How To Paint Your PC Parts - Linus Plasti Dip Method
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
2,365 words · ~11 min read
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The Flash Voyager GTX usb3 drive from Corsair provides SSD like performance
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and fits comfortably in your pocket click now to learn more so welcome to
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something a little bit unusual I don't know how good the audio is going to be in here but it is what it is I am in the
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middle of preparing for one of our ultimate build guides and this project
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kind of spiraled out of control and all of a sudden it turned from a regular
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building guide into like I'm painting stuff so I figured I might as well do a
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quick run through of the procedure that we're going to be using to paint the
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stuff in this build so as you can see I've already gotten started on a couple
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of things so the RAM was the first thing that I got going on so I'm using Corsair
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Dominator platinums with the uh the light bars but not the Windows so you
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can see the way that these are going to assemble is they're going to go on like this so what I'm doing with these ones
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is I want to spray the bars that go
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inside here green so that I get a really cool green underglow effect underneath
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them but then I'm doing kind of a razor themed build so this is going to be in
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the h440 razor Edition so this silver is going to stand out like a bit of a sore
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thumb so I also want to paint these black now you don't want to use regular
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paint on computer components because what'll happen is it'll be permanent so
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that kind of sucks so instead we're going to be using plasy dip so I've got
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three different colors here that I need so first first of all I've got black
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I'll be using this to stealth the Dominator Platinum light uh not the
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light bars rather just the tops of the Dominator platinums here and then I'll
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also be using this to paint the thermal armor on the Sabertooth z97 Mark 1 the
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reason that I'm doing that is I couldn't find any board that even remotely
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matched the color scheme we were going for Gigabyte doesn't do their black and green color scheme anymore since Z87 so
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I figured okay well we'll do our best with it I'm going to pull off the
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thermal armor I'm going to stealth it I'm going to put it make it completely
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black then I'll put it back on and then once we install our RAM plug in our
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eight pin plug in some graphics cards and cover up all this stuff it should
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basically look like a completely stealth black board and then the last thing I
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had originally intended to do a lot more
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green in this build I actually picked up two cans of the blaze uh green stuff
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here so I picked up a couple cans of those and then I I kind of realized that
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razer's h440 or the mgx h440 whoever is
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is um really doesn't have a lot of green it's mostly black with little green
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accents so the last thing I'll be painting is just this top lattice on
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both of our R9 290s so I've I've pulled this off the other one already and then
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I'm actually going to leave the rest of the card Black so we're just going to
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have those two green accents inside the system along with the underglow on the
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Rand and we're going to call that probably good enough so without further Ado here we go so to paint all the RAM
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from every angle without needing to to touch it and potentially wreck it I made
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myself a little thing out of a paint stir stick or two I guess two paint stir
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sticks so that I can space everything out and paint all this without uh
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without going back and doing things over again so here we go always shake for a
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minute and all that noise and let's see how this goes
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okay coat number one done oh yeah you
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should always this is just a general spray bom
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kit hold it upside down wait till the paint stops coming out every time you're
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done using it to keep the nozzle clean okay so to get the Sabertooth ready the
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last thing you want to do is paint something while it's still attached to
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uh to PCB so I'm just going to remove the rear armor something that I didn't
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realize before now is that the screws are actually all different on here so
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I'm just going to kind of map them out for myself as I go all right so we're
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going to pull off the thermal armor here
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uh so I could probably mask off these silver things here but I'm just going to
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do the whole thing black same thing with this ASUS logo cuz it's in like this
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weird camo just going to we're just going to yeah we're going to Black that
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out all right now we're on to the graphics card so actually these
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windforce uh Gigabyte cards come apart really easily all you got to do is undo
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six screws from the back once again keeping keep very careful track of which
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ones go where actually not that necessary here because what we're going to do is we are going to unplug this bad
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boy then we're going to just pop this
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baby off pop just like that there we go so
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once that's done we can actually there
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we go we can just put these back in so we don't lose them while we're in the
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process now is a good opportunity since we're at this to replace the stock
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thermal compound I mean they put decent stuff on at the factory but you can
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always put on something better something like ic7 diamond or something like that
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or icy Diamond Seven's just the size of the tube there's the last one in
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here there we go and
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this please come off please come off
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there we go this is the matching one for
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the other piece that we're going to paint so the blaze stuff doesn't go on
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very well if you don't undercoat with something light so that's why I have
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both a white can as well as a green can so we're going to have to do probably at
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least three or four coats of white maybe maybe two maybe two maybe three and then
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we're going to start in with the green stuff
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here right I guess I uh I should have
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mentioned one of the reasons we're using Plasti Dip instead of regular paint is
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that you can peel it off when you're done so this is going to be the toughest one just because I got to hit it from so
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many angles but light coats from every angle is going to be the
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key so I locked the uh I locked the
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vents open here before starting to paint just cuz I can't imagine why anyone
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would ever close them anyway maybe someone can enlighten
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me that didn't end up being very light coats okay do as I say not as I
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do here's just a quick in progress so I'm mostly done with the actual painting
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I just need to put a few more coats of green on this because uh yeah with the
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black you couldn't see the green at all and with the white the green is very
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very light lighter than I'd hoped based on how it looks when you really spray a
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lot of it on something versus that it's uh more of an acid green than uh than
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sort of the darker green that I had kind of hoped for so yeah you can see these
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coats are darkening
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it all all right the RAM's pretty much good to go
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though so now is as good a time as any to clean off that stock thermal Gunk uh
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we're going to want isopropyl alcohol for this preferably
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99% although I guess it's never been proven that 70% doesn't do a decent
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enough job they put a lot of thermal compound on these gpus so we're going to
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have to take a few runs at it here oh so much more still
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now while we are replacing the thermal compound on the GPU itself we're
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actually not going to replace any of the thermal pads for the memory or anything
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if you try to put thermal compound in there instead of the pads that are there
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then what will happen is your GPU core
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will not make or rather all of those will not make correct contact your GPU
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core will prevent them from coming down enough in order to uh to cool themselves
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so they will overheat so you want to use thermal pads right rather than thermal
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compound there so we're just going to use some MX2 because that's what I
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happen to have lying around and then we're going to reapply this bad boy so
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we apply a bit more on a GPU than we would on a CPU where we normally do a
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uncooked grain of rice size thing we're going to want a bit more here just
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because it's a bit bigger so we're going to do like a jumbo uncooked rice there
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we go this is an incredibly important step in the reassembly process never
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forget to reconnect your fans because without fans
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um yeah no cooling will happen that will be terrible all right so we're just
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going to carefully realign that with the holes where everything came off of no
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we're not very funny we need to put these back on first ha that was a good
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one lus the whole point of this whole
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exercise there we go all right so how's that going to look looks all right it's
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plasty dip I guess okay so now it's time
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for attempt number two lining everything up so
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carefully this time with all the other pieces in
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place okay so just six screws to put it back
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together most of which I haven't misplaced just kidding I didn't misplace
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any of them if I did that would be terrible uh don't do them up all the way at this point you want to make sure
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you're applying pressure evenly as you put the cooler back on the card so we're
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just doing them up a little bit then we're going to tighten everything up at the same time so now we're tightening an
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AC cross pattern get everything nice and tight on there
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there we go all right so this For Better
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or For Worse is what our graphics card looks like now we have a nice green
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accent and uh I guess oh actually I didn't show you guys the reassembly
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process for this there's a safe place
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but here's the Sabertooth board nice and blacked out stealthed out and this is
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what the card will look like in it here we go except imagine of them okay well
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there I guess you don't have to imagine it anymore that's what it'll look like
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with both graphics cards installed with their green
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accents not half bad now it's time to
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put the RAM together so we'll put this aside and get started on that I've been
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doing this stuff long enough to basically have a phobia of uh losing
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oneof a kind screws that are impossible to replace cuz man the number of hours
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I've spent looking for that kind of a stuff that kind of stuff okay so each of
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these is going to go back together with a pretty much identical
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process I guess so this green bar is going to slot back in here where it used
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to be white assuming it still fits come on okay yeah there we go all right so
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that's what those are going to look like in there then the whole thing is going
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to go back on top of the module and that
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paint finish actually matches pretty darn well ooh the these are going to
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look good oh I'm pretty I'm pretty stoked on
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these all right so the back pieces come through
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and then we screw the front pieces in from the front pretty straightforward
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okay here we are putting in the last screw and
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that is what our finished modules look like that nice
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green light bar and then that nice all black
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stealthy looking finish so let's go
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ahead and install this in the last slot on the board and that's it that my
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friends is how you paint your computer
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components thank you for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if
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you disliked it leave a comment let me know how do you paint your computer
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components or do you think painting computer components is stupid would love
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