For months, I've been on a wild goose chase trying to fix a problem with my computer,
and it turns out that the reason was completely different than what I thought it was,
and makes me look stupid, basically. I actually tweeted about this the first time it happened,
which basically is my computer would randomly just start overheating, the CPU.
It would be fine temperatures one day, and all of a sudden it would just go pegged to 100 degrees
C and just stay there, out of nowhere. And this was even with low utilization,
like idle temperatures. There was no reason for it to be overheating. And
the first time it happened, I decided I'll just reapply the thermal paste.
So I did that. I took out the computer, disconnected everything,
took off the pump housing, which was the cooler for the EK All-In-One Water Cooler
360mm. And after reapplying thermal paste, hooking everything back up,
the computer worked fine again. Temperatures were normal. So I figured I must have messed
up applying the thermal paste or something, because I've recently had upgraded my CPU.
I originally got this computer last year in around February,
and a month or two before, I had replaced it with a 13th gen CPU.
So I figured I must've messed up when doing that. So I thought I had fixed it for good,
until it started happening again. And again. Several weeks apart, maybe a month or so,
like clockwork every month for the past four months, it has just randomly started overheating.
Sometimes it would maybe creep its way up over a couple of days and eventually
just max out at a hundred. But a couple other times it would literally one day,
just boom, jump to a hundred out of nowhere. And each time I would take out the computer,
lay it down, replace the thermal paste, put it all back together and it would work again.
And this whole time I was so puzzled about what the problem could be. The
pump was working clearly, because every time I would reapply the thermal paste,
it would work again. And when I actually took the thermal paste off,
it looked fine. And before the last time it happened, which was yesterday,
when I finally figured out the actual problem, it was about a month and a half ago.
I thought, all right, maybe it's the CPU bracket that I got. Before I was using some cheap one.
I replaced it with a thermal grizzly one that holds the CPU in place. Maybe it was
that. And it actually took longer to happen this recent time. So I thought that was the problem,
maybe I just was using a bad bracket. But that theory was proved wrong
when yesterday I was watching TV, I was streaming some Plex from my computer to
my TV, and the stream disconnects. I go to my computer, it is off. So I turn it on thinking,
well I reformatted recently. Maybe I left some sleep settings wrong or something. But no,
when I turn it on, there was an error message -
"CPU over temperature". It had overheated. And this time it had actually shut down the computer.
It had gotten that bad. And I had literally been using the computer maybe 10 minutes before. And I
have a widget that tells me the CPU temperatures, and it was completely fine. So it literally
went from fine temperatures, or at least what I thought historically with my computer was fine,
and went to being overheated and shutting down the computer within about 10 minutes.
It also had me press F1 to go into the BIOS. And when I was in there,
literally the computer as idle as possible, it was stuck at 90 degrees Celsius. I thought,
all right, maybe the CPU heatsink is loosening. So I tighten the screws even
more, no change at all. And once again, I was just left confused.
Unfortunately, I did not take any footage of all of this happening
yesterday because I didn't expect to figure out the problem. But I do have some footage
of me disassembling the water block for the cooler and revealing what was inside,
the problem. So yet again, I prepare to replace the thermal paste. I turn it off,
take off the side panels and decided to just kind of inspect it a little bit more this time.
And it was a little bit different, which finally clued me into the issue. So the
previous times I had figured the pump was still working because there would always
be one tube of the cooler that was still warmer than the other. So obviously it was
pushing the hot liquid through one and taking in the cool liquid.
And because replacing the thermal paste would always fix the issue,
I assumed it was some kind of contact problem with the CPU and the cooler. Except this time
I went and felt the housing of the pump and it was scalding hot. I got my infrared thermometer
and pointed it at the pump housing and it was 137 degrees Fahrenheit, extremely hot.
Clearly there was no issue with contact from the CPU and transferring heat into
the cooler. But the air coming out of the radiator was not hot and one of the pipes
was slightly warmer than the other. And I also was able to feel from feeling the
tubes that the pump was running. It was vibrating like it normally does.
And finally, with all these hints, and the final clue being touching the CPU cooler
and realizing that it was extremely hot, there was no temperature contact issue.
That's what made me realize, "Oh, it must be something clogging it, right?" I mean,
what else could be the problem? The pump was running, the housing was really hot.
Clearly the CPU contact was not an issue, but not all that heat was making it to the radiator,
obviously. So something must be blocking it in there or slowing it down. And then
with that in mind, it finally clicked why replacing the thermal paste fixed
it every time. It was not actually the replacing of the thermal paste.
It was that every time I went to do that, I would have to take out the computer and
turn it over and move around the pump housing when I took it off,
cleaned it, and then would replace it. And what was actually happening was I
was simply dislodging whatever clog was in there every time I moved it around.
It wasn't anything to do with the thermal paste at all! So to test this theory,
I did not replace the thermal paste. I went and just kind of,
with the computer off of course, shook it a bit. I tilted it up and down, left and right
a bit aggressively. Then I go to turn the computer back on, I go and feel the tubes.
One was now way hotter than the other. There was hot air coming out of the radiator,
and I used the thermometer on the pump housing, and it had already cooled in a matter of seconds
down to like 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Hallelujah, I figured it out. And back in the BIOS,
it was way cooler than before. I think it was like only 30 degrees Celsius or something.
Now that night, eventually it did actually start overheating again completely to the
point of crashing. So I must not have dislodged whatever was in there as
much as I would have by going through the whole process of repasting it and
moving the thing around. So I ended up just waiting until the morning to deal with it.
But when I did go to boot it up in the morning, it actually, to my surprise,
started up with no errors. So maybe something settled a bit in there overnight,
just enough to let the coolant circulate more. But it obviously was still partly
clogged because the temperatures were higher than what I was normally used to.
And this is what the CPU package temperature graph looked like over
time. I used hardware info to graph it. At the lowest CPU usage, just idling,
it would go down to like 55 degrees Celsius. And by the way, each of these little squares
represents about 15 seconds horizontally, and I believe about 3.5 degrees Celsius vertically.
It's a weird gradient. Also, the scale goes from 0 to 100 degrees Celsius,
and the bottom graph is the CPU utilization. Anyway, you can see even with mild CPU load here,
it would go up to the 70s or even spike as high as around 85. And all this usage was,
was basically just watching some YouTube videos in 4K and jumping around.
That was kind of what the spikes were. But again, this is slightly higher than what I usually see,
which is idling in mid 40s to 50ish. So I figured, all right, let's make a video out
of it. I'll try and fix it, I'll open it up, see what's in there and clean it out maybe,
see if that fixes it. And if it doesn't, well I'd have to buy a new cooler anyway.
Before I did take everything off, I did take a picture with my FLIR infrared camera,
and you can see that there is one pipe that is hotter than the other. So again,
the pump clearly was working. And this time the CPU cooler housing was not scalding hot. It was
actually not that hot at all. So I guess whatever had dislodged itself somehow partly overnight.
But I still wanted to replace it because it was going to happen again inevitably.
So I took out the computer hopefully for the last time, and unscrewed everything.
I was actually able to use my custom LTT screwdriver from LTX. It's a blue,
which is kind of what my channel uses as a theme. Disconnected everything,
went over to the table, started unscrewing all the different [screws], and finally I had it off.
And this is what I saw, a bunch of gunk and crap, obviously clogging the heat fins. It
was all kind of on one side. I don't even know how to describe it. It was just like
debris or like minerals or rocks or something it looked like. It was mostly on the copper side,
but there was also some on the pump plastic side.
And I had these swabs that I was using to try and clean it out as best I could. And
you could see all the crap that was coming off of it. I tried to use a new swab every
time I did a swipe, just so I wouldn't spread any more of it around. And again,
you could see how much crap was coming off of this. And I spent several minutes on this.
Towards the end, I just kind of dumped some alcohol on there to be able to get some of the
last bits up that were drying off. So after getting it as clean as I thought I could,
I reattached the copper plate. I reassembled everything, applied probably too much thermal
paste, but whatever, it'll push the extra out of the way, and went to boot up the computer.
And I was seeing temperatures I had not seen that low in a long time. I kid you not,
I do not know the last time I saw my CPU idling in the 30 degrees. Here's a comparison of the
temperature graph before and after, along with the CPU load at the time. You can see now afterwards,
it is idling way lower, around 37 degrees I saw, compared to around 55 degrees before.
I tried doing the same thing of watching some YouTube videos in 4K,
and there were still spikes from usage, but to me, it looks like the temperature returned to
baseline way faster. Whereas when it was partly clogged, it looked like there were
more trends higher and lower over time, as I assume it struggled to remove heat.
And I have to imagine that I wasn't able to clean the cooler completely,
like between the fins and stuff, there's probably stuff built up
slightly in there. So I'm sure that it should be performing better even than this. But hey,
a win is a win. But that being said, I am going to be keeping my eye on idle temperatures over time,
and if I see them starting to creep up, or if it ever overheats again, I'm not even going to bother
with a warranty RMA, I'm just going to trash it and probably go with another brand.
I'd only bought it last year in February when I built the new computer, and started
having issues only about a year later. Though I did do some searching on Reddit and stuff,
and I really couldn't find any other instances of people having this issue. So I might've just
been unlucky. I know there have been reports of like MSI having this issue.
I think Lian Li had issues that they replaced a bunch,
but I don't think I've seen too many of this happening with EK. But I mean,
I would be surprised if I was the only one, but at the same time, it doesn't seem widespread,
but who knows. Still not happy with it. Should not have happened in the first place.
And I kind of feel dumb myself because I thought I was reapplying the thermal paste to fix it,
when really it was literally just me moving that thing around. Still,
I'm glad I figured it out. And maybe if anyone else out there has a similar issue,
you will be able to learn from my experience and not spend months
disassembling your computer a bunch of times, fixing something that is not even the problem.
So let me know down in the comments if this is a problem you know you've had before,
or maybe you're now just only realizing what the problem was like me. If you enjoyed this video,
definitely give it a big giant thumbs up, because I wasn't able to work on my
originally planned video today. So I ended up making this one, but I think it'll work out.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is one where I made a AI meme
generator. I think you'll find it pretty funny. You can actually use it yourself.
I'll put that link right here. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.