Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Greg with science studio so a lot of you are probably familiar with my own personal rig I've uploaded a few videos to YouTube already detailing the parts that kind of comprise the thing you probably know that it's powered by the modest intel skylake i 360 100 overclocked to 4.2 gigahertz I'm also sporting a gigabyte win force r9 380 4 gigabyte graphics card and two sticks of ddr4 clocked at 26 66 megahertz if you are wondering how we managed to overclock my locked core i3 check out the link in the video description now don't get me wrong I love everything about this system its speed its reliability its functionality and perhaps most importantly its price but there was something just eating at me and it's probably obvious to you at this point what that thing is the insanely clashing color scheme I wanted to fix that so I decided to disassemble my entire PC and painted using white Plasti Dip yeah are you ready alright let's get down to business I began of course by removing the front and back panels of my NZXT s340 computer case all of the cables wired directly into the motherboard and graphics card were removed including the eight pin GPU power connector a pin CPU power connector which proved to be a bit tricky given the hyper T for extended reach problem and the 24 pin motherboard power connector SATA cables fan cables and the USB 3.0 hub cable were also obviously disconnected we remove the graphics card next notably before disconnecting all the tiny case cables down below we lifted the lever on the PCI port and pulled the graphics card out now with a quick inspection I concluded that I would probably paint both the front and back plates of the card the fans however would remain unpainted simply for the sake of stability also I'm not sure how it's going to look being completely white I made sure to remove my additional PCI components including my Wi-Fi adapter and NZXT LED card the SSD was next maybe I'll paint this and through the EVGA power supply from the tower in the following step the four screws held the PSU frame to the back of the case be very gentle when sliding all the cables out of your case I pulled down the NZXT LED light string from the inside of the case this is what gave my case the blue glow and then I moved on to the rear mounted exhaust fan four screws of course and then slide it right out on a side note I sincerely hope that all of you enjoy the game of boggle no boggle is not our sponsor be sure that your motherboard is completely disconnected from any foreign objects before turning your computer on its side we located the fiber so screws holding it in place and use a magnetic phillips head screwdriver to unmount the bore itself look how handy that is Otto lost that screw a while back I carefully remove the mobo if this sounds weird Mobe oh yeah I don't like that using the t4 as a handle of sorts and placed it on a textbook of all things okay so from this point on you'll need to put on your big boy pants and your big girl pants things are about to get dicey if at any point you get uncomfortable assuming you're following along with us please make a u-turn and save yourself the stress and potential hardware damage this is risky business hmm I think I'll just paint this part yeah the 24 pin connector okay so turn your motherboard on its side and locate the screws holding your vom heatsinks in place some motherboards have the screws entering from the top versus the bottom now in case you're wondering vrm stands for voltage regulator modules the sockets under these heat sinks convert your PS use input voltages typically 5 volts and 12 volts into much lower streams of voltage to power your processor you should remove a heatsink over your chipset as well now if you haven't already removed your RAM cards we plan to paint ours though we had no idea what it was installed for us with these to our pan Ram dims looked like they'd be mighty difficult to disassemble and they were it took me literally an hour to figure out how these things open there were no screws and there were no levers or handles or anything of that sort apparently the two heat shields over the memory modules themselves were glued to the spreader so finally once I realized that this would take some careful precise forced upon things open I downgraded to a flathead screwdriver size and pried them open basically you know what I had to do it I'm open the experience was a bit like shucking an oyster you've ever done that it's kind of the only I can think of this point once inside the beautiful memory modules were revealed now the second half of the heat spreader the other half of it that was kind of stuck to the circuit itself simply refused to budge when I finally decided that the costs outweigh the benefits on this one I concluded that I would just have to place painters tape over the circuits themselves to prepare for the paint process so that's exactly what I did don't press too firmly when performing this stuff you really don't want to snag on resistors when removing this tape later on which you have to do I decided to paint the SSD as well just for kicks I really didn't know how it would turn out so I taped off the important parts for good measure now as for the SSD tray this thing would be super easy to paint no tape required okay now on to the graphics card I knew from the start that this thing would prove the most difficult and yes I mean even more so than Ram these screws had to come off first at least that's what I thought when all of them were removed I found that there were other screws holding the back plate in from the opposite side it would have to come off later so I turned the card front side up and began unscrewing the fan brackets from the heatsink below and yes the screws were located in the side of the fan and links themselves and yes I needed a smaller screwdriver and I had to unscrew the screws at an angle man there were screws on the sides and front of the card as well some were very tricky to get at one was behind a heat pipe I have no idea how they expected anyone to unscrew that let alone screw that into the first place the wind force card had three plugs that needed to be removed to smaller plugs for the LED front panel and then one large plug for the dual fan array the PCB itself was elaborate and impressive of course but the pre applied thermal paste was not it was sticky and just poorly applied it was kind of just splashed all over the GPU cheap really but no surprise there a lot of companies tend to budget on this sort of thing so we'll fix that in a later step disconnect the heatsink from the top of the card and take a picture of what's left he'll need this during the rewiring phases of the reassembling process apparently this card only assembles if the fan and LED cables are arranged a specific way we pulled out the wind force LED panel and realized that all we had remaining was an intricate piece of plastic literally it was just plastic so we could basically paint this entire thing we paused for a second at this point and realized just how far we'd come pretty much everything that we wanted was it ready to be painted so after masking off a few important parts on each component we brought them all outside our graphics card front and back plates were ready to go our vrm and chip setting things were ready to go our RAM was ready to go our SSD was also ready to go and our hyper key for a fan bracket which I didn't show being disassembled because it was literally just four screws was also in the game oh and I don't forget our SSD mounting trip we also tried to paint some SATA cables just for kicks but I really regretted that I prepared a canvas of sorts using old new egg cardboard boxes hello the cardboard boxes you use don't have to be from new egg prepared our Plasti Dip by shaking the can vigorously for a minute or so yes we follow directions and then brought over our components began applying gentle yet the row coats I know that's really confusing it was for us too I'm no expert at this so please don't completely trash me in the comments below I will appreciate it the instructions on the can said to spray from around six to ten inches away from the target but I found this tactic led to overspray in some cases so if you are a plasti dipping pro maybe you figured out how to master the art by now and maybe you can step into the studio and show the rest of us how it's done like for real though if you are a plaster dipping pro you are welcome to be featured in a future video just kind of you know hit us up okay so it looks like this code is good and finish it's not super thick yet but I do expect that as we continue to add coach to this it'll thicken and kind of look a little Madi maybe even glossy I'm not sure how this will look on the materials that we're painting on but that's what this is all about just figuring this out so I'm gonna swap these out for the other parts that we haven't painted it and then we'll let them dry should get a good little circuit going should not the wait too long between sex so let's go and do that after three or so coats the vibrancy of the white plastidip started to show I was very impressed with the looks this early into the painting process well ok impressed with it all - the SATA cables obviously we just had a few more coats once the paint dried our first set of goodies I decided to test drive one of the components I replaced the second black SSD tray which I hadn't painted yet with our newly painted white one and was very satisfied with the new dynamic that was beginning to unfold once the paint dried on the rest of our goodies I brought them back inside and brace myself for the reassembling phase of the project since I knew the graphics card would prove the most difficult I decided to tackle it first at least partially at this point however it obviously doesn't matter what you choose to start with the wind force logo popped into place the fans and their cables were routed successfully and then we're screwed back onto their respective brackets I double-check that each fan spun unhindered just to be sure with both fans in place I was already feeling the jitters this thing was already looking pretty sweet I have to say I was actually glad that I decided not to paint the fans the contrast it works for me moving on we reinstall the vrm and chipset heat sinks but in order to hold them into place they were quite stubborn I had to get a bit creative for parts of the step I basically had to let the board lean partially over a table and lay underneath it to screw the vrm heat sinks particularly it felt a bit like working on a car from you know below oh and our pop kept getting in the way once the board was reassembled I gave it a few turns to you know verify that the board did in fact look pretty sweet and it did next I peeled the painters tape off of the RAM sticks being especially careful over the circuits themselves they actually turned out better than I expected the paint was actually glossy looking in the places with rough textures which I didn't expect at all and all in all looked almost like that was how they were purchased in the first place which was obviously the goal here the two halves of each card connected very simply much simpler than they disconnected I made sure to apply force over the two plates once they were together again all to ensure that the six would in fact stay together once they were in the board in all seriousness though I could not believe how great these sticks turned out I was very proud of myself at this point we merged our motherboard with our tower I love that word merged after reinserting a ram and then realized that our color conversion was starting to finally take shape as a whole that was my watch things actually matched after realizing that I had mentally given up on the graphics card reassembly stage just kind of transitioned from that for some reason I jumped back onto it I remounted the backplate to the PCB of the card itself and then secured it with the original screws now after using ninety whatever percent isopropyl alcohol to clean the original thermal paste from the GPU and heat spreader I applied some of our leftover Arctic silver 5 whatever thermal compound to the chip dabbing slightly more than the typical amount for CPU make sure that at this point the alignment between your heat spreader and the circuit board is very near perfect don't allow your thermal glue to come into contact with other components it's unlikely that anything would come to harm but you never know now once the heatsink was aligned I quickly secured it from the back of the card through the back plate I'm talking about the four screws mounted in the square pattern it would be better if you had someone else hold the heatsink in place while performing this step I found that my heatsink was slippery bit and kind of slid around over the GPU as I tried to hold it steady we brought over the front plate is that what you call it a front plate I don't even know whatever it's the front plate and reinstalled it in this step now be sure to plug in your cables before screwing the front plate onto the board itself when the card was finally assembled to completion we stopped to admire it for a few seconds back from that reinsert your graphics card into your motherboard at this point securing it to the frame as well now at this point I like to wire all of my case components to the motherboard first I do this particularly because it becomes difficult to weave those thin cables in between the massive ones of the power supply once it's inserted so connect the hard drive LED power LED power button HD audio USB cables etc etc into the board first now grab a hold of your power supply and Raddatz cables through your case as we did here yes it is a pain but every computer builder must go through this process unless you have a modular power supply I guess that wouldn't be such a bad thing unless you're you know really tight on cash which is understandable we secured it to our tower using the included mounting bracket and the four screws so unfortunately though as expected our SSDs paintjob was a bit rustic but the good thing is that plastidip is removable yeah you heard that correctly as long as you spray the paint in thick enough coats it'll basically peel right off okay so back to reassembling once your power and SATA cables have been routed and plugged in appropriately and preferably in the same ports that they were plugged into originally yeah I'm going to cover that part up no one wants to see that mess right am i right but hey the rest looks alright give the computer one last tribute and admire the work you've so devoutly invested into your newly decorated build pop on the front and back panels plugging the important peripherals and okay so this is the moment of truth plug everything in we're about to turn it on hopefully it turns on hopefully okay yeah right not bad not bad check it out I am so pleased with these looks I really wish all of you could see it in person but don't worry I'll show better footage of it in a sec I've recorded this with my phone because I was so eager to see it turn on and light up that I didn't actually bring my DSLR with me the blue LEDs definitely bring the white in the case to life I'm very glad I went with this color scheme okay so after practically performing surgery on my PC it works I was more worried about it working than anything else but nonetheless it is working and it looks stunning at least in my opinion now this isn't perfect and using Plasti Dip isn't going to give you a perfect solution especially if you're looking for glossy finish but given the four dollars that I paid for the paint and the six or so hours that it took to paint everything with multiple coats I'd say it looks pretty good for the amount of time and money invested now if why it's not your color by all means choose another color black they have red green some kind of like neon yellow and there are plenty of colors out there to choose so if you decide to Plasti Dip any part of your computer just you know choose something that goes along with the rest of your build and preferably with your case as well so in my case well literally you could see that I had some color disarray in there I had copper orange colors mixed with red colors mixed with black and white and blue it was just it was just kind of a mess so what I decided to do was paint over everything that had any color other than white or black for the most part I mean there are some things that you really can't change so all of the vrm heat Singh's are white the heatsink over the z170 chipset is white pretty much the entire graphics card the most part is white and the case is white that's cool I also kind of did a terrible job on painting my 24 pin power connector you might want to find a different kind of paint to use for the that mine looks a bit chalky but I'm not going to be moving it or unplugging it too often so it's it's it's like a two-foot mod and then maybe a one-foot mod in some cases it's definitely not a ten-foot mod from from where I'm sitting you really can't see that there's any kind of painting malpractice going on in there so if you're looking to show off your PC to your friend's girlfriend boyfriend etc they're not going to be too picky about the details they're gonna look at it from well pretty much how far away I am from it right now and they're gonna say wow that is an awesome paint job hopefully they say that I mean if you do anywhere near as okay of a job as I did you're in the clear so I'm not saying that you have to paint your computer parts obviously and please do these things carefully all this is at your own risk keep that in mind everything that you decide to do to your computer is at your own risk and once you paint these things and take off the stickers and whatnot most of your warranties are void I did notice it on the RAM in particular I pulled off the sticker and it left a void pattern like engraved into the metal and is that was a pain to get rid of but uh yeah there aren't any stickers left on my RAM sticks and that's going to be a problem if I ever want to return them but of course that was something I considered before I decided to paint this entire system so keep that in mind with every part not just your RAM but with every part of your system that you plan on painting it's very likely you won't be able to return anything that you paint over so with that in mind I'll go ahead and show you a few last-minute clips of the system and then I guess you can decide for yourself if you want to spend the time and little bit of money to paint your system and make it your own so that's about it everyone I appreciate the interest thanks for watching this far into the video leave a like if you thought the video was cool leave a dis dislike if you thought the video was crap and you're certainly entitled to feel that way if you would like to leave a comment please do so I try to answer as many of them as I can and as always be sure to subscribe for more I guess I'll just kind of include the video with a few more clips of the PC that I painted Phil yeah it's a sign studio thanks for learning you you