Ivy Bridge LN2 Overclocker's Guide:
Insulation is done very easily for those of you who have done
this before; you are insulting for basically a full pot scenario. However
everything that deals with LN2 OCing or OCing in general can and will void the
warranty of your products, including but not limited to the motherboard, CPU,
and memory. I take no responsibility for your actions.
First
there are two methods I like to use, the first one is meant for use if you want
to use the board after you have done LN2 OC, the second is for if you don’t have
time, and want to be extra safe with the board, however it isn’t very reversible.
The boards this time from
GIGABYTE have a lot of interesting OC features:
Method
#1 Conformal and Eraser:
This method
is the eraser method, in which the user will first coat the board with a thin
film of conformal coat such as liquid electrical tape or some other silicone
based conformal coat. Liquid electrical tape can be removed afterwards as can
dragon skin. Then eraser is put in critical areas to displace the air so that
condensation cannot form. In this method you will also either put grease in the
memory and PCI-E sockets or you won’t, if you do not then you should pay special
attention to those areas. As you can see in the picture below, the board seems
to have frozen solid, even the heatsinks still have ice on them, and it
literally looks as if it snowed on the motherboard. However I was being lazy and
didn’t have proper airflow so I could show you guys how it looks. All the white
on the PCB is a thick layer of liquid electrical tape, providing a barrier to
water and condensation, of course condensation will form on the coating so you
still have to dry the system. I was being lazy and I actually wanted good shots
of condensation forming, so I didn’t use a fan blowing air upwards away from the
board, but you will want to do this. Just one fan blowing air up, sucking air
from below the top of the POT is all you need to move the air away and help
reduce condensation.
You still want to use paper towels
in this method to form an air tight seal as well as catch ice from the POT. I
did a bad thing, in that I didn't have a high RPM fan blowing upwards so that
much less ice would have formed, instead I let the vapor from the LN2 condense
and form ice to show you some of the worst case scenarios. You however shouldn't
do this, you should always have a fan blowing upwards, and preferably not
connected to the board or PSU so that it always stays on. LN2 doesn't stop
boiling because your system is off.
Method #2 Grease and Paper Towels:
Grease and release method is when you use silicon grease, and basically
cover everything but the socket in it, personally I don’t grease the DIMMs or
the PCI-E slots unless I am doing GPU or memory on LN2. Then you lay paper
towels in a square layout such as that shown below, and then you mount the CPU
pot on the paper towels. The paper towels will act like the eraser and help form
an air tight seal between the POT’s insulation and the board, but the paper
towels also provide minimal insulating properties. However the grease when in
all the small crevices will prevent water from hitting the electronics, which is
the goal of this. So if you just use grease, you must be sure to cover
everything. Except do not grease the CPU socket.
Now this
picture is very interesting, you can see this is a UD3H, and notice how the
frost as formed on top of the grease used. There is no conformal coat on this
board, just grease on top of all the electrics. Grease is hydrophobic which
means its molecules are scared of water, and thus they repel water. So you can
literally wipe away the water and some grease as the same time, and then reapply
more grease. Just as in the previous method, you have to let the board dry
before using it again. A heat gun can hurry this process.
You
can see that there is water on some of the chokes as this is after drying out.
The greased system is easier to dry out than the eraser, because the paper
towels are all that need to be removed. However there is no water in the socket,
thus I don’t use any grease in the socket.
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