**The Art of Spray Painting: A Guide to Creating Custom Components**

When it comes to building high-performance computers, components like graphics cards can often be overlooked when it comes to aesthetics. However, with the rise of custom builds and enthusiasts, there's a growing demand for visually striking components that showcase one's personality and style. In this article, we'll explore the process of spray painting a graphics card, including tips, tricks, and advice on how to achieve a professional-looking finish.

**Preparation is Key**

Before you start spray painting your graphics card, it's essential to prepare the surface for painting. This involves cleaning the card thoroughly, removing any protective films or coatings, and applying a primer to ensure better adhesion of the paint. Make sure to follow all safety precautions when working with spray paint, including wearing gloves, goggles, and working in a well-ventilated area.

**Choosing the Right Paint**

When it comes to selecting a paint color for your graphics card, there are many options available. For this project, I chose a silver enamel that nearly matches the course aired on Platts AI. However, it's essential to choose a paint that complements the original finish of the card and won't obscure any critical components or markings.

**The Painting Process**

Once you've prepared your graphics card and selected the right paint, it's time to start painting. This process involves applying multiple thin coats of paint, allowing each coat to dry before applying the next. The number of coats will depend on the desired finish and the type of paint being used. As a general rule, three to four coats are sufficient for achieving a smooth, even finish.

To ensure consistency in your coating, rotate the spray can 15 to 20 degrees between coats and repeat until the desired finish is obtained. Make sure to cover all areas, including corners, sharp edges, crevices, and the inside of the shroud, as these areas will be visible when the card is turned vertically.

**Tips and Tricks**

When working with spray paint, it's essential to keep in mind that every can is different, and all paints set differently. Additionally, every object being painted creates new challenges. To overcome these challenges, practice makes perfect. Start by practicing on other components or materials before moving on to more critical parts of the build.

**The Build Process**

With your graphics card painted and ready for assembly, it's time to start building your system. For this project, I used a range of high-performance components, including the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, Intel Core i9-9900K processor, and Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM.

**The Finished Product**

After completing the build process, I was impressed with how well the painted graphics card turned out. The silver enamel added a touch of sophistication to the system, and the overall aesthetic looked clean and cohesive. While some may find the color scheme to be a bit unusual, I believe that it adds to the uniqueness of the build.

**Conclusion**

Building a custom computer is all about expressing yourself and showcasing your personality through the components you choose. With spray painting, you can add an extra layer of flair to your system, making it truly one-of-a-kind. Remember to follow safety precautions, practice patience, and don't be afraid to experiment with different colors and techniques until you achieve the desired finish.

**About the Author**

The author is a computer enthusiast who has been building custom systems for years. When not working on his own projects, he enjoys playing games, editing videos, and streaming live content. He's always looking for new ways to improve his builds and share his knowledge with others.

**Resources**

For those interested in building their own custom system, I've linked all the components used in this project in the video description. This includes the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, Intel Core i9-9900K processor, Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM, and more.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the gigabyte Oris r-tx 2080 extreme graphics card it's definitely a beefcake and an odd-looking one at that judging from initial impressions on Twitter you're likely either to love it or absolutely hate it personally I love the design I've got a special thing for triple fan coolers and this one brings a little something extra to the table these beautiful LEDs now while they might not look like much at first especially seeing as the one led perf an existing on one fan blade per fan there are many different effects to take advantage of and I encourage you to watch this video right here if you haven't already because it's where we discuss many of those lighting effects but I still think that this card could look better when we last met up with you good buy it in Miami where they debuted the card I asked them if they plan to release different colors like white or silver I thought that the lighting scheme could benefit from a lighter shroud color and I think that's an you know an okay assumption to make but to my disappointment the plan was to stick with just black that's where this video comes in time to paint another graphics card so the first step in this process was to disassemble the entire car down to bare PCB at this point I wasn't sure if I wanted to just paint the fan shroud or the entire frame so I disassembled everything record like this you'll also want to remove any metal accents and logos before painting for obvious reasons you want to keep those bare they usually just tell them by a few screws by the way you can take advantage of this time to replace the stock thermal compound with something a bit more mainstream if you wish although r-tx cards in general aren't going to be limited thermally by nature of this cards design you can remove though the entire heatsink and reinstall that along with the fan array without needing to attach any section of the plastic frame I decided in the moment only to paint the shroud since I plan to turn the card vertically with a cable on riser resulting in the backplate being completely hidden so with all of the smaller accents and details removed I cleaned up the shroud and removed as much dust and debris as I could you can also take this time to mask off any sensitive areas if you so desire as for paint I chose rust-oleum high-performance engine enamel it certainly isn't as removable as say Plasti Dip but the finish is much cleaner with only a few coats in my opinion and typically won't require any extra layers of gloss so in my experience plastidip is also considerably more sensitive to ambient temperatures I've used both probably used plastidip more to be honest but when I use plastic tip especially when it's cold outside which it's not really any more but when I first try to do this with the white plastic tip it just didn't stick well didn't adhere well to the plastic and it would kind of harden in these clumps and it just wasn't a smooth finish I switched to the rest Oleum enamel and under the same conditions practically that paint just just stuck to the surface much better so if you're a little you know concerned about that maybe you're a first-time painter I would say Plasti Dip is going to be more forgiving because you can remove it right it's just like a peelable plastic so in that sense you could just keep retrying over and over but I would say go for the rest Oh Liam because it's going to first I'll give you a cleaner finish it'll be easier to start with and you can practice on practically anything beforehand so if you're that concerned about messing it up the first time just take some small objects you don't care about paint those first get used to the coats and then you can move on to the more important objects now as for my painting studio yeah just a single box and a paint can cap to keep the card propped up I highly recommend you paint these components while they're suspended at least somewhat in the air otherwise you could have paint stick to the box or whatever you're painting on and that could totally ruin your finish this is especially the case for Plasti Dip it tends to be really sticky even when it dries shake the can rigorously for a few minutes make sure the ball inside is moving freely and then try a few test sprays at different distances I try to stay around eight to ten inches away any closer and you're likely to overspray resulting in unwanted puddles of especially wet paint that you never really get to dry in a consistent fashion now you shouldn't expect a clean finish after your first coat even if you have a few areas that aren't completely covered I mean it was there somewhat covered that's okay come back for the next coat and emphasize those areas first we're going getting things as smooth as possible over time and that's why staying further away is better in the long run one of the best things about this paint is that it dries fairly quick at around 15 minutes per coat but that doesn't mean you should be handling the shroud after said time frame you could still leave fingerprints and oils in the finish while the layer is soft which is where the paint cap underneath again comes in handy you can grab that and rotate the shroud as many times as necessary to ensure that you've covered as much of the surface as possible so again that's 15 to 20 minutes between coats rotate spray and repeat until the desired finish is obtained make sure you cover the corners of the shroud the sharp edges the crevices and even the inside of the shroud since you'll be able to see underneath when the card is turned vertically in your bill assuming you're going to it be a sin in my opinion to not turn this card vertically because it looks so good sideways just make sure the paint on the other side though if you flip it upside down has thoroughly dried first I know it seems like I'm spewing a ton of directions at once but I want to make sure that I cover all my bases here because painting isn't something that most people can just pick up and be good at the first time especially we're talking about spray painting is every can is different and all the paints are gonna set differently and every object in question creates new challenges so if you're concerned again like I'm not trying to scare you away from it I'm in fact I encourage you to annex to do this because you can you know make these things kind of your own make them look even more custom than before but I suggest practicing on other things first work on getting that consistent finish and then move on to the more important parts later the silver enamel I chose for this project actually turned out quite well and nearly matches our course aired on Platts AI oh and a gigabyte motherboard I've linked all these components by the way in the video description so if you're interested in building something similar you'll have a frame of reference this is not a cheap build by any means it's actually the one that I edit with consistently and occasionally play games with - hence the smaller 144th monitor right here in my writes there's a 24 inch 1080p monitor all in all though this is one of the more powerful attending rigs that I've worked with and I'm really impressed with how snappy the 9900 K is with its IGP when scrubbing the timeline or rendering the r-tx 20/80 is good especially for encoding and streaming which I do again a lot of playing with this ultra wide 1440p resolution or just looking sharp in the background I mean who doesn't like that look I know you guys were kind of upset this evening you know some of your joking about seizures or whatever but it looks worse on camera because again I got a sink the shutter speed up with the rotation of the fans and so because the fan LEDs are blinking right to kind of sync up with the human eye based on how fast they're rotating it really has to be in sync with the shutter speed in this case it's definitely not so that's why it looks really spotty but to the human eye in real life it looks very flushed very consistent only a small degree of blinking there so you can see here if I alter the shutter speed of my camera I can make this thing look much smoother and that is in fact how it looks again in real life and so again in my opinion now that we've painted this shroud silver the lights have just a more reflective surface to work with so I think that I've improved the overall aesthetic of the card and look I'm not knocking on gigabyte for omitting white or silver variants I don't think that's a negative not something that I would like give four stars instead of five or whatever on a review site like Amazon our new egg I imagine most would still be interested actually in a neutral black version and hey at least they made disassembly a relatively simple process so I've worked with other cards that are a completely different story and that's a pain in the butt and we don't you like to paint those kinds of cards but yeah this one's actually pretty simple to disassemble despite its kind of ominous like feature set like what it looks like it looks like it would be a painted disassemble it is not that's a good thing especially for us painters out there so with that I'd like to know what you think about this color scheme the finish the overall theme of the build obviously the idea here was for black and silver so if you're not a fan of either of those colors then yeah it's not gonna look too great we've got matching cable Mod cables and heck we've even got these fan blades in gray from Corsair so I really tried to match as much as possible and it was definitely fun to build I'm sure I'll do it again soon with that I'll ask you guys to leave a like or just like to ping on what you think your feedback is definitely appreciated subscribe for more content like this and consider becoming a member for special perks including dedicated live streams unique badges and more or try to be more involved on the member side of things here soon this is science video thanks for watching and thanks for this youthis is the gigabyte Oris r-tx 2080 extreme graphics card it's definitely a beefcake and an odd-looking one at that judging from initial impressions on Twitter you're likely either to love it or absolutely hate it personally I love the design I've got a special thing for triple fan coolers and this one brings a little something extra to the table these beautiful LEDs now while they might not look like much at first especially seeing as the one led perf an existing on one fan blade per fan there are many different effects to take advantage of and I encourage you to watch this video right here if you haven't already because it's where we discuss many of those lighting effects but I still think that this card could look better when we last met up with you good buy it in Miami where they debuted the card I asked them if they plan to release different colors like white or silver I thought that the lighting scheme could benefit from a lighter shroud color and I think that's an you know an okay assumption to make but to my disappointment the plan was to stick with just black that's where this video comes in time to paint another graphics card so the first step in this process was to disassemble the entire car down to bare PCB at this point I wasn't sure if I wanted to just paint the fan shroud or the entire frame so I disassembled everything record like this you'll also want to remove any metal accents and logos before painting for obvious reasons you want to keep those bare they usually just tell them by a few screws by the way you can take advantage of this time to replace the stock thermal compound with something a bit more mainstream if you wish although r-tx cards in general aren't going to be limited thermally by nature of this cards design you can remove though the entire heatsink and reinstall that along with the fan array without needing to attach any section of the plastic frame I decided in the moment only to paint the shroud since I plan to turn the card vertically with a cable on riser resulting in the backplate being completely hidden so with all of the smaller accents and details removed I cleaned up the shroud and removed as much dust and debris as I could you can also take this time to mask off any sensitive areas if you so desire as for paint I chose rust-oleum high-performance engine enamel it certainly isn't as removable as say Plasti Dip but the finish is much cleaner with only a few coats in my opinion and typically won't require any extra layers of gloss so in my experience plastidip is also considerably more sensitive to ambient temperatures I've used both probably used plastidip more to be honest but when I use plastic tip especially when it's cold outside which it's not really any more but when I first try to do this with the white plastic tip it just didn't stick well didn't adhere well to the plastic and it would kind of harden in these clumps and it just wasn't a smooth finish I switched to the rest Oleum enamel and under the same conditions practically that paint just just stuck to the surface much better so if you're a little you know concerned about that maybe you're a first-time painter I would say Plasti Dip is going to be more forgiving because you can remove it right it's just like a peelable plastic so in that sense you could just keep retrying over and over but I would say go for the rest Oh Liam because it's going to first I'll give you a cleaner finish it'll be easier to start with and you can practice on practically anything beforehand so if you're that concerned about messing it up the first time just take some small objects you don't care about paint those first get used to the coats and then you can move on to the more important objects now as for my painting studio yeah just a single box and a paint can cap to keep the card propped up I highly recommend you paint these components while they're suspended at least somewhat in the air otherwise you could have paint stick to the box or whatever you're painting on and that could totally ruin your finish this is especially the case for Plasti Dip it tends to be really sticky even when it dries shake the can rigorously for a few minutes make sure the ball inside is moving freely and then try a few test sprays at different distances I try to stay around eight to ten inches away any closer and you're likely to overspray resulting in unwanted puddles of especially wet paint that you never really get to dry in a consistent fashion now you shouldn't expect a clean finish after your first coat even if you have a few areas that aren't completely covered I mean it was there somewhat covered that's okay come back for the next coat and emphasize those areas first we're going getting things as smooth as possible over time and that's why staying further away is better in the long run one of the best things about this paint is that it dries fairly quick at around 15 minutes per coat but that doesn't mean you should be handling the shroud after said time frame you could still leave fingerprints and oils in the finish while the layer is soft which is where the paint cap underneath again comes in handy you can grab that and rotate the shroud as many times as necessary to ensure that you've covered as much of the surface as possible so again that's 15 to 20 minutes between coats rotate spray and repeat until the desired finish is obtained make sure you cover the corners of the shroud the sharp edges the crevices and even the inside of the shroud since you'll be able to see underneath when the card is turned vertically in your bill assuming you're going to it be a sin in my opinion to not turn this card vertically because it looks so good sideways just make sure the paint on the other side though if you flip it upside down has thoroughly dried first I know it seems like I'm spewing a ton of directions at once but I want to make sure that I cover all my bases here because painting isn't something that most people can just pick up and be good at the first time especially we're talking about spray painting is every can is different and all the paints are gonna set differently and every object in question creates new challenges so if you're concerned again like I'm not trying to scare you away from it I'm in fact I encourage you to annex to do this because you can you know make these things kind of your own make them look even more custom than before but I suggest practicing on other things first work on getting that consistent finish and then move on to the more important parts later the silver enamel I chose for this project actually turned out quite well and nearly matches our course aired on Platts AI oh and a gigabyte motherboard I've linked all these components by the way in the video description so if you're interested in building something similar you'll have a frame of reference this is not a cheap build by any means it's actually the one that I edit with consistently and occasionally play games with - hence the smaller 144th monitor right here in my writes there's a 24 inch 1080p monitor all in all though this is one of the more powerful attending rigs that I've worked with and I'm really impressed with how snappy the 9900 K is with its IGP when scrubbing the timeline or rendering the r-tx 20/80 is good especially for encoding and streaming which I do again a lot of playing with this ultra wide 1440p resolution or just looking sharp in the background I mean who doesn't like that look I know you guys were kind of upset this evening you know some of your joking about seizures or whatever but it looks worse on camera because again I got a sink the shutter speed up with the rotation of the fans and so because the fan LEDs are blinking right to kind of sync up with the human eye based on how fast they're rotating it really has to be in sync with the shutter speed in this case it's definitely not so that's why it looks really spotty but to the human eye in real life it looks very flushed very consistent only a small degree of blinking there so you can see here if I alter the shutter speed of my camera I can make this thing look much smoother and that is in fact how it looks again in real life and so again in my opinion now that we've painted this shroud silver the lights have just a more reflective surface to work with so I think that I've improved the overall aesthetic of the card and look I'm not knocking on gigabyte for omitting white or silver variants I don't think that's a negative not something that I would like give four stars instead of five or whatever on a review site like Amazon our new egg I imagine most would still be interested actually in a neutral black version and hey at least they made disassembly a relatively simple process so I've worked with other cards that are a completely different story and that's a pain in the butt and we don't you like to paint those kinds of cards but yeah this one's actually pretty simple to disassemble despite its kind of ominous like feature set like what it looks like it looks like it would be a painted disassemble it is not that's a good thing especially for us painters out there so with that I'd like to know what you think about this color scheme the finish the overall theme of the build obviously the idea here was for black and silver so if you're not a fan of either of those colors then yeah it's not gonna look too great we've got matching cable Mod cables and heck we've even got these fan blades in gray from Corsair so I really tried to match as much as possible and it was definitely fun to build I'm sure I'll do it again soon with that I'll ask you guys to leave a like or just like to ping on what you think your feedback is definitely appreciated subscribe for more content like this and consider becoming a member for special perks including dedicated live streams unique badges and more or try to be more involved on the member side of things here soon this is science video thanks for watching and thanks for this you\n"