Motherboard insulation?

[skorch]

Hello everyone.
I recently built a new machine using an Intel board. My cousin who knows a bit more about PCs took a look at the results and suggested I take it apart and insulate the board. He said using the brass standoffs is OK but I should also wrap the standoffs in electrical tape and screw right thru them.
The whole assembly process was quite a strain if your eyesight is as poor as mine.
Is this a necessary step with the Intel boards and can it be done with a minimal amount of disconnections?

[ViRaL1]

That's a new one on me.

[Cobra]

Don't bother. Insulating a motherboard? Why? It works fine out of the box.

I have built many machines, and I've used the supplied mountings for the board, all metal. No extra insulation required - there aren't any tracks on the board near the mounting holes anyway.

Save your eyes the strain.

Cobra

[redwudz]

I have occasionally put the little plastic washers around the screw heads that attach the MB to the standoffs, but the tape is a new one. I'm not sure what purpose that would serve. The standoffs sit against pads on the MB that are apparently insulated from the circuitry. If you really wanted to insulate the MB, you could use plastic standoffs, but why?

If you use the proper diameter standoffs and screws, that should be fine.

[Capmaster]

There are times when you would want to insulate the MB.

The solder circular pads around the standoffs is usually signal ground. Attaching a metal standoff then ties signal ground to chassis ground. Not usually an issue.

But occasionally .....occasionally .....you could get ground loops when you have multiple paths to ground. Ideally you want all the grounds tied together in the same place as close to the PS as possible.

In high-current circuitry a high load can cause ground to become elevated from 0VDC due to I-squared-R drops. In the digital world, when ground isn't 0VDC, bad things can happen

Insulating the MB reduces the potential ground current paths and could help in certain situations where erratic behavior is being experienced.

[Cobra]

Not the first time I've been wrong about electronic stuff today, eh Capmaster?

[Capmaster]

Not the first time I've been wrong about electronic stuff today, eh Capmaster?

You weren't wrong on this. Almost all the time they do work just fine out of the box

But you should see some of the strange things I've seen ...one time we had a test set up in an environmental chamber. All our measurements were ultra high-impedance - in the teraohm range. But none of our gear worked. Everything was grounded with a heavy 2" wide braided copper strap bolted to the chamber wall, and with the door closed, it was a Faraday cage since we shielded the viewing ports. Yet it didn't work ....it was as though there was no ground. But the ground buzzed out as zero ohms ...bigger'n dog doo doo.

We spent the next two days trying to find the problem. You know what it was? Where we had bolted through the ground strap just happened to be at the peak of a standing wave on the copper strap ...an almost freak occurrence. All we had to do to make it work was move the bolt 6 inches further down the grounding strap and the thing was dead quiet. We were now grounding at a null of the standing wave. Strange