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 critic 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 overs spray 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 flak I'm taking for making this a two-part video because it took me 2 days
I figure if I spent another day fussing about with with learning a new masking technique y'all would 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 over spray from caps and even the PCB
very quickly and effectively and oh
sometimes too effectively I actually ended up making a total mess of this PCI
Express lot just by rubbing up against it some ghetto painting followed that
screw up uh I didn't have a brush handy and I was trying to finish this in a
timely manner so the bazillion pack of cot balls that Nick bought actually
allowed me to cover the damaged spot and even though the surface finish 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 a 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 heat syn assembly so basically everything now a
lot of folks asked why we used the paint material we did rather than plasty 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 okay so we're going to go ahead and repeatedly install and uninstall
this why don't we do three per slot again just to
uh oh sounds just as bad this idea clearly
seemed idiotic to a lot of you and honestly I was uh 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 resoldering them are
much worse I'm actually not aware of anyone ever successfully removing and
replacing a PCI E 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 at least been successfully used before four
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 uh
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 5 extreme on my hands and
genuinely wanted it to work it's not like ASUS is going to 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 $4 in paint and the time that we
spend doing it is 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 uh should probably have
waited until we actually found out
whether the board was going to work or not so we started logically with dim
slot A1 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 uh 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 uh 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 slot in Quad Channel and yes so we
took it to the next level and enabled XMP in the BIOS our first attempt at
2800 MHz did fail but our second attempt
at 3,000 MHz a higher frequency but more
stable RAM divider on our board succeeded and we even managed to do some
Ida 64 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 PCI e6x as 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-ft mod and even a decent 5ot mod but there is no guarantee whatsoever
that you'd have the same success and for folks who pay $500 for their Rog
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 had deal breakers 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' do it again I'm really glad that I did it this time
speaking of things you'll be very glad you did today's episode sponsor is
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