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How watercooling destroyed my computer (without leaking)
Moo Man
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hello! There's quite a story to all of this, but first I'll post my specs.
Intel 3770k OC'd to 4.3GHz
GTX 680
8 GB RAM
256 GB Samsung SSD (boot)
2TB Harddrive
ASUS P8P67 EVO Mobo
Antec 750W PSU
Windows 7 64 bit
Corsair 600t case
I KNOW this is very long, but I want to give the complete story. If you want to skip to the problem, start reading at the 4th paragraph ("Then about a week ago...") and here's a TLDR as well.
TL:DR Watercooling ruined my life, thought i fixed it with a new CPU, and a fresh windows install, but then my harddrive died, then the new one I ordered died, but for some reason it wont boot when it's plugged in, even though windows is installed on my SSD. Why does that happen?
So, to start off this hellish nightmare I thought it'd be a great idea to try watercooling. Ordered a H100i and installed it, tested it, and found it quite lacking. Bad temps, was really loud, etc. So I took it off and found that I installed it very poorly. The square of preapplied thermal paste was only half in contact with the CPU, in other words only half of the CPU was being cooled (the CPU at that time was 2500k OC'd to 4.3GHz). So I tried to do a better job installing it a second time, and I did get better temps, but still was not satisfied.
This time, since I was confident I installed it correctly, I tried to update the firmware on the H100i, which I heard solved a lot of problems. This pretty much destroyed my computer. I will try to explain this the best I can, EVERYTHING crashed, and by crash I mean "stop responding". Let's say I open the start menu, if explorer doesn't crash then, I click on 'my documents' (or any directory), then it takes about a minute to actually load the files and folders. If i clicked and dragged on any of those files or folders it would've crashed explorer, if I opened any of those it would crash. Let's say I open my browser, if it didn't automatically stop responding, it would stop responding whenever I click on anything. Say I click on a link to youtube, it would stop responding for a few minutes, then it would come back and youtube would be there, I type in something in the search bar, click enter, and it would stop responding again, few more minutes later it would come back with the search results, I click on a video, stops responding, etc. Basically makes everything painfully slow. Also games would take FOREVER to load. At one point I timed how long it took me to log into EVE and from the time I entered my login info to the time i could do anything ingame was about 35 minutes.
Now this wasn't the watercooler itself's doing. I unistalled it, and everything I mentioned kept happening. My memory has kind of faded but I remember having Corsair LINK installed (even without the cooler) made it perform alot better, but still pretty bad. I tried virus scanning, which showed improvement after it detected a few things, then went back to really bad. Reformatted my SSD which boots, no improvement. Got a new CPU because I thought I might've damaged my old one (I was really desperate), It offered improvement, but a few days later it quickly reverted back to god awfully slow. So then I did what I should've done first, nuke everything, clear both my SSD and HDD. Finally it looked like that did the trick.
Then about a week ago my harddrive died. It was damn old, like 3 years, over 2000 power on counts, so I wasn't surprised, but after the shit I went through I really didn't need this happening. Now I'll try to describe what my HDD did. I was in a fleet in EVE, all of a sudden everything went to about 5 FPS, so I closed out of EVE (EVE was installed on my SSD, but my settings were on my HDD, because that's where my user account was located). I couldn't open it back up, so I restarted, and my computer was hanging at "start windows." I don't know what made me unplug my harddrive, but I did, and it booted fine. Which makes sense, my User account was on my HDD, and it couldn't find it. So I changed the path back to the default, which is on the SSD. But it STILL hangs on the 'starting windows' even though it has no important system files on it. Sometimes I could get past 'starting windows' but my computer was nigh inoperable. I couldn't open anything, Disk management, HDD Health, crystaldisk info, nothing worked.
So I was like whatever, and ordered a new one. Worked for about a week, and today it did the exact same thing. All my shit crashed, wouldn't open again. So I restarted (took a long time to log off and shut down as well). It hung on 'starting windows' so I unplugged the HDD and it booted fine. I redirected the user account path back to the SSD and right now it's still hanging on 'starting windows' and has been most of the day. I can't believe it's already dead, and I think my biggest curiosity is why is it rendering my computer totally useless if there's nothing on that drive except games (and an SFM I was very near completing![:\](https://forums.penny-arcade.com/resources/emoji/confused.png ":\")
)? I don't know if my watercooling disaster has to do with it, but I figured I should post about it anyway.
Edit: Also, soon after I installed the second harddrive, I realized my PSU was dying. It makes a squealing noise sometimes on load. Looked it up and heard that means a failing PSU, haven't done anything about it yet though.
Does anybody have any idea what to do?
Second Edit: So I ran Windows Startup Repair, and what do you know, it fixed! But I am hardly relieved, I'm fairly positive that this problem will resurface. Also I want to share this experience and maybe find out what the cause was.
Intel 3770k OC'd to 4.3GHz
GTX 680
8 GB RAM
256 GB Samsung SSD (boot)
2TB Harddrive
ASUS P8P67 EVO Mobo
Antec 750W PSU
Windows 7 64 bit
Corsair 600t case
I KNOW this is very long, but I want to give the complete story. If you want to skip to the problem, start reading at the 4th paragraph ("Then about a week ago...") and here's a TLDR as well.
TL:DR Watercooling ruined my life, thought i fixed it with a new CPU, and a fresh windows install, but then my harddrive died, then the new one I ordered died, but for some reason it wont boot when it's plugged in, even though windows is installed on my SSD. Why does that happen?
So, to start off this hellish nightmare I thought it'd be a great idea to try watercooling. Ordered a H100i and installed it, tested it, and found it quite lacking. Bad temps, was really loud, etc. So I took it off and found that I installed it very poorly. The square of preapplied thermal paste was only half in contact with the CPU, in other words only half of the CPU was being cooled (the CPU at that time was 2500k OC'd to 4.3GHz). So I tried to do a better job installing it a second time, and I did get better temps, but still was not satisfied.
This time, since I was confident I installed it correctly, I tried to update the firmware on the H100i, which I heard solved a lot of problems. This pretty much destroyed my computer. I will try to explain this the best I can, EVERYTHING crashed, and by crash I mean "stop responding". Let's say I open the start menu, if explorer doesn't crash then, I click on 'my documents' (or any directory), then it takes about a minute to actually load the files and folders. If i clicked and dragged on any of those files or folders it would've crashed explorer, if I opened any of those it would crash. Let's say I open my browser, if it didn't automatically stop responding, it would stop responding whenever I click on anything. Say I click on a link to youtube, it would stop responding for a few minutes, then it would come back and youtube would be there, I type in something in the search bar, click enter, and it would stop responding again, few more minutes later it would come back with the search results, I click on a video, stops responding, etc. Basically makes everything painfully slow. Also games would take FOREVER to load. At one point I timed how long it took me to log into EVE and from the time I entered my login info to the time i could do anything ingame was about 35 minutes.
Now this wasn't the watercooler itself's doing. I unistalled it, and everything I mentioned kept happening. My memory has kind of faded but I remember having Corsair LINK installed (even without the cooler) made it perform alot better, but still pretty bad. I tried virus scanning, which showed improvement after it detected a few things, then went back to really bad. Reformatted my SSD which boots, no improvement. Got a new CPU because I thought I might've damaged my old one (I was really desperate), It offered improvement, but a few days later it quickly reverted back to god awfully slow. So then I did what I should've done first, nuke everything, clear both my SSD and HDD. Finally it looked like that did the trick.
Then about a week ago my harddrive died. It was damn old, like 3 years, over 2000 power on counts, so I wasn't surprised, but after the shit I went through I really didn't need this happening. Now I'll try to describe what my HDD did. I was in a fleet in EVE, all of a sudden everything went to about 5 FPS, so I closed out of EVE (EVE was installed on my SSD, but my settings were on my HDD, because that's where my user account was located). I couldn't open it back up, so I restarted, and my computer was hanging at "start windows." I don't know what made me unplug my harddrive, but I did, and it booted fine. Which makes sense, my User account was on my HDD, and it couldn't find it. So I changed the path back to the default, which is on the SSD. But it STILL hangs on the 'starting windows' even though it has no important system files on it. Sometimes I could get past 'starting windows' but my computer was nigh inoperable. I couldn't open anything, Disk management, HDD Health, crystaldisk info, nothing worked.
So I was like whatever, and ordered a new one. Worked for about a week, and today it did the exact same thing. All my shit crashed, wouldn't open again. So I restarted (took a long time to log off and shut down as well). It hung on 'starting windows' so I unplugged the HDD and it booted fine. I redirected the user account path back to the SSD and right now it's still hanging on 'starting windows' and has been most of the day. I can't believe it's already dead, and I think my biggest curiosity is why is it rendering my computer totally useless if there's nothing on that drive except games (and an SFM I was very near completing
)? I don't know if my watercooling disaster has to do with it, but I figured I should post about it anyway.Edit: Also, soon after I installed the second harddrive, I realized my PSU was dying. It makes a squealing noise sometimes on load. Looked it up and heard that means a failing PSU, haven't done anything about it yet though.
Does anybody have any idea what to do?
Second Edit: So I ran Windows Startup Repair, and what do you know, it fixed! But I am hardly relieved, I'm fairly positive that this problem will resurface. Also I want to share this experience and maybe find out what the cause was.
Moo Man on
0
Posts
As for the PSU noise, it is coil whine or capacitor squealing? http://www.overclock.net/t/476207/squealing-capacitors
Finally, what motherboard are you using, and hvae you installed mobo drivers at all?
Whenever I find out, I will tell you. It doesn't seem to want to do it anymore. Also I've been very busy moving to college and whatnot.
ASUS P8P67 EVO, I've updated drivers before for some reason or another, and I tried updating them again for my issues recently, didn't really help. Actually I think it caused more issues, I don't remember.
For anyone else reading this thread, I have an H100i and the temps are great and it doesn't make tons of noise. My computer is also not falling apart at the seams, because it was already cleanly put together without having viruses, bad hard drives, shitting power supplies or anything else wrong with it.
I did fail to mention that I'm not totally condemning the H100i, I'm sure for most other people it worked fine, but it sure did cause a whole bunch of problems for me. I do want to try it again sometime, probably with a brand new clean build.