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.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 6 - Step 3: OC-Profiles
Page 2 - Ivy Bridge Basics	Page 7 - Ivy Bridge and LN2
Page 3 - 22 Nanometer and Maths	Page 8 - Ivy Bridge LN2 Memory Overclocking
Page 4 - Step 1: Ivy Bridge CPU Overclocking	Page 9 - Ivy Bridge BCLK Overclocking
Page 5 - Step 2: Ivy Bridge Memory Overclocking

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