Is this normal?

[monarchco]

Attached is a photo. It appears as though the fins on the radiator is rusting? It's important to note they only look this way from THIS angle. Turning the radiator around, the fins are all black. So to clarify, the "rust" look is only on the side of the fins facing away from the fittings(on both front and back of the radiator). 

 

This is how I just received it. It's an alphacool 420mm radiator. And it's for my first water cooling attempt.

 

If this is "normal" or at least acceptable, I'd like to know how to remove it without scrubbing every individual fin, so my build doesn't look like a rust bucket. 

[mxk]

I think the radiator is copper so a chemical reaction doesn't happen when you have a copper block. I could be entirely wrong though. If you can find more information about the radiator, look into it.

[monarchco]

58 minutes ago, Kodan said:

It's the bare copper shining through where the paint applied at the factory didn't reach. It's completely fine. If you want to remove this visually, get a spray can and put paint on from different angles. It'll cost you some cooling performance, though.

So they entirely failed to paint from one direction?

 

If that's how they represent their product quality, Q/A, etc... Not buying anything from alphacool again. 

[Mick Naughty]

Would need a better pic to see rust. They look copper. You wouldn't want them painted, not if you want proper transfer.

[GeoSquigg]

being that most rads on the market are aluminium or copper, your corrosion would be clear (alum) or blue-green (copper). It's probably not a quality failure as painting reduces cooling performance dramatically. Contact them and see if its normal and send out a new one if it's not normal.

[monarchco]

On 1/22/2019 at 10:00 PM, Kodan said:

Painting the fins serves no purpose. It lowers cooling performance because the heat needs to go through the paint and into the air to leave the loop. What you're seeing is the wide side of the fins which provide the most surface area which is what their purpose is. It makes sense to not put paint on there.

Whatever due to case space I had to switch to dual 360s instead of 1 360 and 1 420. Both 360s are EK, and completely black.

 

On 1/23/2019 at 5:51 AM, GeoSquigg said:

being that most rads on the market are aluminium or copper, your corrosion would be clear (alum) or blue-green (copper). It's probably not a quality failure as painting reduces cooling performance dramatically. Contact them and see if its normal and send out a new one if it's not normal.

literally a major point of water cooling is visuals... I could get easy cooling from slapping something like an R1 air cooler on the cpu, and that alone will cool a cpu better than 90% of custom loops and aios....

So to have 1 side painted, and the other side where its not painted, but there's clear overspray, is idiotic.

[Mick Naughty]

Don’t see how it’s a visual thing if you aren’t gonna see it.