Water cooling not working?

[pavlos94]

Hi all,

 

So my all-in-one CPU water cooler 'failed' one day so I took it apart to find that there was very little liquid in it (around 30ml).

 

I bought some new tubing and painted the radiator outer casing white and the plastic pump/water-block white also and filled up the loop with car radiator coolant (it took around 250ml) and fitted it back in. My system now looks awesome....If only it worked!

 

So it was working fine for a while, temps: ~45C idle, ~72C load while gaming. A big improvement from before I fixed it.

 

About a week after I have been using it in my system, i.e. last night, I decided to run prime95 and temps looked good again. I ran it over night and when I woke up I found the CPU temp was 99-100C. I don't know how long it had been like that but I switched it off ASAP. I left it cool and when I switch it back on and go into bios the CPU temp climbs from 53C upwards. I don't want to see what it hits.

 

The pump would have run dry-ish before I re-did the loop but still seems to be running fine. I checked it before I put it back in. The outlet tube feels hot and the inlet tube feels cool so my pump must be working, and this indicates that radiator is doing it's job fairly well. So why is it not keeping my cpu cool now???

 

I've attached a photo of it in my system.

[William12h]

what is your Specs? 

[AlwaysFSX]

Drain it and use distilled water. 

[pavlos94]

My specs are;

• Intel i7 930 (LGA 1366)
• Asus Rampage II Gene (X58)
• OCZ 6GB (3x2GB) 1600MHz DDR3
• Intel 520 120GB SSD (OS Drive)
• Seagate 1TB
• EVGA Supernova G2 850W PSU
• CoolIT ECO A.L.C. CPU Cooler
• MSI HD 7970 Lighting Boosted Edition
• Corsair Obsidian 350D

 

I don't currently have any distilled water to try but I'm sure the difference in temperatures between distilled water and radiator coolant would be negligible.

[pavlos94]

Could my pump bearings have damaged such that it is pumping inefficiently at a very slow rate?

[smacks]

Its not really designed to be taken apart and refilled, you could try with distilled water. the distilled water might work better; if the coolant is really thick the pump might struggle. the paintjob looks sick tho. it could also have air stuck in it, i guess those things wouldnt bleed so easily

[pavlos94]

Thanks for the reply. I've order some distilled water so when it arrives I'll try it out. It was very difficult to fill and remove any air.

Thanks for your help guys. I'll update you when my water arrives.

[pavlos94]

I said I will update you. The water arrived but didn't make much of a difference. I tested the pump again and measured it's flow rate. I was running at a low 4ml/sec. I think the pump didn't like the car coolant and is almost dead. It's probably the reason it wasn't cooling my CPU.
Thanks again for all your help though.

[pavlos94]

Note I measured the flow rate using plain water.

Also my circuit had quite a lot of gunk in it (maybe bacteria?) so the car coolant was rubbish.