We've diagnosed a plethora of issues in our fixer flop playlist if you haven't heard of that
playlist you are missing out it'll be linked below if you want to check it out but one of the more
common themes that i've seen from folks who are inquiring about having their system fixed for
free is overheating my cpu temps are running way too high and i don't know how to fix them i've
checked all my fans are turning and no matter what i do my cpu temps reach crazy high temperatures
and then the system shuts off or blue screens neither of those things is particularly fun the
blue screen of death when i'd be a bit more afraid of just personally because i hate troubleshooting
software and a lot of times software causes blue screens of death or software conflicts i should
say but when it comes to system straight up overheating a lot of times if you have an
aio it's because the pump died and in this video i'm going to show you what happens when the pump
dies so that if this happens to you in the future you'll know how to properly diagnose it stay with
me to get rid of that annoying windows activation watermark hop on over to vip SCD-Key where you can
purchase a windows 10 OEM key for a fraction of the price of retail just use the secure payment
method like Paypal enter the product key in your pc settings and say bye bye to the watermark and
be sure to use our offer code SKGS for a special eleven eleven discount of thirty percent so let's
jump right into symptoms that you might see and then i'll show you firsthand what happens when
you disconnect the pump i'll use the system for demonstration purposes so when your system gets
too hot and this could be a result of a number of things not just if your pump dies maybe you don't
have good air flow maybe your case is just a hot box it doesn't really matter the point is if your
cpu approaches t junction typically it's between 95 and 105 degrees celsius the computer will shut
itself off in an effort to preserve itself it's like a last ditch kind of last resort effort to
save vital components including the cpu and the motherboard which could potentially die with it
and even the power supply we really should be happy that these safety nets are in place
a lot of older pcs didn't have these fail safes and as a result their platforms would literally
cook themselves to death you could fry eggs on cpus easy no problem just like weld a little
pan to the top of the ihs and there you go you can cook breakfast but nowadays a lot of these systems
won't let you do that at least with temperatures that are desirable for cooking eggs in fact there
are even ways to disable t-junction which i won't go into in this video because you don't
need to know how to do that there's absolutely no reason why your cp should ever reach above
that temperature it will only do harm not good so with that i'm going to simply disconnect the pump
leave the t-junction parameters in place and watch what happens and you guys are going to follow
along for the ride so if this ever happens to you again you'll be able to kind of just yeah that's
that's exactly what my system is doing you know what i think i have a dead pump there you go i
saved you hours of troubleshooting i've been there done that i don't want anyone else to go through
that so to kick things off let's start with a control this system houses a Ryzen 5 2600 a b450
or a b5d mother but i'm not really sure it doesn't really matter though everything's running its
stock i do have docp enabled so we're running at a higher clocked memory than base at 21 33 megahertz
and obviously the AIO in here is a 120 mil this is from Ddeepcool now i'm not tweaking fan curves i'm
not changing again vcore or anything like that i'm just leaving this stock a lot of folks build their
systems don't hop into the bios and change a bunch of things even though there are some benefits
uh doing that obviously enabling docp or xmp uh maybe tweaking Vcore if your motherboard's just
dumping a ton of voltage it doesn't need to into your chip so there are some things in there that
you probably do want to mess with but more often than not folks who are maybe first or second time
builders just don't know really what they're doing so they tend to stay away from the bios or UEFI
so that's what i've attempted to replicate here just a system that i built kind of from scratch
and it you know it just works it powers on we loaded up windows and there you go so what i did
was download it 64 engineer if you're not aware of what ida 64 is it's a great software uh for just
pretty much anything diagnostics troubleshooting can do temperature tests burns things like that
it's not as heavy as prime95 in fact nowhere close to it but if you want to do some kind of
long-term cpu stability testing you can do that in 964 and that's what you're seeing here with this
chart so the temperature with the pump running appropriately with just a default fan curve you
can see never really touched 70 degrees celsius stayed in the mid 60s which makes sense for a
2600 very low TDP it's a very uh efficient chip in that regard and 120 million is just it's fine for
it right nothing out of the ordinary here now it's important that we let this test run for 30 minutes
at least i'd say for larger AIO is probably an hour you can see this one's pretty much flatlined
after about 10 minutes or so but i always like to let it stretch out to 30 at the minimum when it
comes to liquid cooling because water has a higher heat capacity than most metals used in air tower
coolers and as a result of that you usually need to wait a bit longer for that water to equalize
to the heat output being dumped by the cpu so yeah and again mid 60s looking pretty good here and
we're going to do the exact same thing or attempt to run this test for the exact same amount of time
without the pump running and i can already tell you again from experience that this is
not going to end well so as you can see in the graph we've allowed temperatures to return to
idle around 30 degrees celsius that means that the fluid in this loop has again kind
of equalized to atmospheric temperature what i'm going to do is simply disconnect the pump cable
which is powered and actually powered through the cable itself sometimes you'll find like
SATA or molex power for these pumps that's just separate power sometimes you need to connect a
proprietary connector a lot of course their aos are like that so it really depends on the unit but
in this case the pump is being powered directly through the pump cable so yeah what we're going to
see here are temperatures steadily climbing we are at idle here apart from ida 64 being open and a
few other background tasks this system is under no sustained heavy load at all and temperatures will
probably still slightly increase over time and the reason why is because all the heat being kept here
is not being circulated to the radiator so picture this like its own kind of stand-alone tower maybe
an aluminum tower and there's no fan attached to it right so all that heat is just building up here
and it's not being transported where it needs to be transported for active cooling with this fan
that's not good what i'm going to do is put the side panel back on to simulate real-world use
and we'll see what happens now by looking at this graph can you tell where i disconnected the pump
it should be pretty obvious this is with the pump on this was about a 20 minute or so
gap here and then you can see how temperatures immediately started climbing and they will
continue to do so until i imagine the cpu overheats in the seat and the system shuts down
this is a very common dead pump symptom now while this test is running there is another easy way
to tell if a pump is dead obviously you can check temperatures if they continue to climb especially
at idle that's a that's a bad sign it means that you probably didn't see the AIO properly maybe
the block isn't making proper contact with the IHS or maybe you forgot to use thermal paste or forgot
to remove the plastic covering on the bottom side of the the block over the cold plate or maybe the
pump is dead right but an easy way to tell that the pump is dead is by grabbing the tubes okay
if you have an AIO that's working just fine right now grab the tubes and try to remember what that
feels like you got that fluid churning through them and that little vibration there that you're
picking up is a good sign if you grab these tubes at some point and you don't feel those vibrations
when of course your system is on because the pump has to be turning for this to work
then that means that your pump is dead so memorize that feeling now if you have an AIO just store it
somewhere in your head and then if you ever notice that cpu temps just continue to climb and never
really stop until your system shuts down just grab the tubes it's an easy way to troubleshoot whether
or not your pump is dead now back to our test bed you can see temperatures have continued to climb
you would think that just by looking at this chart we were under some kind of heavy load
but we haven't even started the stability test in ida 64 yet this system is essentially at idle but
you'd think we were under load based on how crazy these temperatures have behaved and another thing
don't be fooled by the fans in your system at this point the fan attached to the radiator here
is just churning the rpm is very high much higher than what it was at at idle even
though we're still at idle but the air back here i'm putting my hand behind the radiator
this air is at room temperature that should not be the case if the pump was properly moving the
heat from the source to the radiator where it is essentially convected to atmosphere
we'd be feeling heat back here but this is literally just
it's it's room temperature that's not good another way to tell that your pump is bad so we can
simply let these temperatures continue to climb while the system is at idle and it might take
several minutes especially with the 2600 because again the TDP is fairly low we're not dumping a
ton of heat at idle but what we're going to go ahead and do is stop this test allow fluid temps
to return to room temperature thereabouts and then turn on uh the stability test we're gonna click
the start button on the bottom left of the screen and allow the temps to just skyrocket it's not
gonna be pretty so here we go we just disconnected the pump again after temperatures had flat lined
and we're going to start the stability test this is not not going to be good okay here we go
oh boy i'm not liking this really hoping i don't permanently damage the cpu okay it's
continuing to rise fans are pretty much max speed we're at 90 degrees celsius
101 degrees celsius so the system is actually um it's still still going it's kind of funny
but i think it is throttling itself fairly hard what are we at here cpu frequency is what i want
and uh yeah current frequency 500 megahertz that's what we're at right now folks
500 megahertz for comparison the standard clock speed of this chip is somewhere around 3 to
point five ish gigahertz so we're not even we're right around like yeah like half of one gigahertz
that's pretty awful okay yeah we are sustained at over 100 degrees celsius now system still hasn't
shut off yet i'm kind of surprised i know intel at this point would have definitely shut off but AMD
is just throttling back frequency it's trying to keep the system on at least somewhat functional
but again 500 megahertz is just that's an abysmal clock speed and that there is t-junction
this is yep 106. okay all right i'm calling it i don't know why it's not shutting off it should be
shutting off right now but these temperatures are just yeah these temperatures are bad okay
all right i think i think we made a we made our point and would you look at that just as quickly
as the cp heated up the temperature also dipped at about the same rate once we reconnected the pump
and shut off the stress test so that's a very very quick recovery but at the same time you just you
never want to see your temperatures reach triple digits in in celsius at least if you're measuring
in fahrenheit i'm sure triple digits can be just fine but 100 degrees celsius is no bueno for most
if not all modern consumer desktop chips another cool thing to show you i took my floor imaging
camera to the AIO both with the pump disconnected simulating a dead pump scenario and with the pump
connected and functioning properly you can see that on the left with the pump not working that
a lot of heat is built up in just one tube and especially under the cpu block and it's
kind of hard to see under the block itself this is just mapping surface temperature here so the
the plastic basically comprising the cpu block is not very hot but under that i can assure you
it is extremely toasty and one of the tubes is also very hot this i imagine leads directly into
the fin stack where the fluid would kind of pick up the heat and then pull it to the radiator
it's not good to see something like this where you've got heat just soaking one side of a closed
system if the pump was functioning properly you'd see what we see on the right picture here
where you really have an even distribution of heat over time now you could see a small um
you know maybe one tube is a bit hotter than the other especially in longer systems we're
getting tons of heat dumped into the system you can see this in car radiators especially but in
a very small build like this even under idle conditions which this photo was taken at idle
um you shouldn't be seeing all that heat pent up on one side well that was a bit unexpected i guess
i'm a bit more experienced with overheating when it comes to more modern intel chips Ryzen tends
to not be that hot but anyway i hope that this at least gets the point across when it comes to
overheating cpus and potentially like motherboards overheating and other things that are next to the
cpu could be a dead pump and there are easy ways to check just grab the tubes you can feel the
pump churning fluid in there that's a good sign otherwise if your system is randomly shutting
off in the middle of especially heavy gaming and other scenarios like that or even at idle after
i've heard it happen after a few seconds because sometimes when when the system starts up
the cp is under a bit of a load um even that could cause the system to immediately shut
back off again in an effort to save itself check the pump check the fluid churning
in the pump itself if you can get into your desktop check temperatures if they keep rising
yeah you've probably got a dead pump if you're rocking an aio with that if you enjoyed this fun
little video be sure to let me know give this one a thumbs up i appreciate that you know sometimes
it's better to just like kill two birds with one stone by making a video like this when i come
across scenarios and the email chains of email threads that i get from folks inquiring about
participating in the fix or flop playlist a lot of them that have overheating issues usually i
just tell them to check the pump and that ends up being the issue so instead of just seeing so
many of those over and over this one video i hope should suffice and uh what i'll end up doing if i
suspect that's to blame is link those folks this video here and maybe it'll point them in the right
direction with that uh consider leaving a like if you haven't already consider subscribing if you
haven't already and i'll catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for learning with me