PC Building can be portrayed as this glorious art; a fun process of assembling your chosen
parts and crafting a build that you love and getting great satisfaction out of it.
And sometimes it can be.
But sometimes, it honestly just sucks.
This video has no real point, if I’m honest - just a peek into a day of botched computer
maintenance and what can go wrong in an otherwise simple project - and a good way to vent and
get some ROI on all the footage I captured for no reason now.
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So I managed to waste an entire work day doing what should have been a fairly simple CPU
cooler swap in my main workstation.
I’ve been running a new build for about 9 months now that I’ve not really talked
about on-camera much - it’s an X299 build running the Intel Core i9-7980XE 18 core,
36 thread CPU - graciously provided by Intel.
It’s great.
But, as many of you might know by now - this thing runs HOT.
I currently have it sitting around 3.6 to 3.8GHz on an all-core overclock to balance
out the weird Turbo Boost 3.0 behavior, but that means that some cores can hit 85C under
full tilt load.
I could push it up to like 4.7GHz or so, but then it’d be in the 90s and possibly overheat
and etc.
For the YouTubers who aren’t using this in their main rig or have the funds to easily
replace it if they screw it up, their solution has been to delid the CPU, or take off the
integrated heat spreader and remove the bad thermal compound underneath on the CPU die
itself and then either put on better thermal compound or use liquid metal - and that has
proven to be very effective at lowering processor temps.
But I’m not one of those people.
This is my primary workstation and it would be very problematic to be without it for any
significant amount of time, and I can’t easily buy a new $2000 CPU.
So I started looking into coolers.
I’m currently using an unbranded 240mm AIO liquid cooler from CyberPower that came on
the CPU when I got it from Intel.
It has 4 120mm Corsair HD RGB fans in push-pull configuration.
With that, the rig idles around 39 to 43C and under 100% full-tilt loads, it holds between
75C and 85C max.
It’s hot, but not problematically so.
But I thought I could improve it.
I did my research, looked into cooler performance on the 7980XE, looked at the documentation
for my case - the Phanteks Enthoo Pro M, the first time I’ve built in a mid-tower sized
case - and it says it can support a 280mm radiator without needing to remove the optical
drive.
I saw nothing about where it needed to go, eyeballing made me thing i could squeeze it
back on the front of the case like my current radiator and I was good to go.
Looked into GamersNexus top coolers for 2017 and the EVGA CLC 280 was it.
I ordered it and got to work the next morning.
Boy was that a mistake….
It took me a long time to un-do the push-pull fans and Corsair’s horrendous RGB scheme.
2 wires for every fan, all tightly wrapped and tied up in my case.
This is why I don’t waste time on cable management most of the time despite complaints
for viewers.
It is never worth it.
I am always changing things and swapping things out and the more tidy you make cables, the
more hellish life becomes when it’s time to undo them.
I actually wound up cutting my finger open trying to pull out the RGB plugs from the
Corsair RGB controller.
I swore I’d never use that again, but spoiler alert; I do.
[phone clip]
So a good hour or two of dismantling my previous cooler and planning how I’m going to tackle
the cable management, I cleaned off the thermal compound from the CPU and cooler, getting
alcohol in my brand new cut while I was at it, and time to install my brand new EVGA
CLC 280.
Should be great, right?
The fans are a little ugly, but it has a RGB badge on the cooler to make up for the less
light from the front.
Let’s do this.
Turns out it’s helpful if you at least look at the product near your build before spending
hours preparing to install it.
The CLC 280 does not fit in the front of my case AT ALL without removing the optical drive.
While doing specific measurements would have told me this prior to ordering, since the
case manual specified when the optical drive needed to be removed, I assumed it would specify
if something could only fit in the top.
I was pissed, but I proceeded to pull out the top cooler tray, remove the 140mm Corsair
RGB fan from there and install the cooler.
Turns out that this EVGA cooler is just beefy for its size, as it doesn’t actually fit
there, either.
I had to push the BluRay drive out quite a bit in order to fit this thing, but I was
committed at this point.
It’s a workstation, it doesn’t need to be pretty, right?
I got everything wrapped up, shot some more b-roll of this monster of a cooler with both
fans plugged into the pump itself and the USB 2.0 plug that I didn’t realize my motherboard
didn’t have a header for ran to the outside of my case and took it upstairs.
Time to see the amazing results, right?
Yeah, no.
It ran a little hotter at idle and actually started kicking up to 5 or so degrees hotter
on average per core under load, AND it was incredibly loud while cooling.
All this work to make my build uglier and louder?
What the hell?
Part of that problem is the positioning of my PC.
I have it on a wood stand on the ground below my desk.
This is important to keep the sound blocked out as much as possible away from my microphone.
This also means that there’s a little bubble of hot air under the desk.
When the cooler was in the front, it had no problem, you can feel the front fans pulling
in cold air low to the ground and the exhaust shooting hot air out the other side and up.
But when the cooler is at the top of the case right next to the exhaust fan, it’s probably
just pulling in hotter air, giving it a much more difficult time.
So by this point I’d given up on filming anything.
Swapped the cooler back, used up the rest of my Kryonaut thermal compound - they really
don’t give you much - and wound up leaving things how they originally were and had wasted
literally an entire work day.
I think at this point - other than a future video showing the motherboard I’ve switched
to - I don’t want to have to build on this rig anymore.
With my workstations I’m a “just build it to work” kind of guy.
This was the first time I built something flashy for YouTube, used a smaller case when
this all would’ve been easier in a Define R6 or something like I normally use, and I’ve
mostly regretted it.
Oh yeah, and I also learned that somehow when I first plugged in the USB 3.0 front panel
connector to my brand new expensive motherboard, I bent one of the pins in the header to hell
and back and broke it off trying to fix it during this.
Only one of the front panel ports works now.
Perfect.
Now, I can buy a PCIe card with a header, but still frustrating.
So while PC building can be fun and an art if you’re doing it as a hobby, and I will
still enjoy tinkering with my side rigs - when the primary machine you do your day to day
work with is on the line, things aren’t always sunshine and rainbows.
I’m sure the EVGA CLC 280 is fine for most people, and I only returned it because I was
so mad about the whole experience, but just thought I’d share a day in the life of a
botched PC maintenance experiment.
If you liked the video, you know what to do.
I’m EposVox, here to make tech… more difficult and confusing this time?
I’ll see you next time.