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Coating a Motherboard In Thermal Resin?
Bat Country writes "I've had an idea in the back of my head for some time (and I'm surely not the only one) that it would be a worthwhile project to coat a motherboard in thermally conductive electrically insulating resin — complete with all of its various components — for the purpose of immersion, shock resistance, whatever. I'm curious to find out if anyone's undertaken a similar project or if it's known to be a shockingly bad idea (due to shrinkage during the curing process) already. Thoughts?" If you've done anything similar (even an experiment that failed), how did you go about it?
Probably a lot easier to source yourself a few liters of Cray blood (or some similar non-conductive coolant) to submerge the board in instead.
Cheers,
The issue I see is with immersion. Sure you can coat the MB but what about the USB, VGA, etc connectors? Can you guarantee water will not leak in. Water has a way of getting inside any way it possibly can. Coating may be beneficial when you do not intend to put in case. Maybe to protect the MB as a bench system.
Wouldn't that conduct the heat from the CPU over to the other components?
Except that conformal coating would not be the greatest idea for use with immersion cooling. You would have to coat everything together, including memory modules, pci cards, power connectors, etc..., making them permanently attached and impossible to replace if/when necessary. Since it seems Bat Country's intention for this is so that a non-conductive coolant is not required for immersion, leading me to believe water or some other electrically conductive coolant is to be used, you add the risk that the coolant may enter through small holes and cracks that may develop at the places where the components are connected, immediately bringing everything to a halt.
For immersion, the only sensible means is to use a non-conductive coolant and not worry about having to protect your hardware from the coolant it will be immersed in. It might be more expensive than just cooling with water, but it will likely be cheaper than having to replace ALL of your hardware that you just fried.
That's what he wants to do?
pfft. Waste of time and hardware. A leak will kill it.
Use something cool, maybe some old Cray coolant. It's out there.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.