory cuts out those options entirely. You have to buy what the manufacturer gives you, and you can’t change it later. That means paying higher prices in the long term even if soldered RAM might be slightly cheaper up front. Meanwhile, the ability to swap out RAM on demand gives you more control and flexibility. The green argument The environmental impact of laptops as e-waste has never been more important to consider. We’re certainly paying more attention as we use and review them, and laptop manufacturers are also lowering their carbon footprints . Some people say that soldered memory uses fewer resources in the construction of a laptop—and they aren’t wrong. But without the ability to repair or upgrade a laptop, it’s much more likely to end up in a landfill sooner than it should ( dispose of it in an eco-friendly way ). If soldered RAM breaks, the laptop needs to be sent back to the manufacturer for a full repair, which itself is eco-unfriendly with all the unnecessary shipping back and forth. Or if it’s outside the warranty, it just gets binned altogether. On the other hand, if the RAM isn’t soldered, you can just swap it out. That’s why user-replaceable RAM is one of the key factors in whether a laptop is eco-friendly . And it’s not just about repairs. A laptop that’s showing its age after 3 to 4 years can be refreshed with bigger, faster sticks of RAM. Faster RAM can boost FPS in games and increase responsiveness in apps and services. It postpones the inevitable in a very real, very important way. But with soldered RAM, you don’t get the opportunity to do that. The lifespan of a laptop is artificially reduced to whichever component breaks first. This isn’t just e-waste—it’s a drain on your wallet, too. I hope you bought enough The lack of upgradeability with soldered RAM also means you need to be sure you’ve bought a laptop with enough memory to last you. Maybe you’re only using the laptop for light office work today, but what if you pick up gaming again a year from now? Or you want to noodle around with AI? Or maybe video editing? With an upgradeable laptop, you can always add more (or faster) RAM as your tasks evolve and demands increase. Not so with soldered RAM. Shoutout to Framework for continuing to champion modularity and repairability, even with recent price rises due to the AI-driven RAM shortage. Chris Hoffman / Foundry That means you either risk buying a laptop with less RAM now and hoping you don’t need more later, or buying a laptop with more RAM than you need just to play it safe but spending more than necessary in the meantime. It’s a lose-lose. Considering the price of RAM right now, that kind of purchasing decision can have real big-dollar ramifications down the road. Is that laptop really premium? Premium laptops are expensive. If you’re going to spend all that money, you better be getting excellent hardware and features for it. While upgradeable RAM is more likely in higher-priced premium laptops, there’s also a bit of paradox here because the premium range is where you tend to find the most thin-and-light designs—and thin-and-light laptops benefit greatly from soldered RAM, which helps to reduce the overall weight and thickness. This shouldn’t be a premium feature, but it increasingly feels like it is. Gordon Mah Ung / Foundry Shouldn’t premium laptop designs feel… well, premium? To me, that means they should offer flexibility, durability, and longevity. Sure, the thin-and-light approach is great for portability, but there’s so much more to the laptop ownership experience. If I’m buying a laptop that looks and feels like a high-end piece of kit, I want all the potential benefits for the long term, not just something that feels premium on its first day. What about resale? You know who I’m not buying a second-hand laptop from? Someone who’s selling a laptop with soldered RAM. Not only on principle, but also because of the reduced longevity we discussed above. I’m not alone on this, either. Which means when you come to resell your laptop with soldered RAM, you’re reducing your pool of potential buyers—and that means putting up a reduced price. It’s one of several reasons why buying laptops with soldered RAM is a horrible deal . Even if you aren’t selling it and are just handing it off to your younger sibling, spouse, or friend, the value of that hand-me-down is reduced. They now face all the same lack of upgradeability and repairability as you did, only now it’s already a few years down the line. Killing the consumer with kindness Soldered RAM can be faster than traditional plug-in SO-DIMMs. It can be lighter and thinner and allow for suitably slim thin-and-light laptops. When manufacturers pass on the savings, it even has the potential to make a laptop cheaper. But it has many other weak points—and frankly, it offends my tech consumer sensibilities. Soldered RAM reduces consumer choice. It makes pricing for memory even more arbitrary than it already is. It makes it so I can’t define my laptop the exact way I want it to be. All of that reduces the fun of enthusiast tuning options and mid-life refreshes. It also normalizes disposable PC designs at a time when right-to-repair and eco-friendly designs are finally filtering in to mainstream device manufacturing. I refuse to support soldered RAM. For me, the fundamental appeal of the PC ecosystem is that it’s DIY and personalizable at its core. It’s a high-tech, garage-build industry that stands apart from other pre-packaged device industries like tablets and smartphones. PCs are supposed to be different—and to make sure it stays that way, I’ll continue to vote with my wallet. Further reading: Looking to upgrade your PC during the current RAM shortage and pricing crisis? Check out my tips on how to get the RAM you need without spending too much .

Nvidia’s DLSS 5 isn’t a tool. It’s an invasion

Nvidia’s DLSS 5 isn’t a tool. It’s an invasion

Why is Nvidia’s DLSS 5 causing gamers to go insane? Because it makes a game look how Nvidia thinks it should look—and uses AI to do it. Nvidia’s newly-announced DLSS 5 is an Nvidia feature that injects new details like textures and lighting via generative AI into supported games, all done using the GPU. It’s quickly become the focal point of an increasingly vicious battle between human artists and AI. It’s a step further than even Microsoft is going. Last week, Microsoft tried to convince game developers—backed by chipmakers like AMD, Intel, and yes, Nvidia—that AI should be built into the foundation of PC games, but only as a tool that developers can choose to take advantage of. But games are art, and art has purpose. If the GPU simply generates AI-generated content that neither the user nor developer asked for, doesn’t that detract from the experience? At that point, you have to ask yourself: what’s the dividing line between AI content, art, and slop that’s merely being forced down your throat? DLSS 5 isn’t really DLSS at all What we now consider “AI” began as generative AI art, where users asked services like Midjourney to produce computer-generated images via descriptive prompts. The results aren’t “art” in the traditional sense, yet the output is still technically impressive. I’ve never looked at AI art as something to value . My home’s walls are full of art that we’ve bought from real local artists, not drawn by a computer—but I can still appreciate the way AI breaks down and analyzes writing in the same way that noir borrows heavily from icons like Dashiell Hammett, Hitchcock, and The Big Sleep . I’ve always appreciated the technical ability of generative AI to create images, but I always understood I wasn’t creating “art.” I was commissioning content. In the meantime, of course, “AI” evolved into actual tools, like command-line instructions via Claude Code and various features within Adobe Photoshop. Now, even Nvidia uses it. But as a number of my colleagues pointed out on the most recent The Full Nerd podcast , Nvidia’s first mistake was charactering DLSS 5 as a tool. It’s not. While Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) feature is synonymous with performance improvements. You might not care how DLSS features like upscaling and frame generation work, but with those the AI is designed to make games feel smoother ( “fake frames” or not ). But with DLSS 5, that’s not the case at all. Instead, DLSS 5 is merely a visual enhancement. Nvidia seems to want us to appreciate DLSS 5 with all the technical admiration we’d have for a generative AI art service like Midjourney, Udio, or Runway, but also to think of it as a practical, useful tool. It’s neither. Nvidia’s examples suggest that DLSS 5 adds additional detail via generative AI where the original rendered graphics either suggested it or left it out altogether. In reality, the early demonstration—and yes, it’s just a demonstration—have added an “uncanny valley” commonality to familiar video game characters, prompting calls of “AI slop.” And those are just the examples Nvidia supplied. Could Far Cry 3 ‘s Vaas end up with dimples? What about Darth Vader with rouged cheeks or lipstick? Shao Khan with dyed hair? AI can make mistakes, we’re reminded. Maybe that’s hyperbole… or maybe it’s not. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has countered that users have gotten it completely wrong and that game developers remain in control of all of the creative elements they’re used to. PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray, who saw the DLSS 5 demo first-hand, also seems convinced that we’re all wrong, and that the additional AI lighting and textures won’t detract at all—possibly the opposite, in fact. That still doesn’t answer the question of who exactly benefits from DLSS 5 being turned on in the first place. And whose fault is it if something visually glitches, especially if that glitch varies by PC? The artistic cost of DLSS 5 Whether you like it or not, AI is becoming more and more integrated into the PC. Microsoft and chip vendors are laying the foundation for AI to become integrated inside PC graphics. Intel, AMD, and Nvidia backed up Microsoft in introducing the next evolution of DirectX , the API responsible for playing video games on PC (and soon, the next Xbox). AI is also being used to develop shaders—”small model” instructions for rendering scene elements and “large model” for entire scenes. Instead of compressing textures, Microsoft wants AI cores (like the Tensor cores in Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5000 GPUs) to extrapolate what those textures “should” be. Same goes for lighting: AI will try and guess how light rays “should” bounce off objects. Instead of actually modeling light as it bounces off one object to other (path tracing), AI will guess. Nvidia already uses the “large model” technology in existing versions of DLSS, where frame generation technology looks at the entire scene itself and tries to determine the path of a ball, for example, as it moves behind trees. This interjects “fake” frames, sure, but performance increases. In this, I’m no purist. If Nvidia’s DLSS or Intel’s XeSS can make games accessible to more users simply by increasing frame rates, terrific! I think that’s a marvelous use of AI. But games aren’t just technical achievements. They’re art, too. Art directors design games with purpose. The way a character looks defines who and what they are; environments are lit to lead and conceal and suggest. Would Expedition 33 be the same game with a nu-metal soundtrack and a design inspired by Pokémon ? Of course not. That’s hyperbole, I know, but my point stands: even altering a game in subtle ways can have a profound impact. The AI invasion continues The fact that Nvidia is doing this via AI matters. Transforming familiar characters into plasticky, well-lit influencer clones is one thing. Games, however, feel like a safe haven against AI’s blitzkrieg into our daily lives… and so this kind of encroachment feels all the more violating. I still think there’s a place for AI-generated content, even if it isn’t art. Art is what you pay for at the theater, or listen to, or read; content is the illustration accompanying the pamphlet on new linoleum that’s left in your mailbox. Art requires effort and insight and discussion; content is the machine summary of a Teams call you were too sick to attend. Some details, like the additional detail on the shawl, look good. But are the lines on the face a plus or a minus? Nvidia / YouTube Nvidia thinks its additions will strengthen the artistic contributions of game developers. But Nvidia is wrong. DLSS 5 is simply the sprinkling of AI content on top of games, devaluing them in the process. A number of my family members (including my wife and cousins) are creators: writers, journalists, voice actors, and stage actors. Fortunately, AI still can’t replace a human performance, especially to a live audience. But that performance isn’t just the work of the actor upon the stage, but also the set designers, the directors, the creatives who plan and run lighting and audio. Providing those creatives with cheap, effective tools is one thing—taking over their outputs is quite another. Buying a video game means paying creators to give you a tour of their creative vision. It’s a contract and an agreement. One where you shouldn’t have to let Nvidia bully its way in and dictate to you what parts of the tour you see, or what the tour itself should look like. Yes, you may be able to turn DLSS 5 off. But until then, I absolutely will defend the rights of consumers and creators to stand up, draw a line, and refuse to let Nvidia cross it. It’s a line that we actually can draw right now, and that in itself still feels meaningful.

Investigation: the US FedRAMP authorized Microsoft service GCC High to handle sensitive government data in 2024, despite years of concerns about its security (ProPublica)

Investigation: the US FedRAMP authorized Microsoft service GCC High to handle sensitive government data in 2024, despite years of concerns about its security (ProPublica)

ProPublica : Investigation: the US FedRAMP authorized Microsoft service GCC High to handle sensitive government data in 2024, despite years of concerns about its security —  Zero Trust: Inside Microsoft's Cybersecurity Failures  —  Reporting Highlights  — “Cloud First”: To move federal agencies to the cloud …