Gadgetory

excellent well what's up guys and welcome to this sort of quick impromptu in-between video about my wife's build hot box which I completed actually a couple months ago it's up and running she's been using it to play well mostly overwatch but also some doom and it's pretty much good to go although if you guys watched my previous video series on that you might be aware that I just wasn't necessarily under percent happy with how it turned out so I have been previewing other parts to basically integrate into that system I have collected pretty much everything I need to move on with the build through a phase 2 of this project for that I've decided to first upgrade the CPU since I am water cooling the system and it's pretty high-end water-cooled system the 6600 K you know it's a nice unlocked overclockable CPU but the 6700 K is kind of the this is what I would get if I was building a new water-cooled system on this platform and so that's what I'm going to be dropping in their new motherboard of course that's what this video is going to be mostly about is modifying this motherboard to make it match aesthetically with the rest of the parts of the build since finding a mini ITX motherboard on z170 that has a good color scheme is actually pretty difficult a bit of a challenge anyway but other than the CPU and the motherboard I'm going to be doing some painting today so some of that there I've got a replacement 8 pin a CPU power connector from unsourced customs Joe we actually sent this over to me free of charge a big thanks to Joey he does a really good job over there and I needed an 8 pin because previous motherboard only required a 4 pin and we want overclock so more power there's a big pile of fittings over here this is from the supplementary stuff that ek has sent over I mainly needed some additional fittings so I got some rotary fittings here these are really nice because you can twist them to be 90 degree or sort of in between 90 and 45 these are great for just getting stuff lined up properly or doing a little offset or something like that I have a pass-through right here so this is what I'm going to possibly punch a hole through the bottom of the case to do just a drain at the bottom so I might use this for that or else of a fill port right here which is effectively the same thing but you know it's a little bit larger need a little bit cleaner I'll probably test both of those and see which one works better and use which everyone seems to work better finally get some like 90 degree fittings and that kind of thing we got to make sure that I have everything needed so that's why I had this whole pile because if I was missing something I didn't want have to wait for it to ship all the way from ek over in Europe so all right for coolants we do have some upgrade or some change this is the pastel orange concentrate coolant from Mayhem's I tried a couple different clones from bits power and Mayhem's before but it was the not opaque the the clear types of cool it's at least coolant dye this is pastel so it's much more dense and you can't see through it J has had weird random issues with this stuff so we'll see how it works for me but I also got two of them because it's overkill on too much lastly more tubing 12 millimeter inner diameter 16 millimeter outer diameter this is what I was kind of running out of when I was doing the original build and I was getting my bends down and I found this type of tubing to be a bit more challenging I got a lot of this though this time so I can redo any builds that I need to redo and make sure I have plenty left over so I don't start to get worried about running out like I did with the original build back to the subject of today's video though and I'm going to be doing a quick unboxing of this while I talk this is the z170 I pearl gaming motherboard made by Asus Zealand 70 board and the reason I'm swapping to this motherboard is for overclocking purposes because the gigabytes the gigabyte z170 n Wi-Fi was was able to overclock but basically I was only able to get about four point actually at four point six gigahertz stable for a little bit and then that ended up having some issues so I decided to upgrade the motherboard to something that could possibly do a little bit better with overclocking if you look at z170 motherboards that are available right now though and you sort them by mini ITX options and you look at what's out there you'll find that the one I chose from gigabyte originally the zealand 70 and Wi-Fi is pretty much the only kind of mostly pretty much color neutral board that's out there this one is I think kind of a close second and this one does have some benefits such as better power delivery so you got a pin connector there instead of a four pin you also have some decent size heat sinks here over the power delivery elements for the CPU so that's going to hopefully help us maintain a better overclock I knew already than my 6600 K that I used in hotbox hood hits as 4.7 gigahertz I did that on a Maximus 8 formula motherboard but on the z170 and Wi-Fi it was really topping out it sits 4.6 originally and then we had a bit of instability there so I've actually rolled it back to 4.5 this motherboard I think should be able to hold well I'm actually not sure what we're going to be able to get since I have a new 6700 K here a little squished in the box but we'll see how that overclocks and hopefully we'll do a little bit better so back to the dilemma for anyone who's trying to build a mini ITX system is really looking for a color coordinating board if you don't want black and red then your options are really limited so this board fortunately is pretty much all black with a little bit of sort of gray square some silver accents on some of the pieces that are going on in there we only have three maybe four elements of red we have the pro gaming right here with the Asus logo on it that's bitter red there and then we have the heat sinks up top that have some red accents over here and over here we have one last a little bit which is the cable here for the this is the battery right yeah this is a battery yeah that's a motherboard battery and I might pull that off and just paint it or something like that just to get rid of all of the color on the board other than that though it has the other features that as looking for which is an m dot 2 on the board right there on the back which is I need that because that's one of the main drives in the system and then I also was hoping to get Wi-Fi and this one does also have Wi-Fi in there too so nice to have all the features and in a color scheme that hopefully I can modify it to be color neutral the way I'm going to do that is by removing the heat sinks to spray-paint them essentially now there's two different types of mounting methods for the heat sinks here you might also notice this lower one here just says these little plastic prongs they pop through so I'm gonna just just use some pliers to squeeze those and pop those back out they're kind of annoying to remove but they can with a little bit with by being careful and a little delicate you can get those off and it's not too much of an issue the other heat sinks on the board fortunately are held on by these screws right here so we got standard Phillips head screws so those should come off very easily and they do have a bit of therm pad underneath them that I can see along here at the edge so I'm gonna need to be careful to maintain that but I'm just going to remove those and then we'll be doing some spray painting now when it comes to spray painting or modifying something like this you have a few options of course Plasti Dip has been championed by a lot of people because it is not conductive however Plasti Dip is difficult to use anywhere that might get extremely hot places it warm up it can melt so I'm going to go and skip the Plasti Dip option this is just some more general purpose spray adhesive that's I paint that's pretty severe why is that they what I'm going to be using is a self etching primer right here this is heavy duty stuff it's made for auto bodies steel and aluminum I'm using some heavy protection when I actually use this which includes I'm going to be spray-painting it outside and I'm using you know the air filter thing gas mask on my face make sure I don't know hail too much of this and this is going to make sure that it is into the grooves first of all which is very nice and also I've used this prepaid before set I know it has a nice flat black finish and hopefully everything should turn out nice and pretty one last thing to point out before embarking on an endeavor such as this is I just bought this motherboard this wasn't provided by Asus I bought this directly from Amazon so the first thing I'm actually going to do before I do any modifications make sure the damn thing works so I'm going to install my 40 or my 40 60 700 K and some memory and just plug it in make sure it's up and running and if that is all good then I will move on to some modification of my heat sinks all right the tabletop build is done and it looks like we have power so let me just short a couple pins here if I can figure out where the heck they are oh I found them power button okay cool that's good enough for me they're definitely more tests we can do and whatnot but usually if you get into the BIOS it means most of the major issues that you might discover out of the box are not going to be issues so I am confident enough to proceed with the modifications to the heat sinks and the avoiding of my warranty I'm pretty sure I can just heat gun this top layer off here and if I do that and the underneath is still finish you know come like the edges here I might just leave it as is and just leave that off if not I'll have to figure out a way to color this or paint it this is the adhesive on the chipset heatsink which is pretty thick but I'm actually just sort of pushing it with my thumb a little bit at a time and it's coming off Oh okay it's next morning now and here's a look at the chipset heatsink finished cleaned I was actually considering like spray painting over this or something but I think I'm totally fine at the finish so you know that's mostly clean there are few scuff marks where as gripping it with the pliers and whatnot I could have been a little bit more careful with that but it looks just fine and with the little retention pieces in place the rough spots alone the edges really you can't see very much so I'll be okay with that so happy with how that turned out also of course the heat sinks themselves which turned out pretty nicely I didn't get these from all angles because the black was blending in pretty nicely I mainly needed to get the top to get rid of that red accents and I think I did it is one of them at least other one is here these are all dry and it turned out very nice great clean I did have to tape off all these pads back here to make sure none of those got anything on them but now it's time to reassemble and there it is guys the finished product for the mods at least the ones that I did last night and kind of finished off this morning primarily removing this stupid pro gaming Asus logo from the chipset that's so much better without it why why even make this thing and put this cost money to put that on there and it's stupid anyway also of course the painting of these two heat sinks also came out very nice and finally just a very slight modification with some Plasti Dip on the little battery cable right there to get that all black as well so everything is just matching super nicely now this is going to be very clean and it will blend in with my orange and black and gray build that's of course going to be redoing for my wife hot box version 2 I'm pretty excited so anyway guys I know it's going to be probably another week and a half until I can move on to the next step of this project but it is nice to know that with a bit of modification you can get a z170 board that is looks pretty cool can overclock has all the good features that you'd want and it also well it's got a voided warranty I guess that's the downside to it the only other thing I need to double check is to make sure I can disable these LEDs down here pretty sure I should be able to do that but I'm not positive so wish me luck on that one anyway guys thanks for watching this video hit that thumbs up button once again let me know if you enjoyed it and we'll see you all next time