So this is a short story about my first water cooling experience
I have a
X570 pro Wi-Fi
ryzen five 5600 X water cooled w Amazon aio(28-34c)
64gb trident
980 pro 1tb as main hdd
3060 ti
In a 4000D airflow cas
Runs awesome
A buddy of mine who has 10 3080s bought another off of eBay but it end up being a gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 OC water force
Naturally he didn’t want to add that to his mining system because he didn’t want to buy liquid cooling stuff or run the risk of it leaking and ruining other cards
So he sells it to me and I happily buy it for 1k usd

I bought a copper radiator ,copper fittings, (not cheap shit )some soft tubing cause I didn’t wanna fuck with hard tubing and EK water pump and reservoir combo and then a few noctua fans

Then I find me some Corsair pre-mix coolant and it’s XL8 so it should’ve been fine with anti-corrosion/ germicidal

I set it all up and I bleed the system and I refill the radiator and the pump is pushing great I have the best temperatures I’ve ever seen in my life on a graphics card that I’m able to play in really high resolution and high frame rate

Until I learn about memory temps
While the card itself was about 37 Celsius the memory temps would be about 85 Celsius
And then when I turned on my miner it would jump to 110 Celsius

Then I learned about thermal pads and how replacing them should help
So I took the task and I undid everything that I did with the water cooling loop make sure not to get any anywhere for the card apart and replace the pads on the front and used the old pads for the back of the memory
Then plug everything back in and there is always like this tiny air pocket that I couldn’t get rid of inside the loop
And I thought well that’s weird because usually the pump pushed every bit of air into the reservoir like it did when I first turned it on to prime it

So anyways I was like wow the temperatures are amazing with the memory it went from 85-ish while playing games down to 60 in some other games it’ll just be at 40 And while mining it’s only at 82 ever so I thought that’s really great

well just this week I went on vacation and I come back in my core clock was like 240 MHz. Every game has high temp ..
Mining while I was away of course
Pump now has a very large air bubble
The pump isn’t doing shit if at all very well
Temperatures are insane
I pull everything apart and here’s what I find
https://ibb.co/NKdTtsy
https://ibb.co/1n4vPM8
https://ibb.co/QkcjDw5
https://ibb.co/R9Rf4jg

My coolant is turned to jelly and there’s metal flakes everywhere inside
So go to the store buy distilled water unplug everything use a wire wheel to clean the little grooves out of the gel alcohol to basically polish her up
After running 2 gallons of distilled water through the pump reservoir and radiator there’s still a little tiny metal flakes like the water is still fucking shiny
I have no idea how to get rid of all of these rest of the little metal flakes because I believe them to be nonferrous
Currently with the distilled water I’m getting better than usual temperatures I know at some point I’m gonna have to add some kind of anti-bacteria mold stuff and maybe add a way that makes it to where it’s easier for me to drain and replace coolant


I welcome opinions on what I should do
I could order more XL just in case of that bottle was already contaminated somehow and I didn’t ever notice it.. except this time instead of going 100% premixed coolant I might just do like 80% distilled water and then 20% and the premixed coolant I don’t know if that makes sense

/e
Come to think about it I don’t think that I actually ran anything through the radiator before plugging it all in could it be advertised as copper but really be aluminum inside

This post was edited by hunter_1 on Nov 17 2021 08:58am

just skimmed cuz im bald

looks like you didnt clean
out the rads or waterblock

holyshit alot of air bubbles

mother of god
you put a bucket of thermal paste
on that gpu

2021
customer wcing= useless
and waste of money tbh

The water block was out of the box new attached to the gpu already
But no I pulled off the little white caps and blew into it and it didn’t shut out anything so I figured the rad was good
That first pic in my second post was after I first got it together but it did settle

I put a nice dollop and spread around fairly maybe the artic 5 just looks thicc? Lol.

When you say customer water cooling what do you mean?
Do you mean air cooler just easier and cheaper?
I get that I think I spent 500$ in shit to make a custom loop
But I wouldn’t have had this card at all had my buddy not bought it off eBay for 2k and didn’t use it.

Thanks for the reply!

as5 is thicke and terrible in 2021

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/guru3d_thermal_paste_roundup_round2_2021,10.html

500bux is alot
thats new monitor money sir

from garbage to

awesomeness

Looks great. I always avoided custom loops in favor of AIOs/Air coolers because if my cooler dies I can just go to the store pick one up, and replace it (or warranty it etc).

Everyone I know who has a custom loop has had extended downtimes and disastrous unexpected events (lotsa jello moments).

the thing that specifically bothers me about this is that gigabyte put this card out knowing full well that the heatsink they said was a nickel-plated copper was in fact all aluminum with small amount of copper plating.
plenty of people had worst scenarios with this particular card..


i did experience downtime but only till amazon came

holy fuck that thermal paste
less is more bud

maybe 1mm over entire surface

gpu core isn't complaining