Question Are bamboo skewers conductable?

[BopTarts]

I’m making a cardboard case and have bamboo skewers in the stand-off holes. I also might have splinters on my board. Will this short my PC?

 

[boju]

Dry wood/bamboo isn't conductive so shouldn't be an issue. Coated with oily substance would change things but don't think that is done for food grade skewers. I've made skewers plenty of times and it's just plain dry wood.

 

[Karadjgne]

Dry no. Wet yes.

 

[CountMike]

Standoffs are meant to be conductive and ground MB to the case thru mounting holes

 

[DSzymborski]

I'm a little confused by the whole standoffs thing. Why ornamental standoffs that don't fulfill any of the actual roles of standoffs?

 

[Karadjgne]

Standoffs are not meant to be grounds. They just happen to fulfill that purpose because the primary role of standoffs is to extend the groundplane of the motherboard for thermal purposes. Neither of which is a necessity for full motherboard function, just a luxury.

Making the reason for 'standoffs' nothing more than what they are physically, a means to hold the motherboard solder points away from a thermally and electrically conductive surface.

There's multiple cases, and just about all AT and prior cases that used plastic twist or snap pins to hold the motherboard.

 

[punkncat]

Lol, I once made a case out of a boot box. It was a bit of a running joke between a friend and I over the premise of "junkyard builds". In my particular instance I just utilized some silicone to hold things in place.

 

[Karadjgne]

I'm a little confused by the whole standoffs thing. Why ornamental standoffs that don't fulfill any of the actual roles of standoffs?

Because other than physical need to keep solder off the motherboard tray, standoffs are a luxury for most boards.

The design of a motherboard is testament to electrical engineering. Every component that has power running through it, from the smallest diode to the biggest mosfet creates heat. The groundplane covers most of a single pcb layer. Those components get attached to that ground plane, which acts as a leech field, and needs to be effective enough to moderate the temps of the components. It's why the constant battle with ram and fets etc encroaching on the socket, they need to be close enough not to lose transmission time to the socket, but far enough away not to create hot-spots in the ground plane that won't leech the heat created.

Add in the variety of cpus and their different demand for power and speeds, and figure all that into the requirements of size and thickness and thermal conductivity of the ground plane.

Then all that is taken into consideration with just how much power is expected from the cpu, and then Intel throws a curve ball and puts out a 300w cpu that's also overclockable. But how much exactly is anyone's guess, is it 100w or 200w. Unknown.

So higher end boards like the Hero and Godlike etc are built to withstand the 'maybe' power and heat use, the B/H boards built to withstand the known power use, but nobody can predict the unknown, like some idiot using a BCLK OC, or power consumption and heat generation of ultra high speed ram, so brass standoffs are used as a failsafe to extend the groundplane, and helping to prevent premature component burnout with a larger leech field.

Metal standoff use isn't a necessity for normal full operation, you can park the board on its cardboard box for breadboxing purposes and get full functionality, or use plastic or ornamental standoffs, but you'd really not want to go to extremes with that or there is a possibility you'd physically burn up some components once the groundplane gets saturated and starts losing thermal conductivity.

Motherboard design and tolerances is one of the many reasons Intel and amd release the flagship cpus first, top of the line, biggest power draw, so vendor partners can build motherboards to withstand the abuse. It's also why some motherboard purchases also run into trouble or have issues when unknown variables like the 5800X3D are released late, someone using a mid-grade X570 that could handle a 5950x within limits, now has a cpu that's dumping excessive heat, and it complains with reduced performance or simply dies.