ASRock Announces A-Style Conformal Coating For 8 Series Motherboards

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You have butterfingers, unfortunately we’re not talking about those delicious sweets, but the kind that makes you practice Newton’s law of universal gravitation every once in a while. And according to Murphy’s law, things tend to get even worse when your slippery hands get involved with electronics. What usually happens when you spill beverages or other conductive liquids onto your motherboard is that it turns into a not-so-fun sizzling barbeque fest, and then your motherboard dies of short circuit fatefully. That’s where A-Style, Conformal Coating comes in.

The special layer of Conformal Coating makes ASRock’s motherboards invulnerable to conductive liquids, so overclockers won’t have to worry about accidently spilling liquid nitrogen, liquid helium or even clam chowder over their motherboards while they are overclocking. Along with conductive liquids, Conformal Coating also protects the motherboard against dust, corrosion and extreme temperatures. It is the ultimate armor for the upcoming 8 Series motherboards.
 
That's a pretty cool feature. Does anyone know how well the coating would do with heat transfer?
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
That's a pretty cool feature. Does anyone know how well the coating would do with heat transfer?
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Conformal coating is going to hamper heat transfer, to what degree depends entirely on the coating being used and how thick it is applied and to what extent to/on the board components.
 
I guessed as much. Would such an implementation require additional heatsinks placed on non-coated areas in order to circumvent this issue or is that a moot point with the coating in the first place?
 
Coatings like this are extremely thin, and aren't likely to interfere with heat transfer in any real, measurable way.

I do question how useful it really is though. Seems more of an odd marketing gimmick. Unless they've had a huge rash of returned motherboards that failed due to water damage.

This would be far more useful in a laptop or keyboard than a motherboard.
 
I wouldn't think it would effect cooling past maybe 1 degree. Unless they just pack it very thick on the board, which I don't think they would.
 
Thats pretty cool.. Just gives that little more peace of mind when water cooling.. I know they were going to start doing this to new cell phones..
 
I call bullshit on this one. The board may be waterproof, but it still has open expansion slots and connectors. I guess it's better than nothing, at least for extreme users. /never heard of many hard core overclockers using Asrock branded boards though
 
Does belonging to a forum cause people to automatically become cynics?

I'm pretty sure they didn't mean for you to chuck it in your swimming pool or go scuba diving.

Casual spills, no problem, and when you are torn between Mobo A and Mobo B, well, this one has a neat gimmick/feature/etc.
 
Just wanted to say the dialog in that video is top notch, lol.

Additionally, I've heard people complain about component failure in high humidity areas. This might be useful there.
 
Lith1um said:
I call bullshit on this one. The board may be waterproof, but it still has open expansion slots and connectors. I guess it's better than nothing, at least for extreme users. /never heard of many hard core overclockers using Asrock branded boards though
Click to expand...

I had my most satisfying overclock to date using an ASRock 939Dual-SATA2...
Took an Athlon 3700+ (san diego core) up to a stable 2.86GHz :D
 
Conformal coats are to prevent barfunkien from attaching to the pcb and becoming conductive. Its also to prevent tin whiskers in lead free assemblies, along with preventing questionable solder flux from absorbing water and becoming non inert, or conductive.

Some of the conformal coatings at my shop are also thermally conductive and electrically insulating. So they even out board heating and help with arcing.
 
leSLIe said:
It's amazing!!
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QlMUPzk.gif
 
Between this and the audio set up for the board this may be an interesting Motherboard.
 
hmm, This layer could be thousands of an inch thick, and irrelevant, or it could be a heat conductive layer, but not electrically conductive

Im sure the engineers didn't think about heat conduction when they decided to make a motherboard for overclockers who like to remove heat with water cooling.

:rolleyes:
 
I've looked into a combination of this and something for the PCI-E slots/etc a while back, just never took the plunge.
I'm in a coastal town in Brazil and the humidity destroys everything.
 
BreezeDM said:
Between this and the audio set up for the board this may be an interesting Motherboard.
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I think ASRock should spend the money on a thicker PCB rather than a useless feature that almost no one will care about. Yeah it's cool that you can theoretically spill crap on a board and not fry it but that's probably not as useful as you might think. It doesn't safeguard your power connectors, PSU, graphics card, CPU, RAM or anything else you'd plug into the system. A light spill may not kill the board but if you spill in just the right place that coating won't matter. It certainly won't be worth the tradeoff of potentially increased thermals.

My point being that while it's a cool marketing gimmick that's all it really is. I just don't see this as a practical feature. That said stuff like this is exciting because it gives me an opportunity for unorthodox testing. I am certainly looking forward to putting this coating to the test in order to see how well it really works.
 
Maybe the motherboard can take liquid splash, but are we forgetting there are other components to a PC?
 
My Koolance CPU-300-10 cooler failed a couple of weeks ago and started a slow drip from the bottom of the heatsink. I never noticed a problem until I shut the computer down and it would not power back on. Turns out the coolant was driping down onto the SATA connectors. I was able to clean up the board, replace the coller block, and carry on. But that could very easily have been way nastier than it was. If Asus started offering this type of coating, it would definitely be a consideration for me.

In fact, this is not even the first Koolance block I've had fail on me. I have had 1 HDD cooler, 1 Mainboard cooler, and 1 chipset cooler fail - but all of those had swivel ends, and it looks like they failed because the rubber rings in them wore out (and they were amongst my oldest blocks - been running Koolance since HardOCP reviewed the first Koolance case). This CPU Cooler is the first one where it developed a leak through where the acetyl bonds to the metal. . . The new CPU-380 blocks seem to be better in this regard in that they can be taken apart and have the seals cleaned or replaced.
 
Nobified[H];1039900533 said:
Maybe the motherboard can take liquid splash, but are we forgetting there are other components to a PC?
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An electrical short from an add-on component would give the motherboard a jolt regardless of the coating. One way or another, the coating may not provide as much protection as the PR release would like us to think.
 
Interesting idea, and maybe useful to some people but it won't make much difference to me.
 
Now just need expansion cards with this coating and seals/sealant for the slots, etc.,.and full submersion water cooling with no specialized liquids will be a reality.
 
In spite of the assurances it is AMAZING by the man in the video, it doesn't seem like it has any practical protection improvement.

Sure, if you carefully pour a trickle of water down a selected area of the motherboard itself it's great. But in any true accident, the chances liquid does that and avoids all expansion cards / sockets and USB headers would seem slim.
 
It's not a bad feature, but if you can get it to run while submerged 24/7/365 then you will really have something.
 
It is a neat coating..But I gotta say it. If you have the quoted problems.

You have butterfingers, unfortunately we’re not talking about those delicious sweets, but the kind that makes you practice Newton’s law of universal gravitation every once in a while. And according to Murphy’s law, things tend to get even worse when your slippery hands get involved with electronics. What usually happens when you spill beverages or other conductive liquids onto your motherboard is that it turns into a not-so-fun sizzling barbeque fest, and then your motherboard dies of short circuit fatefully. That’s where A-Style, Conformal Coating comes in.
Click to expand...

Then you may need to reconsider working in electronics..Just saying..
 
Conformal coating is great.

We used to do it all the time for military boards back when I was with Raytheon.

For some implantable parts it is done in medical devices as well.

Typically Parylene coating process is used for this.

It can make manufacturing's life a living hell though, as any board rework is much harder, as now you have to scrape this shit off before reworking.


The problem is it's just not going to do what they claim it will do. :rolleyes:

You will still have exposed pins, connectors, CPU sockets PCIe slots, power supply, hard drives, video cards, ram slots, etc. etc. etc.

It will make the system a little more moisture resistant, yes, but water/spill proof? I highly doubt it.

It will have insulative properties as well. Presumably they will not coat over chipsets that require high heat dissipation.
 
well chicken nuggets and honey here i come! assembly time can now be multitask time!
 
Reading the posts here I'd say 99% of the people here wouldn't bother wearing Level III ballistic armor while on police patrol because it won't stop an artillery strike to the nuts. :rolleyes:

CacaSapo said:
I've looked into a combination of this and something for the PCI-E slots/etc a while back, just never took the plunge.
I'm in a coastal town in Brazil and the humidity destroys everything.
Click to expand...

This is what everyone's missing. It's not so much about dumping some beverage into the board's connectors. It should help shield against condensation, dust, and errant intermittent contact with, say, a screw or jumper that went where you didn't want it to go for a teeny second. It may also help cut down the risk of minor ESD if your grounding isn't entirely perfect, and might help with some errant beverage that doesn't happen to land on the 10% connector real estate vs the 90% coated real estate. Considering how so many cases are less solid and more mesh now, that's a concern inside a closed box as much as an open one. Sure, it won't help if your Mountain Pew lands on your video card, but if more manufacturers start using these coatings, then more devices could have them, and less risk of damaged hardware and expensive bricks. There's potential for this. The question is... is it going to really be worth it, and how effective will it be in real-world scenarios?

CreepyUncleGoogle said:
It sounds like [H] should put one of these boards to the test. :)
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Absolutely.
 
Not sure if its feasible, but I would think this coating would be even more useful for notebooks/tablets/phones than desktops. I can't remeber ever spilling anything on my motherboard, but I've washed phones and been thrown into pools with phones/tablets before. Would have loved to have had something like this.
 
Without graphics cards or other extension cards carrying the same coating, it becomes moot. When you convince Nvidia or ATi to make some cards with this coating, then I'm interested.
 
CacaSapo said:
I've looked into a combination of this and something for the PCI-E slots/etc a while back, just never took the plunge.
I'm in a coastal town in Brazil and the humidity destroys everything.
Click to expand...

What kind of humidity do you actually see?

Cause here in Boston we are frequently at 90+% RH in the summer, and I have never suffered any premature board failures...

Phoenix333 said:
Reading the posts here I'd say 99% of the people here wouldn't bother wearing Level III ballistic armor while on police patrol because it won't stop an artillery strike to the nuts. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Not a good comparison, because if you are counting on it to protect against RH in the air, then that humidity is going to hit all components of the system equally, so every gap in the coating, wherever it is system wide is going to be its weak point, and negate any coating anywhere else.

You do have a point when it comes to spills, but wince everything is so close together, it would seem to me that unless it's a REALLY SMALL spill, you are going to hit multiple components anyway...


Phoenix333 said:
It should help shield against condensation, <snip>
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I agree here. This board might be very useful for those in the extreme cooling thread.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039903252 said:
Not a good comparison, because if you are counting on it to protect against RH in the air, then that humidity is going to hit all components of the system equally
Click to expand...

It's when the humidity becomes condensing that it's a problem. Heat distribution on components is never uniform, so the cooler spots will be more likely to become points for condensation. I probably should have made that a little clearer.
 
Phoenix333 said:
It's when the humidity becomes condensing that it's a problem. Heat distribution on components is never uniform, so the cooler spots will be more likely to become points for condensation. I probably should have made that a little clearer.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but you'd likely need a component that is cooler than the surrounding air in order to force it to drop below the dew point...

Either that, or a very sudden indoor temperature drop beyond the dew point, not aided by air conditioning (as it tends to dehumidify the air)

Both seem like a rather unlikely scenarios to me...

Well, the first is likely if you do extreme cooling, but otherwise, no.
 
NeoNemesis said:
Not sure if its feasible, but I would think this coating would be even more useful for notebooks/tablets/phones than desktops. I can't remeber ever spilling anything on my motherboard, but I've washed phones and been thrown into pools with phones/tablets before. Would have loved to have had something like this.
Click to expand...

Conformal coating is already being used in smartphones like the latest iphone and galaxy. Just keep in mind the coating is to ensure the water slips off the surface as quickly as possible. It's not a safety measure against getting your electronics submerged.
 
mvmiller12 said:
My Koolance CPU-300-10 cooler failed a couple of weeks ago and started a slow drip from the bottom of the heatsink. I never noticed a problem until I shut the computer down and it would not power back on. Turns out the coolant was driping down onto the SATA connectors. I was able to clean up the board, replace the coller block, and carry on. But that could very easily have been way nastier than it was. If Asus started offering this type of coating, it would definitely be a consideration for me.

In fact, this is not even the first Koolance block I've had fail on me. I have had 1 HDD cooler, 1 Mainboard cooler, and 1 chipset cooler fail - but all of those had swivel ends, and it looks like they failed because the rubber rings in them wore out (and they were amongst my oldest blocks - been running Koolance since HardOCP reviewed the first Koolance case). This CPU Cooler is the first one where it developed a leak through where the acetyl bonds to the metal. . . The new CPU-380 blocks seem to be better in this regard in that they can be taken apart and have the seals cleaned or replaced.
Click to expand...

Every time I think I want to get into water cooling, I think "what would happen if it leaked and killed most of my system?"

That's what ends it for me - I have a family and if my system drowned to death, I would be back to a Celeron and a an 8800GT for months or longer.

I'm very careful and meticulous but I don't think I would ever stop worrying about it.
 
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