Painting A Motherboard DIY Mod - Part 2, The Stunning Reveal - ASUS Rampage V Extreme
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,874 words · ~9 min read
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welcome to part two of how to change the color of your motherboard it will be the
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Epic conclusion and I we don't actually know yet if it's going to be epic win or
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epic fail but stay tuned with us as we try and figure out the best technique
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for removing the paint from the contacts and then test the board to see if it
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actually works because if it survives this mod this is the board that's going
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to be going in my personal system so I need it to actually be functional in
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order for me to be comfortable doing that wish me
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luck cooler Masters case mod World Series is your opportunity to show off
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your modding skills and win great prizes entries close February 7th 2015 click
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now to learn more so this is the conclusion of our two-parter on
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motherboard painting and I'd like to both finish up the process which some of
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you thought was done but actually had a lot more work left to do and address
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some of the critic in the comments from part one so let's pick up where we left
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off just having removed the tape the quality of the paint job is just not
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what I was hoping for from a distance it looks pretty good but I was extremely
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disappointed that I had missed a couple of masking areas leaving overs spray on
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some motherboard components and even the PCB some viewers suggested a liquid
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masking material that peels off might be a good bet for next time but given how
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much flak I'm taking for making this a two-part video because it took me 2 days
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I figure if I spent another day fussing about with with learning a new masking technique y'all would be none too
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pleased but I was at least happy to observe that with some rubbing alcohol
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and cotton buds I was able to remove over spray from caps and even the PCB
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very quickly and effectively and oh
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sometimes too effectively I actually ended up making a total mess of this PCI
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Express lot just by rubbing up against it some ghetto painting followed that
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screw up uh I didn't have a brush handy and I was trying to finish this in a
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timely manner so the bazillion pack of cot balls that Nick bought actually
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allowed me to cover the damaged spot and even though the surface finish kind of
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sucks in that spot now it's hard to notice unless you put your face right
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next to it one thing that worked better than I expected for touch-ups was spraying a bit of paint onto a little
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metal poker and dabbing that onto key areas I was able to fix up a lot of
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little areas where the masking was too close to a vertical surface to get good
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coverage including the PCI Express slots RAM slots one of the USB 3 headers and
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even the red Accent on the vrm heat syn assembly so basically everything now a
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lot of folks asked why we used the paint material we did rather than plasty dip
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or at least priming it first the reason we didn't Prime is that I wanted to
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avoid any more material buildup than necessary on the slot contacts and the
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reason for no Plasti Dip is that while it can be removed which is convenient
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when you scratch it it has a thick rubbery consistency that could have
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gummed up the slots and necessitated filling the PCIe USB 3 SATA and RAM
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slots with something to protect them such as cardboard or dead components but
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even I don't have dead ddr4 lying around and while I do have cardboard it would
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have made even paint coverage much more difficult especially for slots that will
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be left empty in the finished system we're not going for a two-tone color
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scheme here so the reason we did it the way we did was that we wanted the paint
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to flake off easily from the contacts this just makes me feel horrible
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inside okay so we're going to go ahead and repeatedly install and uninstall
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this why don't we do three per slot again just to
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uh oh sounds just as bad this idea clearly
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seemed idiotic to a lot of you and honestly I was uh on your side hearing
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the crunch of installing components into each slot for the first time but I can
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assure you that some of the other ideas in the video comments things like
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desoldering the slots to remove them painting them and resoldering them are
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much worse I'm actually not aware of anyone ever successfully removing and
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replacing a PCI E slot let alone a RAM slot on a modern lead free solder board
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and stop stop do not post the link because even if someone has done one
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slot without breaking the board they didn't do eight on a single board so
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let's not treat that like a viable way to do this I mean while it's not perfect
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our technique is one that has at least been successfully used before four
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anyway with three insertions in each slot behind us we turned our attention
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to tearing down a test bench to fire up the board and find out if it works at
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this stage I had literally no idea if
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the board was going to work and contrary to what some of you seem to think uh
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that I don't care about the hardware and was just ruining a motherboard for fun I
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was really really worried I had a dead Rampage 5 extreme on my hands and
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genuinely wanted it to work it's not like ASUS is going to send me a new one
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because I painted the one they gave me in the first place but this channel is
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supposed to be about pushing the boundaries and doing crazy stuff that
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you wouldn't risk your own Hardware to do on your own so honestly I think a lot
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of the crap about how this is an unnecessary project is horseshit we're
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not about to stop ghetto modding and experimenting with this stuff because
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it's unnecessary we don't consider it a waste of time and money to do something
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like this our monetary investment is like $4 in paint and the time that we
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spend doing it is we would have spent making a video anyway so yeah we risk
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losing the board but that happens when you're trying new things which is our
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job and anyway all the hate about how we killed the board uh should probably have
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waited until we actually found out
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whether the board was going to work or not so we started logically with dim
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slot A1 which spat out an error code but at least managed to display some post
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codes on the board then we followed up with dim slot A2 which caused a reboot
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loop uh even worse and then success dim
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A3 posted followed by dim A4 which also
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posted so um I expect retractions in the comments under part one from everyone
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who guaranteed the board was dead and called us stupid for basically turning
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it into garbage which actually no I don't expect uh retractions this is the
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internet so anyway a few more tense insertions in the first two slots later
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and all four slots had successfully posted then it was time for the real
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acid test would the motherboard run all four slot in Quad Channel and yes so we
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took it to the next level and enabled XMP in the BIOS our first attempt at
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2800 MHz did fail but our second attempt
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at 3,000 MHz a higher frequency but more
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stable RAM divider on our board succeeded and we even managed to do some
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Ida 64 stress testing in the OS to validate that the system was operating
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correctly oh yeah and I forgot to mention we checked in the BIOS to make
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sure our video card was running at PCI e6x as as well so the board is fully
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functional take that haters all right so
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here we are to be clear guys this project is not something I'd recommend
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like seriously we're having a do as I say not as I do moment here yes it
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worked the paint we ended up using covered extraordinarily well given that
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we didn't use any primer and the technique we used with some tweaks like
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better masking and maybe the use of a paintbrush for touch-ups delivered a
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great 10-ft mod and even a decent 5ot mod but there is no guarantee whatsoever
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that you'd have the same success and for folks who pay $500 for their Rog
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motherboards this is not something I'd be comfortable endorsing with that said
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I'm extremely pleased with the results and I'm really looking forward to installing this board in my system for
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my x99 upgrade I've been having a hard time finding the perfect board since
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even the high-end stuff that we get to play with around here at the office
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either had deal breakers features for me like chipset fans or little things like
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the wrong color scheme so this solved my admittedly very first world problem and
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while I'm not sure if i' do it again I'm really glad that I did it this time
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whatever we need a new verb for this guys thanks for watching like this video
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