Hey guys. I just finished building my new pc and am thinking about some of the finishing touches now to make it prettier. I plan on doing custom white and blue sleeving on the 24pin cable and 6pin gpu cable to add a little more colour to the build.
I have being thinking about painting the heatspreaders on my RAM (Corsair Vengence) with a white UV reactive paint so it has a nice glow from the two UV cold cathodes in my case. I was wondering if anyone has painted these before or has any ideas about how to go about this or whether I should avoid this all together.
How about some pictures of it in it's current state? So we can get a better idea of what your doing.
Apart from the paintfumes that will come out of your case 24/7, i'll work I guess.
First off you need to take off the heatspreaders by heating them up with a heat gun and peeling them off, sometimes they are firmly attached to the chips and just pulling will probably pull the chips from the PCB. Remove the thermal pads/thermal medium that is between the chips and heatspreaders. Use 99% IPA or a solvent that will remove that tacky material.Don't just take off the heatspreaders and paint them. You need to lightly go over them with a 400 to 600 grit sandpaper to mark up the metal. Then get a self etching primer and put on a coat or two. Once all that is done then you can go about painting the heatspreaders. When you go to reattach the heatspreaders you need thermal pads/other thermal medium put onto the ramchips. Once it is all together you have painted RAM. You don't really need to remove the heatspreaders, but doing so will ensure a better finished product. You can use low tac painters tape if you don't want to remove the heatspreaders.
Paintfumes will not come out of your case unless you literally paint them while inside the case which is highly advised against. Once paint dries the smell of paint fumes are gone.
Thanks for the info. I decided not the bother painting them after all. After some research I found out normal white paint doesn't reactive to uv light, you need to use paint designed for that purpose. And i figure it will void the warrent so it isn't worth it. I would post some pics of my build up but I can't figure out how to upload pictures on this site.