Gadgetory

hey guys welcome to pulse hardware today's video is a quick tutorial on the humble sli bridge that is rates and how to do a quick and easy modification to it to make it look much prettier purely for aesthetic purposes this is one of the things I've learned how to do or kind of retaught myself as I've been working on the arctic panther this is not however the final Arctic Panther build blog I have been working on that and it has been coming along and I will give you guys a quick little update on that towards the end of this video but for now how did I go from this to this how can you do that - what do you need to do that and does this apply to crossfire bridges as well yes yes it does although those are less relevant now that Hawaii and Fiji based GPUs don't need them but I digress onto the tutorial so many computers especially those with a side panel window the sli bridge is just in a very visible position and we've seen lots of systems built that don't seem to do the best job when it comes to actually well keeping them visually appealing they stand out a lot especially if you have one of these older or cheaper SLI bridges like this one they don't really do much when it comes to aesthetic considerations there are other sli bridges available of course like this one from ROG with the ROG logo on it so that is black and much more appealing or here's another one for eat from EVGA for example that has the nvidia sli logo these will work but what if you're like me and I actually don't have any ROG hardware in this system I'd have an asus motherboard but I also don't have any EVGA hardware in this particular system so I felt like those wouldn't really work out so what I did was I took an old ribbon style sli bridge just like this one and I painted it and now it looks like this and I think that looks much better now I did this sort of quickly and without much research or consideration so thankfully for this video I have done that but I will say right from the get-go that this sli bridge works I've tested it and that is actually the second thing you should do after getting all of your equipment together is you should test your SLI bridges or your SLI bridge to make sure it works well let's talk about equipment you might need other than the sli bridge you need paint and this is the paint that I used originally this is an all piss paint it works on metal wood plastic and more I liked this paint cuz it's matte black and I like the matte black finish I didn't want my SLI bridge to be like too blingy and stand out ish I feel like if something's in my system and I want it to stand out it needs to blend in perfectly or like warrant standing out so for that reason I was just looking for more of a subtle approach to the sli bridge and that's why I went matte black but this is the paint I actually about to paint some of the my wires and some of the other stuff in the system and the main concern with the paint you choose is whether or not it's conductive and lots of paint can be conductive how conductivities depends on what the actual materials are the chemicals are that are in the paint and then also can depend on whether it's wet or not so definitely if you are painting at all make sure that you let everything dry completely before you do any testing the paint I will recommend that you use if you're going to do this project at home is going to be plasti dip because Plasti Dip is it has its completely non kentucky conductive it's more like a plastic coating and you can also peel it off so you should screw up you can maybe start over that sort of thing so today I'm gonna be using this to do a paint job on this SLI bridge here here is the SLI bridge I did with a matte black finish I think it turned out very pretty but the concern here again when it comes to the conductivity is these terminals and there's actually some voltage running through there so that's why conductivity would be bad if you were to bridge connections up here you could potentially damage your well your graphics card and other things so that's why when I was testing this one at least I didn't do it with mine and ATT is for example I use nine sixties but did you you should just test beforehand or maybe just use plastidip that's probably the best bet plastidip you shouldn't be concerned about the other things to worry about when it comes to step three which we're going to do here in just a second which is masking is you might notice some very very small connector connectors right in there in between the plug and the thing and I would I would avoid if you could getting paint clogged up in that because that would be bad so step three is masking sorry I didn't mention in the equipment that you need some some painters tape some masking tape that is important here's all I really did to mask it off I use two small pieces to cover the actual plugs on the end because we don't want to get any paints up in there that might be blocking the connection between the plug and the graphics cards SLI fingers other than that I've left everything as is and again there is a gap in between here and if you're not using Plasti Dip if you're using anything that might be conductive be really careful about getting paints clogged up under there if you're using the Plasti Dip even if plastic gets in there it should still be fine as far as the connection goes so no worries there let's move on to the next stage though which is which is painting here's my setup outside I have a bit of cardboard to paint on use more than this if you're at all concerned about the surface you're painting on whether that I got to shake the can up and then I'm going to start painting I'm gonna start painting off to the side and then I'm gonna do I'm gonna swipe across I'll start over here and then swipe across the thing and I'll start over here and come back and I gotta turn it around the other way and do it on the other side as well and then after it's dried a bit I'll flip it and do the same thing from the other side okay so this was a single coat I've given it plenty of time to dry now well it's only been about 10 or 15 minutes but plastidip dries pretty quickly and it's looking pretty good actually I'm I'm happy with this else I got this camo version of Plasti Dip which I wasn't sure what it meant it was but I think it means it's a little bit more matte of a finish so here's the Plasti Dip one on the Left versus one I did with the other paints on the right both looking pretty nice let me just peel off the masking here and we'll take a closer look at it there's a downside to the Plasti Dip is it all wants to come off in one piece so I'm gonna be a little bit more careful removing the other side I worked a little bit better alright so there's your close-up look at the finished at least outside you can barely see some of the like ASIS labeling that was on there and stuff before but other than that it's pretty much all covered maybe a little bit of a Miss spot under here I could do another coat on this but I want to keep it as thin as as possible and I think this will do just fine also not too much buildup on the connection points right up in there either so I'm happy with that a couple final points to make on the sli bridge side one is gonna be that these are flexible you might notice unless you're using a rigid PCB one which you could probably do the same thing with I imagine but if using a flexible one that's another reason why the plastidip might be a good choice because it is flexible if you're using other paint that you've deemed to be non conductive maybe consider choosing one that is the exact correct size for the spacing of your graphics cards that's kind of what I've done here just because I don't want it I don't want it bulging out either I don't like that look I just wanted to direct three slot spacer which are actually pretty common so just get that if if you're worried about because it flexing flexing the SLI bridge after it's painting could cause the paint to crack or that kind of thing but that's pretty much all for the SLI bridge part of this but I'm I promise you guys another quick look at my ongoing custom article build here so there it is in its current state you'll notice I've put my custom sleeved power supply in there I've started getting the cables routed around I'm working on training the cables I had bought some cable combs they were too small to fit through so I'm just got them sort of lined up and held in place with some twist ties for now and I got to see if that's going to work if they'll stay as is after they've been trained that way for a while or if I need to actually get some other combs or something that the 24-pin still needs some work up there too but it's coming along other than that I've got a most of the hardware reinstalled in the system I've got the radiators in place so everything's coming back together I just I do need to do some rebinding of the tubes I think I'm actually only going to be reusing one of the tubes that I've bent from the original one the one that goes from here up to here everything else the spacing is a little bit different because I'm using different fittings and with all black fittings but you know what I need to do is finish this freaking build so I'm gonna get I think I'm I'm gonna wrap this video up and get to work on that there's a look at the ongoing progress for RP Panthers stay tuned for that final build vlog coming very very soon probably next week sometime fingers crossed in the meantime I hope you have enjoyed my quick tutorial on how to create your very own custom painted SLI bridge if you enjoyed these types of videos let me know by posting a comment down in the comments or maybe hit the like button to let me know that you enjoyed it and maybe you got something out of it also don't forget to share this with your friends who you think might be interested if you stopped by my store at store Paul's cardboard net and you can buy a fancy shirt not this shirt but shirts just like it I have a new series that are out right now or should be up this weekend and of course as always thank you for watching