OC & Modding Painting My Motherboard!

I had watched this over at LTT, when Linus modded his red asus motherboard to match his blue themed system. I was sort of in a similar dilemma. After a lot of searching around, I finally got a decent Z77 motherboard - The Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe motherboard.

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I intended on having a simple black and white theme for my system. So the strong blue accent of the board was not a fit. So, I took the risk and decided to paint the motherboard. This should be fun (or at least I thought so..)

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sorry guys, was having problems with my internet, uploading images was taking forever...

Anyway, as you can see, I don't have any fancy tools. I just have 2 cans of acrylic paint - Black and White. Black cost me about Rs 260 and white Rs 160. I have 2 rolls of masking tape (some local make, 3M not available), Not sure how much they cost, maybe ~ Rs 120 total. So total cost was about Rs 500. I tried sourcing liquid masking tape, but could not find any locally. Let me know if you guys can source it.

So, first up, was to take the heatsinks apart. That includes the main array of heatsinks that cool the CPU VRMs and the chipset heatsink. These all were blue in color as you can see. The VRM heatsink was fairly easy to cover, I had masked the exposed heat pipe and the branding (Dual Intelligent Processors marking). The Chipset heatsink required a lot of patience to cover. Probably took 30 minutes just for that. Once that was done, I started off with the motherboard itself.

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Similar to what linus did, I started masking the CPU area first (easy) and then the RAM slots. I wanted to paint the blue RAM slots white, so I masked the black slots and the area around it as closely as I could. However, I did not mask the space between the RAM slots themselves. I found this way too difficult to attempt, so did not even bother. Unlike linus though, who did not cover the slot contacts, I did insert come folded up masking tape into them. However, I made a mistake here (more about this later).

Then I covered the back of the board (easy) and then started moving towards the PCIe expanssion slots. These were a little tricky. There were a few capacitors that were too close to the slots and were hard to work around. I actually tried to work around them and in the process *might* have damaged one of them as it seemed to move a lot. I wanted to paint my blue PCIe x16 slot white, all PCIe 1x slots black. Again, I needed to fill in the slots, so first I prep'd the PCIex16 slots and would paint my motherboard white.

Before I start off with that part of the story, I'd like to say that I did NOT paint the following parts:
1. 24 pin power connector (Original Color: Blue) - Once the Power supply is plugged in, this part won't be visible, so I decided against painting this.
2. USB 3.0 Header (Original Color: Blue) - Same reason, when plugged in, wont be visible.
Another reason why i did not try painting these is that this area was very crowded and masking was becoming very difficult.
3. 8 pin power connector (Original Color: Blue) - This would have been easy to mask, but I just did not think it was worth it.
4. USB 2.0 Headers (Original Color: Blue) - Again, very tight space at the bottom of the board, so did not even try masking them.

So this is what it looked like all covered up.
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^why not buy aluminium and acrylic sheet and make a cover for the board.that sounds way less easier with a dremel and acrylic cutter
 
I admire ur guts Rajan . .all the best . .I saw that Linus video and its not guaranteed that it will work . .still wish u the very best.
 
sorry for the delay guys. I get to work on it only on weekends and they have been pretty busy lately. I am also sorry for not taking enough pictures, I was very nervous during the whole process that at one point i just ditched the whole build log thing and just wanted to see if it worked. So i skipped taking closeups of the final board.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the board AFTER painting. I think it came off pretty good:
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The heatsinks were easy to paint, but since I did not prime them or sand them, the paint peels of very easily. Even with minor contact with a screwdriver, the paint peels off. I did have some brushes and acrylic paint for touchups, which did help.

So all in all, yes, the board works perfectly. I now know, first hand, the do's and don'ts of the process, will put them down in detail here. Also, my watercooling build (as in the pictures above) had some issues, which I will explain soon as well.

Anyway, thanks for your support guys, hope you like what you see :)
Let me know if there are any specific questions.[DOUBLEPOST=1468149056][/DOUBLEPOST]Guys, made another thread for the finished build, here it is:
https://www.techenclave.com/communi...cooling-build-with-modded-motherboard.180419/
 
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I know, but the end product won't look good.
Also, I did paint the heatsinks, but with only a few coats of paint. I think only if you use plastidip would it really cause any heat issues.
 
I know, but the end product won't look good.
Also, I did paint the heatsinks, but with only a few coats of paint. I think only if you use plastidip would it really cause any heat issues.

Any paint will hinder heat transfer. More paint layers make it even worse.

The only proper way is to strip off the outer anodised layer, re-anodise with whatever colour dye you want added into it.
 
Thats why i asked in first place. It is possible but was not sure for today's hi-end mobos as i think they are too delicate to perform such mods. But now seems its no big deal.
Go ahead and paint it!
 
Not sure about anodizing man, but with simple spray painting, I doubt it would you would run into temperature ISSUES. Just don't overclock that much, simple. I just keep it simple at 3.7GHz stock voltages, whereas I have run this system at 5.0GHz on a different asus board.
I guess a better way to paint would be to sandblast and prime before painting. But I just did not know where I could get that done.
 
Is it possible? I am hearing this for the first tym. Has anyone done it? Can u share video link or build log of doing this

Thats why i asked in first place. It is possible but was not sure for today's hi-end mobos as i think they are too delicate to perform such mods. But now seems its no big deal.
Go ahead and paint it!

How do you guys think the heatsink had its original blue color?

Watch this video to understand how anodising works :

 
How do you guys think the heatsink had its original blue color?

Watch this video to understand how anodising works :


That process is for anodizing Titanium which is as simple as soaking the metal in a solution and variable voltage no matter what the size of the item is. Aluminum anodizing is a very long process which involves calculating the surface area of the metal, anodizing with the appropriate voltage based on the surface area, then soaking it in the anodizing color and then soaking it in the anodizing sealant solution. Check out the below video how complex it is :)

I've done titanium anodizing and that is super easy and anyone can do it.

 
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