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.
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.