Posted by j_d3
Jay hails from small city Chatham, Ontario where he's grown up and spent his entire life, short of university. Since returning home from school, he has spent the last several years in the radio broadcast industry as an IT professional and Interactive Media Manager.
Part II of the project involves what I considered to be a risky alteration to the motherboard heatsinks. The plan is to paint the north & south bridge and mofset heatsinks white to match the theme of the case. Cross your fingers and read on to see if this gutzy mod will make or break the project.
If any of you have experience in modding you’ll know right away that this is just a bad idea. Paint is an insulator and thus will inhibit the ability for the heatsinks to do their job. But I decided so what? Why can’t we make this work somehow. I’ve seen ram heatspreaders painted so why not the motherboard’s? First of all if I was running an SLI based board like te 790i I probably wouldn’t have tried this since they run hot as is, but the P45 in my P5Q-E is nice and cool. First off removing the heatsinks. Proved to be a little painful on the fingers but simple enough like every other motherboard.
Tools
- needle nose pliers
- high temperature flat white spray paint
- thermal compound
I cleaned off the heatsink tape on the bottom of the northbridge and southbridge contacts but left the sticky tape for the mofsets which should be fine. Time to paint! Some toughts before going ahead and trying this yourself; keep the paint as light as possible. The last thing you want to do is gum up the fins. I had to whipe down the paint a couple of times and wait till the next coat. Also make no strong effort to get between the fans too much. As long as you can’t see the original copy you’re good visually, but if there are bare copper areas deep within the heatsink then this should help maintain the effectiveness of them. And finally this paint was quite coarse after applied. For a polished finish it required a bake in the oven at 350C which I decided against because the mofset tape was still present. After curing I did give it a good hot water wash, to make sure no residual paint was coming off. Reset the heatsinks using some fresh OCZ 5+ thermal compound and this is the final result.
And finally remounted back in its case.
The resulting temps? Once I got it back on the desk and hooked up, I powered her up and started up speedfan to see the resulting doom. 31C! The exact same temps I was seeing the day before. This can’t be so I left writing this post for 6 hours to see if it just needed to heat up. 32C is the final temp after some serious Call of Duty 5 gaming for several hours complimented with some photoshoping. So I would call this mod a great success. Expect Part III in a week or so as my water cooling shipment is due to come in.
posted on 13.06.2009
JasonSaggers
I love the white heat sinks but doesn’t painting them white affect there heat properties?
I don;t suppose it would.
Nicely done.
posted on 15.06.2009
j_d3
Thanks! That was my first thought but wanted to try it anyways. I used a high heat paint used for engine blocks in cars but I believe that just means it won’t peel. To date (months later now) all heat changes are nominal and what would be expected with normal operation. I’m sure it also helps that the P45 chipset runs cool to begin with, thus I haven’t water cooled it.