When the DreamView G1 is at its best, it fully delivers on the immersive gameplay experience Govee promises. Unfortunately, only the brightest and most vibrant tones are picked up by the camera, and games with more subdued color pallets may leave some players feeling disappointed. A clunky app and some other lackluster features make the overall package tough to recommend as it is. The hardware overall though is top-notch, and with the potential for future updates to the app, the DreamView G1 may still fit perfectly into your PC gaming setup.

Specifications
  • Brand: Govee
  • Music Reactive: Yes
  • Color Composition: RGBIC
  • Connectivity: Bluetooth
  • Price: $140
  • Working Temperature: -10°C to 45°C/14°F to 113°F
  • Power Input: 12VDC 3A
  • Hub Required: No
  • Multicolor Capable: Yes, uses pixel LEDs
  • Type: Light bars and TV backlight
Pros
  • Incredibly bright and colorful
  • The light bars, neon strip, and gaming camera look cool and fit with any setup
  • Syncing lights to gameplay feels great
Cons
  • Unintuitive and messy Home App
  • Poor adaptive audio performance
  • Most light scenes you can choose from are impractical strobes
Buy This Product
DreamView G1 Gaming Light Kit

The Govee DreamView G1 Pro gaming light kit is an immersive lighting system designed for PC monitors between twenty-four and twenty-nine inches. RGB lights are as popular as ever for any gaming PC setup, and these lights are powerful enough to illuminate surprisingly big spaces. But just how immersive and adaptive is the experience Govee has to offer?

What Is the Govee DreamView G1 Pro, Exactly?

There’s no shortage of options when it comes to gaming light rigs or DIY lighting setups for a more immersive gaming experience. Govee’s new DreamView gaming lights opt for mounting a camera to the top of your monitor that senses the colors on screen. The camera attachment has an overall minimal design that’s no more intrusive than any mountable webcam.

The actual lighting for the system consists of a neon pixel LED strip that will be mounted to the back of your monitor and two free-standing light bars. All of the lighting components look really nice on their own even before becoming a part of your larger setup. The light bars have a sleek metallic finish, and the light strip has a flexible casing that acts as a diffuser while also looking more appealing than exposed LEDs like some monitor-mounted lights do.

In video-adaptive mode, the Govee camera watches your screen and drives the lighting to match on-screen visuals. In theory, anyway.

light bars close up
light bars close up

What's in the Box?

The DreamView G1 box has quite a bit to unpack. The first item out of the box is the Gaming Camera that acts as the central hub of the light kit. The camera has a spring-loaded hinge and an adhesive pad to grip the top of your display. On the back of the camera, there are ports for power, audio, and lighting attachments. That’s right, all of the lights involved with this setup have to be plugged directly into the camera.

CAMERA

Govee realized that most people probably aren’t eager to add more wires to their setup, and they have included some ways to minimize their exposure; There are two velcro straps used in the packaging of the neon light strip that can be repurposed as cable ties if you so desire.

light bar cu

The power and audio cables come separately in the package, while the light bars and strip have their cables attached.

Everything else in the box is used for mounting the neon strip and calibrating the system.

here are a total of nine mounting clips of three different sizes, two alcohol wipes, and eight funny-looking orange squares. These are foam stickers that you’ll temporarily attach to your screen to help calibrate the camera. Lastly are two screen positioning cards to help you place the mounting clips on the back of your monitor based on your display’s aspect ratio.

Setting Up the DreamView

Before you can get into the weeds of calibrating and readjusting the bars or the camera, you’ll have to mount the neon light strip to the back of your monitor. Govee made this process easy with the inclusion of the two-screen positioning cards. These cards fit the aspect ratio of compatible monitors and have holes cut in them at the optimal spots for the mounting clips to hold the neon light strip in place.

set up

After giving your monitor a quick disinfecting wipe with the alcohol pads, sticking on the adhesive mounting clips is a breeze. Govee says that the DreamView G1 is only compatible with flat-backed monitors, but the mounting clips have a generous amount of bend to them that give you a little bit of leeway on the shape of your display.

neon bar set up

Given the variety of unique PC gaming setups and the fact that the DreamView G1 is compatible with a range of screen sizes, you can probably imagine that setup and calibration will take some time.

calibrate 2

Adjusting the distance between the light bars and your monitor as well as controlling other light sources in the room all have noticeable effects on how the G1 performs. Govee even suggests placing a dark mouse pad on your desk directly below the camera while you’re calibrating to prevent any light reflections off the surface of your desk. All of these factors go into how the DreamView will perform and ultimately it’s up to you and how much time you’re willing to spend playing around with all of these variables to get the most accurate reading.

calibrate

Now, with the neon strip mounted, the light bars in place, and the camera fully calibrated, you’re ready to begin your immersive gaming experience! You’ll just have to download the Govee Home app, and use BlueTooth to connect your DreamView G1 to your smartphone.

The Govee Home App

The Govee Home app is the control center for any and all Govee products, so if you already own any other Govee accessories, the G1 gaming light kit will feel right at home with the rest of your smart lights. However, the Govee Home app itself isn’t exactly the ideal command center for an immersive experience.

If the only thing you’re planning on using the app for is to control your DreamView light kit, you’re going to be ignoring a large chunk of the Govee Home app.

Beyond the tab used to keep track of and control your devices, there are entire sections of what appears to be a bizarre attempt at a Govee-centered social media platform. Of course, there is also a section where you can shop for more Govee products, and more egregiously, banner ads also make an appearance.

While all of these features are annoying, they are at least avoidable for the most part.

Unfortunately, even the portion of the app used to directly control the DreamView G1 is heavily congested by menus within menus and an unintuitive design.

Once you’re actually controlling the DreamView, there are essentially four different modes you can set your lights to: Music, Video, Color, and Scene.

Music Mode

While the DreamView G1 is primarily designed for an adaptive gaming experience, the adaptive music feature is probably what got me most excited about the product. The idea of having colorful RGB lights dance and swirl to the rhythm of whatever I’m listening to only became more enticing with the inclusion of an audio splitter cable that can plug directly into your speakers.

The music mode within the app has options for your lights to sync through your device’s microphone, your phone’s microphone, or hardwired from your audio source via the splitter cable plugged into the DreamView’s camera. Sadly, this feature is the most disappointing of all the modes.

No matter what method you use to sync your music, the lights will flash seemingly at random. Occasionally, this random flashing will sync up to the downbeat of a song or to an impactful audio queue in gameplay, but even if there is absolutely no sound coming from your device, the lights will continue to flash randomly.

While this might be fine for an impromptu bedroom disco, the continued flashing that happens while your speakers are silent completely shatters the illusion of the lights really adapting to the sounds your PC is making. You won't be using this mode for immersive gaming, anyway.

Thankfully, the other modes do get better, so let’s just move on to those.

Video Mode

Video mode is the setting designed for the adaptive and immersive gaming experience that Govee is advertising. This is the setting that will change the lighting to reflect whatever color is being displayed on the screen.

Video mode does work much better than the music mode, but it still isn’t perfect. Even after spending hours adjusting the white balance, changing the position of the light bars and my monitor, and recalibrating the camera with foam stickers, it is still less accurate than I had hoped for, and this is likely a limitation of the camera-based approach.

govee gameplay

When the colors on the screen are bright and vibrant, or if there is a lot of a single color, the G1 does a great job. But obviously, that isn’t always the case. If colors are muted or on the darker side, or if the scene is highly dynamic, the G1 leaves a lot to be desired.

For darker colors, the DreamView seems to default to either solid red or blue depending on how you adjust your white balance. So you can always expect to see a lot of one of those two colors anytime there are black values, dark scenes, or any other color that isn’t heavily saturated.

Color & DIY

Color mode is easily the most straightforward setting on the Govee Home app and doesn’t have any performance issues as a result. This mode gives you the option to set every individual segment of the neon strip and light bars to any color you want.

Whether you have multiple different colors on each light bar or set the entire system to one vibrant shade, the color will always remain static. This mode can essentially be thought of as a colorful lamp.

In addition to a color mode, there is also a tab for DIY that allows you to further customize the behavior of the lights. In DIY you can choose between multiple colors and change the way the lights flash and fade between them. Sadly, this mode is really where some of the unintuitive design of the app is on full display. I found the process of saving my DIY color pattern and its accessibility to be such a pain, that I’ve had no desire to program any new ones and would rather just stick with the other settings.

Scenes From a Desktop

Scene mode gives you the choice between at least 42 different light displays with names like Dance Party, Dreamlike, Portal, and Racing Game. Some of these scenes seem like demonstrations of what users could be able to create in DIY mode, but most of them have patterns that are too complicated to be created this way.

Some of these scenes I found to be extremely pleasant, and I frequently had my DreamView set to a few favorites. The stability they provide is a nice change of pace from the adaption of video mode that will more or less match your screen.

As with all other previous modes, these scenes also have their fair share of issues. Apart from the few scenes I really enjoyed and found myself returning to, the remaining 35 or so were basically unbearable. No matter if I was sitting at my PC or simply using one of these scenes to illuminate the rest of the room, the abrupt strobe-like flashing on display in most of these scenes could be genuinely headache-inducing.

Light Up the Dark

When the Govee DreamView G1 Pro gaming light kit works, it really works well. When the light bars and neon strip sync up perfectly with a huge boss attack in a game or match the atmosphere of the open world, it really was an immersive gaming experience like I’ve never had.

Even outside the context of video games, watching anything else on my screen occasionally had bombastic moments of color that were amazing to watch, and even seeing the lights react to scrolling by an image on an article I’m reading is oddly satisfying.

But those truly immersive moments were few and far between. Most of the time it was more of just a general sense of the overall color scheme on display that added a nice ambiance to my viewing experience.

While I found most of the scene selection to be literally hard to look at, the few that I did enjoy have been on almost constantly since I’ve had the G1 Pro. I can’t understate just how powerful these lights are. They have just about replaced every other light source in my room where my PC is and are overall much more pleasant than my overhead lights. However, the Govee Dreamview is primarily marketed as an immersive gaming experience; and not just a bright and colorful lamp.