Diagnosing the Problem with my Water Cooling Loop - Might've Been Corrosion - Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,095 words · ~5 min read
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so my original hypothesis about my water cooling Loop was that it had gotten all
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gunked up due to microbial growth in spite of the fact that I am using
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primochill LRT that is oh I can't even
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remember what it stands for
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um huh well there you go whatever the primochill antimicrobial tubing I
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thought it was cuz I reused some of the segments of tubing so they didn't have
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the coating enough of a coating left anymore or whatever else but I'm
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starting to think it was to do with this block and not anything else because you
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can see there's weird text on the other side of the
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block see that there's like graphic design going on and it's not on the side
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see here you can see under my finger it's on the other side of the Plexi and
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this looks like some kind of a corrosion or something see that's not a normal
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nickel color so I'm going to be opening
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up this block and seeing if I can even clean it off and let's try and find out
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what the heck is going on here so my my
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new Loop is going to be using a swifttech block so one way or another um
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whatever kind of issue I know EK had some nickel plating issues in the past
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but I didn't think the GTX 480 blocks were offend were affected so I guess
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we're uh we're about to find out all right so the cover has been removed and
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it's interesting cuz I can uh I can read the text now so something about Quinn
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plastics.com and uh format something these are
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another languages but
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um that's hilarious so this is just yeah
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it's just Gunk see so I can scratch it right off but I guess it was probably
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from the protective layer that was over the Plexi before it was applied and that
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somehow left um
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like a slight residue in the shape of
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the text so here there's a phone number so plus 44 028 6774
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886 and then I wonder if there's something after that doesn't look like
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it so yeah there you go so you can reach Quinn Plastics and ask them about it if
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you really want to I suppose um now
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let's have a look at the Block itself so this is where we start getting into
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whether or not this block is correct
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roing I mean that looks an awful lot
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like metal discoloration to
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me but until I pick away at it a little bit
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here I'm not going to know for sure everywhere else kind of looks okay oh
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hold on what's that that one's not coming
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off here hope you guys can see this I wonder if I can switch to macro mode in
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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
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haven't really tried to clean it off yet but there's that one and then here's the
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one over here right there that doesn't seem to be coming off so I wonder if
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there were some imperfections in the nickel plating here going to try and
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clean it off completely now and see what happens going to have to remove the block from the card in order to do that
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as well so I'm in the bathroom
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now got my uh got my block here got an
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old toothbrush that's got some alcohol on it so that
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uh might at least help me clear away
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some of this Gunk which it doesn't seem
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to be doing this is uh this is some
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pretty robust Gunk we got going on
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here huh it's funny cuz
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it oh no that doesn't come off that easily does
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it so I was having some success with it before I hope you guys can see what I'm
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doing yeah not really okay okay I'll move it a little closer there we go
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we'll call that good
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enough yeah no that's not coming off at all but if I try with like a little bit
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more scrubbing
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power no that is a pretty stained block yeah you can see I've got actually yeah
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that that takes off the top layer of it so let's just do this one
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bar bar wave I don't know whatever you want to call it
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there we go so you can see that the metal itself
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is uh is discolored
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there so there you go I will not be reusing this particular block um under
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any circumstances and uh yeah that's a
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that's a shame well thank you for checking out this
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little Discovery episode of my video blog don't forget to subscribe to L
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techtips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos it looks like
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there's actually a few of these there's one here yeah there you go you can see
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that there's a couple places here here
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and here where it seems like there's very very small imperfections that then
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just from the water flow carried
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um carried away some metal particles
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that deposited themselves onto the nickel looks like up here was kind of
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bad
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and uh look there's a couple more marks
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in there if anyone knows more about Metal than I do feel free to chime in
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and suggest how this might have happened remember this is nickel plated
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copper and I think we're done here actually one more thing guys I
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should note that it's been quite a while since EK has had these problems with
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their blocks so this video was just more for um the sake of that I was working on
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it anyway so I figured I might as well shot a video about it it's not a warning
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about EK products they've uh they've tightened up the quality control on
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their nickel plating processes so any recent blocks should be fine however if
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you do have a 480 or a 470 block something from this generation of
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products might be worthwhile to have a look in your Loop and if your case is
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closed make sure that you don't have any gunk