so my original hypothesis about my water cooling Loop was that it had gotten all
gunked up due to microbial growth in spite of the fact that I am using
primochill LRT that is oh I can't even
remember what it stands for
um huh well there you go whatever the primochill antimicrobial tubing I
thought it was cuz I reused some of the segments of tubing so they didn't have
the coating enough of a coating left anymore or whatever else but I'm
starting to think it was to do with this block and not anything else because you
can see there's weird text on the other side of the
block see that there's like graphic design going on and it's not on the side
see here you can see under my finger it's on the other side of the Plexi and
this looks like some kind of a corrosion or something see that's not a normal
nickel color so I'm going to be opening
up this block and seeing if I can even clean it off and let's try and find out
what the heck is going on here so my my
new Loop is going to be using a swifttech block so one way or another um
whatever kind of issue I know EK had some nickel plating issues in the past
but I didn't think the GTX 480 blocks were offend were affected so I guess
we're uh we're about to find out all right so the cover has been removed and
it's interesting cuz I can uh I can read the text now so something about Quinn
plastics.com and uh format something these are
another languages but
um that's hilarious so this is just yeah
it's just Gunk see so I can scratch it right off but I guess it was probably
from the protective layer that was over the Plexi before it was applied and that
somehow left um
like a slight residue in the shape of
the text so here there's a phone number so plus 44 028 6774
886 and then I wonder if there's something after that doesn't look like
it so yeah there you go so you can reach Quinn Plastics and ask them about it if
you really want to I suppose um now
let's have a look at the Block itself so this is where we start getting into
whether or not this block is correct
roing I mean that looks an awful lot
like metal discoloration to
me but until I pick away at it a little bit
here I'm not going to know for sure everywhere else kind of looks okay oh
hold on what's that that one's not coming
off here hope you guys can see this I wonder if I can switch to macro mode in
the middle of filming I don't think I can here I'm going to switch to macro mode okay we're in macro mode now so uh
haven't really tried to clean it off yet but there's that one and then here's the
one over here right there that doesn't seem to be coming off so I wonder if
there were some imperfections in the nickel plating here going to try and
clean it off completely now and see what happens going to have to remove the block from the card in order to do that
as well so I'm in the bathroom
now got my uh got my block here got an
old toothbrush that's got some alcohol on it so that
uh might at least help me clear away
some of this Gunk which it doesn't seem
to be doing this is uh this is some
pretty robust Gunk we got going on
here huh it's funny cuz
it oh no that doesn't come off that easily does
it so I was having some success with it before I hope you guys can see what I'm
doing yeah not really okay okay I'll move it a little closer there we go
we'll call that good
enough yeah no that's not coming off at all but if I try with like a little bit
more scrubbing
power no that is a pretty stained block yeah you can see I've got actually yeah
that that takes off the top layer of it so let's just do this one
bar bar wave I don't know whatever you want to call it
there we go so you can see that the metal itself
is uh is discolored
there so there you go I will not be reusing this particular block um under
any circumstances and uh yeah that's a
that's a shame well thank you for checking out this
little Discovery episode of my video blog don't forget to subscribe to L
techtips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos it looks like
there's actually a few of these there's one here yeah there you go you can see
that there's a couple places here here
and here where it seems like there's very very small imperfections that then
just from the water flow carried
um carried away some metal particles
that deposited themselves onto the nickel looks like up here was kind of
bad
and uh look there's a couple more marks
in there if anyone knows more about Metal than I do feel free to chime in
and suggest how this might have happened remember this is nickel plated
copper and I think we're done here actually one more thing guys I
should note that it's been quite a while since EK has had these problems with
their blocks so this video was just more for um the sake of that I was working on
it anyway so I figured I might as well shot a video about it it's not a warning
about EK products they've uh they've tightened up the quality control on
their nickel plating processes so any recent blocks should be fine however if
you do have a 480 or a 470 block something from this generation of
products might be worthwhile to have a look in your Loop and if your case is
closed make sure that you don't have any gunk