Waterproof coating for motherboards

Intel’s Haswell is just around the corner and a number of motherboard vendors have been announcing their new features for their respective lineups, including a good deal of those boards featuring in-house-designed audio solutions based on designs from Realtek and Creative. But one feature from ASRock looks to be the coolest of them all – a water proof coating that allows the board to run even when wet.

I can hear the jaws of overclockers everywhere drop. For those of you who also run custom liquid cooling setups, this is fantastic.

ASRock calls the tech “Conformal Coating” and it is a super-hydrophobic coating. We’ve had products that are hydrophobic for years – some hospitals have a spray-on hydrophobic wax to keep casts dry, you can order paint for your house with hydrophobic properties, and there’s even car wax sprays with hydrophobic properties that can last for weeks.

It works by bouncing water molecules on the object’s surface without breaking the molecule’s skin. It keeps the molecules balanced on a very soft surface at a low angle and allows the water to easily roll in any direction, preserving its shape even while moving. You can coat any object with hydrophobic wax – skin, cellphones and even heavy metal structures can have the coating applied to keep the object completely dry, even though its under water.

A drawback to the technique is that although you can coat anything you want, once you do that object loses its ability to conduct electricity. ASRock says that the pins on the Z87 OC Formula are not coated, therefore the water shown flowing off the board is actually directed away from any active pins lest it shorts out unexpectedly.

This is a boon to LN2 overclockers, however. One of the headaches with overclocking on LN2 is that the board’s surface actually condenses the water vapor in the air around it because its so cold. You need to use things like putty, malleable wax and even tissues to avoid water pooling up on the board.

No-one’s really had the chance to test it in public yet, but you can bet that local overclocking hero Andrew “dRweEz” Roberts will report back on it when he’s allowed to. Andrew’s post on the Below Zer0 forums suggests that he may have the board already.