I like keeping my system tidy and good-looking even though I don't have a windowed case. I have a black, gold and white colour scheme, but my NZXT Havik 140 heat sink and the visible heat pipes for my graphics card are silver/metal/aluminium (whatever you call it) coloured. Does anyone know if painting these would affect the cooling performance and how difficult it would be to DIY paint heat sink fins and end up with a good-looking result?
Bonus question: My case is the R4 and I have been thinking about going for a water cooled system to make the area around the CPU look a bit tidier. I’m thinking the Swiftech H220 either in the top or the front (preferably in the front) and cool both the CPU and the GPU with this. I run a completely silent system so the fans would be running at 5 V. Is this doable? Would it be as silent and effective as my current air cooling solution?
I've seen people pait them before but it kinda scares my briches off too much to ever try it myself. My guess would be you'd have to use some High Temp paint eg. brake caliper or engine enamel paint. The only time I've seen a radiator painted even with in an MNPCTech video so you might want to look through their vids and see if they say anything about what type of paint they're using when they do it.
Painting them isn't too difficult; a simple spray paint job will suffice. As long as you aren't painting everything, as in, in between the blades, etc., you should be fine. You could just paint the top of it (the visible part), and be fine. You won't lose much thermal performance at all, really. Just use a good, quality paint, and don't forget to cover up the parts you don't want to paint with masking tape, etc.
Thats a really good idea actually.
Contact Swaintech and see if they will coat it with their black ceramic thermal conductivity enhancing coating. It looks amazing and it happens to facilitate a more rapid exchange of energy in the form of radiated heat.