A friend of mine left me his old and broken AIO liquid cooler, so let’s fix it. This particular unit failed in not so obvious fashion – pupm stopped running. And by that I mean that I could hear the engine trying to spin, but not actually doing so.
Taking it apart
This cooler isn’t anything fancy, it’s a 240mm SilentiumPC Navis RGB unit, and being a few years old it’s due for service.
I tried getting to it from the top, but in hindsight this efort was futile.
Who would have thought, a brushless motors stator (and pump) is isolated from the electronics part of it.
Anyway, I had to get there from the bottom.
The stator was seized, cause will reveal itself in a tiny bit. All I had to do was push it a tiny bit and it freed itself, after that I cleaned it with demineralized water. Obviously I didn’t test it without any fluid inside, but I had very high hopes for it.
Turns out there was immense amount of gunk built up on the whole cooler! I wonder how badly was it cooling the CPU before the pump gave up.
Again, I cleaned it using a soft brush with tiny hair and demineralized water.
There isn’t really much else to do besides drainig the rest of factory coolant and reassembling it back together.
Refilling the coolant
Time for the most tedious part of whole repair – replacing the coolant. Some people can get mad at this. but I’m using a 70/30 mix of demineralized water and antifreeze.
If it’s good for a Lamborghini hypercar, it’s good enough for me 🙂
Please tell me at least one person got that reference.
WHY?
Why are all screws square?
Isn’t the sticker enough?
A normal person still won’t do any maintenance, maybe besides replacing the thermal paste on the CPU, so WHY USE SQUARE HEADED SCREWS?
Anyway, I used a syringe to get as much liquid as I could without powering it on. This meant that I had to do some gymnastics – fluids tend to flow to the lowest point they’re allowed to get, that meant flipping the radiator upside down quite a few times. Not a big pain to do so, but if the refill port was on the pump You could just let the radiator loose and hold it by the pump. No need to think about fluid dynamics 🙂
After that it was time to turn it on and check for leaks.
As You can see the pump fortunately works and spews out remaining air in the system. What’s more, there are NO LEAKS! YAY!
Not much to do besides occasionally adding a bit of liquid.
This is almost an art piece, I call it “Escaping air in action”.
Finally, after nearly an hour it’s done! Time to remove excess liquid, put the screw back in and enjoy my new* AIO.
Thanks for reading!
*New for me. Everyone else probably would just get rid of it.