RGB lighting has exploded, with dozens of brands vying for the honor of gifting your home with living photons. The competition has been great at making rainbow lights a more accessible dream for everyone, but it has also created a confusing landscape where each LED seems to work in its own proprietary way, leading to frustrating inconsistencies, incompatibilities, and just some budget-friendly lights . That’s how I felt about Govee when I first looked at one of Govee’s offerings, the Dreamview G1 Pro, two years ago, but now, reviewing the brand’s fresh Cob Strip Light Pro, it’s clear that these LEDs have shined.
Govee Cob Strip Light Pro is available in two lengths, 9.8 feet or 16.4 feet, and can be easily cut to shorter lengths. Once cut, it’s cut for good. It cannot be extended, which, while melancholy, is quite common for this breed of lightweight.
RGBIC+W style lighting is a step up from many standard RGB-only offerings. It allows for glossy transitions between colors and even obtaining really pleasant shades of white thanks to a dedicated white diode. It’s just one white LED, though, and the lack of a dedicated sultry white in the mix means it’s a bit more narrow than options with more. Supposedly 1,260 LEDs are wired together, and the colors are overall glossy, energetic, and quite effortless, as advertised. It is packaged in a adaptable diffuser unit with a self-adhesive acrylic back that allows you to stick it there.
Like most of Govee’s fresh lights, this Cob Strip supports Matter technology, and adding it to Google Home required relatively little effort. I can do basic things like adjust the color and brightness of the entire bar and turn it on and off. This was really useful, but if I want to do something particularly fun with the lights, the Govee app is required.
Strip Light Pro specifications
Length: 9.8ft – Also available in 5.4ft. You can trim it, you can’t extend it
Communication: Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz + Bluetooth
Color: RGBIC+W
Control: Recommended mobile application. Desktop app and Matter support for basic control.
Characteristics: Microphone providing audio response
Suggested retail price: 100 dollars | 100 pounds | 142 Australian dollars
I wouldn’t call the Govee Home app bad outright, but it is incredibly complicated. There are menus, social sections, a shop, and probably some other things I haven’t found yet. While setting up the lights in the app is quite plain, sometimes finding the settings can be a real ordeal. There are plenty of customization options available with scenes, options to respond to music, and even AI-powered suggestions. Some are easier to find, let alone understand, than others.
You can also create Dreamview scenes if you find an option that allows you to synchronize several lights for a cohesive arrangement. You can also check it via the Razer app to work with more devices. There’s plenty to play with, but it’s not always effortless to tell what any of them will do until you play around with them, and while you can edit them, more control would make a huge difference.
The lights have their own microphone, so by making them respond to sounds, you can choose where they receive the audio signal from. This was perfect for my drum setup because all my music and sounds come through my headphones and the bar only hears my drum hits. The lights respond to my physical impacts and look super kinetic while streaming. Dreamview even allowed me to create a cohesive scene between my drum kit and the lightweight curtains behind me. It’s a really frigid setup, but it’s not exactly what I wanted.
Cob Strip has 12 sections for which you can individually set the colors. Thanks to the brilliant, energetic LEDs, this allows for really nice gradients and contrasts. The only thing I can’t do is create a scene that responds to music using these sections specifically. When I put it on my electric drum kit for YARG, I was hoping to set each section to match the color of the pad it was near, but I just couldn’t find a way.
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Buy if…
✅ Looking for brilliant ambient lighting: These lights work best when they paint a room with color and add atmosphere to it. They can vibrate to the beat of the music using their own microphone or phone audio, or just create a frigid scene.
✅ You want to turn off the camera lighting: The color and lightweight cast by these strips is quite impressive and can easily cover enormous areas, providing a huge variety of evenly diffused appearance. It even works well with backlit keys as long as you’re content with the white available.
✅ You’re here for the features: In this package you have several meters of truly versatile LEDs. As much as I complain, the Govee app, while hard to navigate and fully understand, can be effortless to employ and allows you to get a lot done at a basic level.
Don’t buy if…
❌ Are you looking for lighting that you want to see directly in your broadcasts or videos: These lights are really brilliant, and the downside is that they glow even on the dimmest setting. Your fun RGB effects will be wasted when everything looks white on your stream.
❌ You just want some LEDs: Govee Cob Strip Light Pro is quite a feature-rich option, but all these features boost the price. You can get much cheaper lighting setups if you’re content to forego options like RGBIC, matter, sound response, etc.
❌ You will not employ the Govee app: You can do basic things with Matter and the Govee desktop client, but to get the most out of these lights, you’ll have to download the app and probably spend some time confused.
At least the densely packed LEDs produce some brilliant lightweight, and Govee’s Cob Strip is brighter and softer than God’s lightsaber. It’s great for shedding lightweight on scenes and providing ambiance hidden under a desk, but is less useful for being actively in front of the camera.
Even reducing it completely was still too much of a strain on my webcams, causing them to constantly go obscure, even though my eyes were providing a mostly pleasant experience. Additionally, my phone’s camera picked up slight movement in the lights at lower brightness settings. I often noticed that what the lights were shining on had a much more correct color than the camera lights themselves. Diffusion does a great job of making everything look the way you want it to in real life, which is great for room atmosphere, but doesn’t seem to be very helpful for cameras.
When it comes to streaming or video, turning the strips away from the camera and asking them to paint the surroundings with lights is where Govee Cob Strip absolutely shines. The colors are colorful and refined, and the dispersion gives them an even shade. White, and even artificial sultry white, is good enough to be used as a key lightweight, and with this strip you can achieve a very wide range of lighting on your desk with one lamp. If you can place them directly in your space, this is probably one of the better lighting options for this purpose, thanks to the individual control of the segments.
Govee’s Cob Strip Light Pro is an extremely brilliant and energetic strip lightweight that you can do a lot with. It’s not the best choice for on-camera work, but when it comes to painting a scene with lightweight, the power of the LEDs combined with the spread creates a powerful package. The monkey-paw experience that is the Govee app leans mostly towards the useful side, and there are plenty of options there too. Before you make your final decision, you just want to know what type of lightweight you need.
