Yuck!!

[Biffa]

Well I discovered why the flow rate in my old desktop loop had dropped to almost nothing.

I thought that the pump was gone in my old XSPC bayres and that became an excellent excuse to rebuild my rig (I'll be posting a build log soon and will update here)

It was wierd because the fluid (Feser Green) looked fine in the bayres, nice and clear. Some of the tubing looked like it needed replacing but nothing major.

So I stripped the old machine down, everything looked ok so far, Res, pump, GPU block... but then I got to the CPU block, a Heatkiller 3.0 LT.

Something struck me as soon as I removed the fittings..

After dissasembly the state of the gunking becomes apparent:

IT LIVES!!!

I'm not sure what this is, searches on the net point to a breakdown in the dyes in coloured liquids, or it could be just some biodiverse beasties that got into a sealed loop.. I am not sure.

But I've switched to coloured tubing and plain Distilled water with silver coil for all my rigs.

Beware.! check your loops, esp if flow starts to decrease.

 

[Biffa]

Looks completely blocked - what kind of temps were you getting?!

Interestingly enough about 90°C on the [email protected] and 65° on the GTX460. This is individually under load, I couldn't run them both under load without an instant reboot and temps going over 100°

Shows that the water was still clearing some of the heat even though it wasn't moving very fast.

What part is that in the third pic?

Not familiar with w/c but it looks absolutely manky.

Its called a "jet plate" and spreads the water over the pins/ridges on the block beneath. Some blocks come with different plates to give you a choice of cooling improvement vs restriction in the loop.

 

[Biffa]

Yeah I had similar problems with bits or crap gunking up my HK 3.0 block. Not dye though, and not quite as extreme, but I'd guess from the looks of the jet plane and microchannels it was only getting water to 1/4 of the microchannels in my block...

More gunk in my loop atm - will have to clean it out this weekend.

Can be other things like residue from the radiator not being flushed out, or even plasticiser from some tubings that are out there.

Well thanks for posting this has helped me to decide to avoid coloured coolants and the one i was looking to get more for price then anything else was coloured so this has helped. Guess i will just go with clear distilled and silver coil will add a tiny bit for the coil but clearly worth it .

I highly reccomend going for coloured tubing if you want colour

On another note, there are two things in effect here, Prepackaged coolant which is coloured and also had additives and inhibitors put in it. If its good kit then all should be well but a lot of this sort of gunk is caused by inhibitors that are in the liquid.

Whatever it is, I personally have decided to go for coloured tubing and distilled/deionised water with a silver coil and maybe a couple of drops of ptnuke to kill any beasties that get in there before the silver coil kicks in

Obviously YMMV and not all coloured fluids are equal but for me its not worth the risk anymore, will check back in a year and see!!!

 

[Biffa]

A soak in some very dilute vinegar and a good scrub with a toothbrush and some Tomato sauce on the copper bits and voila:

Now on with the rebuild