Gadgetory

welcome to part two of how to change the color of your motherboard it will be the epic conclusion and I we don't actually know yet if it's going to be epic win or epic fail but stay tuned with us as we try and figure out the best technique for removing the paint from the contacts and then test the board to see if it actually works because if it survives this mod this is the board that's going to be going in my personal system so I need it to actually be functional in order for me to be comfortable doing that wish me luck cooler masters case mod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries close February 7th 2015 click now to learn more so this is the conclusion of our two-parter on motherboard painting and I'd like to both finish up the process which some of you thought was done but actually had a lot more work left to do and address some of the criticism in the comments from part one so let's pick up where we left off just having removed the tape the quality of the paint job is just not what I was hoping for from a distance it looks pretty good but I was extremely disappointed that I had missed a couple of masking areas leaving overspray on some motherboard components and even the PCB some viewers suggested a liquid masking material that peels off might be a good bet for next time but given how much flack I'm taking for making this a two-part video because it took me two days I figure if I spent another day fussing about with learning a new masking technique you'll be none too pleased but I was at least happy to observe that with some rubbing alcohol and cotton buds I was able to remove overspray from caps and even the PCB very quickly and effectively and Oh sometimes to effectively I actually ended up making a total mess of this PCI Express slot just by rubbing up against it some ghetto painting followed that screw up I didn't have a brush handy and I was trying to finish this in a timely manner so the bazillion pack of cotton balls that Nick bought actually allowed me to cover the damaged spot and even though the surface finished kind of sucks in that spot now it's hard to notice unless you put your face right next to it one thing that worked better than I expected for touch-ups was spraying a bit of paint onto little metal poker and dabbing that onto key areas I was able to fix up a lot of little areas where the masking was too close to a vertical surface to get good coverage including the PCI Express slots RAM slots one of the USB 3 headers and even the red accent on the vrm heatsink assembly so basically everything now a lot of folks asked why we used the paint material we did rather than Plasti Dip or at least priming it first the reason we didn't prime is that I wanted to avoid any more material buildup than necessary on the slot contacts and the reason for no Plasti Dip is that while it can be removed which is convenient when you scratch it it has a thick rubbery consistency that could have gummed up the slots and necessitated filling the PCIe USB 3 SATA and RAM slots with something to protect them such as cardboard or dead components but even I don't have dead ddr4 lying around and while I do have cardboard it would have made even paint coverage much more difficult especially for slots that will be left empty in the finished system we're not going for a two-tone color scheme here so the reason we did it the way we did was that we wanted the paint to flake off easily from the contacts this just makes me feel horrible inside ok so we're gonna go ahead and repeatedly install and uninstall this why don't we do three per slot again just to oh it's just as bad this idea clearly seemed idiotic to a lot of you and honestly I was huh on your side hearing the crunch of installing components into each slot for the first time but I can assure you that some of the other ideas in the video comments things like desoldering the slots to remove them painting them and re soldering them are much worse I'm actually not aware of anyone ever successfully removing and replacing a PCIe slot let alone a Ram slot on a modern lead-free solder board and stop stop do not post the link because even if someone has done one slot without breaking the board they didn't do eight on a single board so let's not treat that like a viable way to do this I mean while it's not perfect our technique is one that has least been successfully used before anyway with three insertions in each slot behind us we turned our attention to tearing down a test bench to fire up the board and find out if it works at this stage I had literally no idea if the board was going to work and contrary to what some of you seem to think that I don't care about the hardware and was just ruining a motherboard for fun I was really really worried I had a dead rampage v extreme on my hands and genuinely wanted it to work it's not like Asus is gonna send me a new one because I painted the one they gave me in the first place but this channel is supposed to be about pushing the boundaries and doing crazy stuff that you wouldn't risk your own hardware to do on your own so honestly I think a lot of the crap about how this is an unnecessary project is horseshit we're not about to stop ghetto modding and experimenting with this stuff because it's unnecessary we don't consider it a waste of time and money to do something like this our monetary investment is like four dollars in paint and the time that we spend doing it is time we would have spent making a video anyway so yeah we risk losing the board but that happens when you're trying new things which is our job and anyway all the hate about how we killed the board should probably have waited until we actually found out whether the board was going to work or not so we started logically we have dim slot a one which spat out an error code but at least managed to display some post codes on the board then we followed up with dim slot a2 which caused a reboot loop even worse and then success dim a3 posted followed by dim a4 which also posted so um I expect retractions in the comments under part one from everyone who guaranteed the board was dead and called us stupid for basically turning it into garbage which actually no I don't expect retractions this is the Internet so anyway a few more tense insertions in the first two slots later and all four slots had successfully posted then it was time for the real acid test would the motherboard run all four slots in quad channel and yes so we took it to the next level and enabled XMP in the BIOS our first attempt at 2800 megahertz did fail but our second attempt at three and megahertz a higher frequency but more stable RAM divider on our board succeeded and we even managed to do some I 264 stress testing in the OS to validate that the system was operating correctly oh yeah and I forgot to mention we checked in the BIOS to make sure our video card was running at PCIe 16x as well so the board is fully functional take that haters all right so here we are to be clear guys this project is not something I'd recommend like seriously we're having a do as I say not as I do moment here yes it worked the paint we ended up using covered extraordinarily well given that we didn't use any primer and the technique we used with some tweaks like better masking and maybe the use of a paintbrush for touch-ups delivered a great 10-foot mod and even a decent 5 foot mod but there is no guarantee whatsoever that you'd have the same success and for folks who pay $500 for their LG motherboards this is not something I'd be comfortable endorsing with that said I'm extremely pleased with the results and I'm really looking forward to installing this board in my system for my x99 upgrade I've been having a hard time finding the perfect board since even the high end stuff that we get to play with around here at the office either head deal-breaker features for me like chipset fans or little things like the wrong color scheme so this solved my admittedly very first world problem and while I'm not sure if I'd do it again I'm really glad that I did it this time speaking of things we'll be very glad you did today's episode sponsor is audible Khan and with over a hundred and fifty thousand audiobooks to choose from including New York Times bestsellers like all the light we cannot see by Anthony Dewar there's always something to listen to on audible you can download audiobooks to your mobile device so you can listen to the network or in the car really anywhere I mean that's what mobile means and the membership not only includes one audiobook credit per month but also other perks like discounts on additional ones if you just can't get enough so check out audible at audible.com slash Linus to get your first one three and to start finding more time to read or listen or whatever we need a new verb for this guy's thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike if you thought it sucked leave a comment letting me know if you have feelings that are more complicated than this also check out the link in our video description to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can give us a monthly contribution or you can change your bookmark for Amazon to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff on Amazon that kind of stuff helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe and do as I say not as I do