Desk PC Water Cooling Maintenance Vlog
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
2,247 words · ~11 min read
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the desk pc's desperate need for maintenance has been
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kind of easy to ignore because all i had to do to not be able to see come check this
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out colored foam at the top of the water in
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the reservoirs and the disgusting amount of dust on the
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motherboard was to just cover it with hoodies and
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galaxy s9s and that sort of thing
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but it's gone to the point where it's actually loud like listen to this
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that's because of all the air in the loop so by popular demand
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welcome to desk pc water cooling maintenance
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a video that is going to be absolute
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hell brought to you by thermaltake their p90
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core tempered glass case features five millimeter thick glass and angled open
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included and more check it out at the link below
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because this thing is so large and heavy during the construction project of the
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wallpaper tv window we actually didn't
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take it out of the room so even though i did eventually get my filters installed
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here look at this look at this if i touch this filter
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see that dust there was so much dust in this room
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that i mean even
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what did get through the filter has made it just grody this one's the worst
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although what's cool is that for the doubters out there who thought that the
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airflow scheme for this thing wasn't gonna work yeah you're wrong
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oh
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it's inching over
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oh there we go and for those of you who figure i'm probably just whining look how thick
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that sucker is
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look at this oh lordy oh that is gross
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i need my dyson let's just make this video not about the desk at all let's
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just make it about a vacuum again you guys you guys like that i'm just kidding
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but i do need a vacuum hi
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i legitimately hadn't really given a lot of thought to where to start with this
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so one thing i did think of was that
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it would be good to be able to pull these up to drain the loop
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i don't know if i ended up actually leaving enough slack
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i take kind of a yolo approach to water cooling maintenance
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so you might as well get as much adrenaline pumping during that time as
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you can alright so this is a little bit tricky
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because what we don't want is any water on our mdf desk it is
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painted and that does help us out a fair bit but it is still sub-optimal
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to get water on it it'll swell up and basically get
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immediately ruined
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all right now this is a bit of a hack
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now normally i wouldn't recommend blowing into a water cooling loop
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because you introduce all kinds of you know microorganisms and stuff in
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your breath um but the reason that we don't care
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here is that we are about to clean everything anyway so it's not a big deal
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how would you if you were to blow into it um you would just have to open up
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somewhere open up the highest point of the loop and then drain at the lowest
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point in the loop and then the whole thing should just kind of drain on its own but you'd have to kind of carefully
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plan your loop in order for that kind of a strategy to work and we didn't
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because this loop was more planned for looks and less planned for
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so that we can maintain it properly all right so the adventure just got a little
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bit more interesting here this pump that i'm pulling out right now
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this one's fine but if you have a look at the inlet of the other one
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there's actually a bunch of micro cracks
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where the fitting goes in check this out this is very
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disappointing because it's clearly not leaking now it looks like we might have
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to replace this pump
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holy crap this might be a problem i can't even
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i can't even take apart the first thing that i'm pulling out of here
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oh good all right one down
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there's a reason that most water cooling manufacturers use delrin or acetal
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anywhere where you're going to thread in a fitting rather than plexi like this and the
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reason that it is more prone to cracking and additionally
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plexi is kind of sucky to clean because you can't
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really use um solvents like isopropyl alcohol on it
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you got to be very careful
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so the fittings we can just go at with some rubbing alcohol and an old
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toothbrush and then one of these
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handy dandy pipe cleaners
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and for this guy we just want to use
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we'll start with just our scrap water just to get some of the gunk off of it
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so for my next trick i'm going to be replacing the pwm
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versions of this pump that i have in there these are great
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if you don't cut off the pwm lead
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like we did when we were installing it and i'm going to replace them with the
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older regular dc control with a little
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knob on the back so i'm actually ending up with a double whammy of work here
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because i got to clean this before i put it away
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and i definitely have to clean this
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before i use it that is supposed to look like that
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okay alcohol seems to be working a little bit better i don't mind if the
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metal is stained but i do need to get the bulk of the
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actual sediment that's built up on it off
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uh this is going to be a bit more challenging
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oh crap i think i just ruined this
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it's an impeller it's a magnet i just touched steel wool on it it's all over
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it i am going to pull the one from the other pump
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got two pumps and one reservoir done
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the reservoirs are permanently stained from having an air bubble
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get me to eat it no you had a moment where you thought i
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might actually do it
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yeah i should try and get this off reservoir is done
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let's go find out if we have any tubing
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oh this is not a good sign not if i want to maintain the
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white and black color scheme anyway i just need a really long
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stiff object sorry i had something caught in my eye
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there on unfortunately no not a meter stick this time it has to be thinner for
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optimal penetration of the tubing Jake
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god get your mind out of the gutter look at that get that right in the tubing
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let's actually get the pumps back into place
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so while you guys were gone i got these pumps all swapped around so they are now
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d5 varios and
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these are really tight fit and they're all cleaned up now
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you put your cleaning stick in you take your cleaning stick out pick up this jug
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and try and wash it down
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that's what it's all about
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okay let's just spit on it to lube it up spit really is nature's lube
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i mean not like for this but bam
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nope you missed it already it's up it's done there was no fundamental problem
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here just needed more lube also this hole was a bit looser
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none of the bolts for these pumps were tight anymore
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once i took them off they all vibrated themselves loose
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all of a sudden you're having a heck of a time
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before and after baby ah okay uh there is definitely some
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trash in there though
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oh that's so dirty
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that's actually not as bad as it looked i've got a little bit of yellow gunk
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so there's definitely cleaning to be oh right
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okay so that's worse it's scrubbing time
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you know i don't know how clean this is gonna come
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like i could pull out the scouring pad but but then i've got metal shards all
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over the place and making matters worse i'm gonna end up with an uneven finish
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because i'm only gonna be able to scour some parts of it there may just not be
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anything we can do about this because part of the problem here
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is just that the nickel plating is being worn away to expose the copper over time
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i mean it's the funny thing about water like
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i'm not blaming the manufacturers here water erodes it's like
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what it does so we've got some erosion not corrosion
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in our block and i think we're just gonna kind of have to live with it
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so i did more closely inspect this pump top and yes it does have some
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like spider web cracks around it but it seems okay i think it'll hold up for
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quite some time um but that's actually
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why it used to be that the threads were directly in the acrylic on GPU blocks as
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well but that's i think why a lot of manufacturers started putting these on
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that and it gives them compatibility with those multi-block manifolds
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something to note is that most water block manufacturers void your warranty
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if you open up the blocks wow
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that is a very very poor thermal paste application there
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oh it smells
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you want to smell it no look at that it kind of looked like an
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oil of some sort like i wonder if whatever i'm touching is like some kind
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of microbe like can you imagine that on my tombstone here lies Linus
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tech tips sebastian died of
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weird alien organism growing in his water cooling loop that's embarrassing
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all right so we're going to do a slightly better job of this this time around okay
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just a little bit more tubing and then we're good to go i'm not going
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to watch Linus tech tips videos that guy has no idea what he's doing
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awesome all right
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well let's finish getting this thing filled up
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ah okay oh what the hell
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oh crap oh crap oh this is really bad i'm gonna keep throwing paper towels
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okay i think that's enough paper towel thank you i can't even see what i'm doing
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okay all right all right all right geez
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um it happened because i opened up the other side as well
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and beca i can't remember which order they're in in the loop but i guess not
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the one that i hoped for and so
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it basically didn't go very well made this one start
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spilling this is og pt nuke
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from petra's tech shop
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okay just a few drops of that should keep anything nasty from growing in the loop
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there's a bubble i see it i see ya there it is
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yep that's better finally done
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for those of you out there who were wondering why it is that we'll take a
12:38
a water-cooled pre-built system and we'll say this thing's beautiful it's
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gorgeous it's got great temperatures but we're not sure if we'd recommend buying
12:47
it to a water cooling novice anyone who couldn't build it themselves
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this is basically why because water cooling maintenance does
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have to be done and it is as difficult if not
13:00
far more so than the actual initial
13:04
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