Being a gamer with several rigs boasting powerful CPUs, I have two machines equipped with water cooling and from my point of view, AIO (all-in-one) water cooling kits really do the job. So I was very surprised when one came into my workshop, which appeared to be failing.
Why Is My PC Crashing?
Last week, a customer turned up with a gaming rig he’d built four years ago when he was only eleven, which is impressive in itself – he did a hell of a good job.
Anyway, his machine kept crashing, and when it arrived, it wouldn’t boot at all – just fans and pretty lights. At first, I thought it was the GPU due to the beeps (one long, three short), then the memory, but extensive tests showed it wasn’t any of those, so I performed a battery reset on the motherboard.
It finally booted, and I went straight to the UEFI to see the temps, which showed 75 °C and rising rapidly, so I shut it down.
The AIO was a 240mm Enermax on a Ryzen 5600X with a high-end Asus ROG motherboard. I removed the pump block, the paste looked good, but I repasted anyway, and the result was the same – 75 °C and rising rapidly.
I then removed the AIO and tested it on a spare motherboard, albeit with an inferior CPU, and again the temperature was rising to over 75 °C in ambient 20 °C, let’s say.
Asus Armory Crate was not present on either his machine or the test rig. I only mention that because that program has been known to cause some temperature problems, but I have never come across those.
AMD Stock Cooler To The Rescue!
The general consensus is that a Ryzen 5600X needs a better heatsink cooler than the stock AMD one that used to come with the CPU. However, I had to deal with what I had, which was a spare stock cooler, to at least get the lad up and running. But did he still have the AM4 bracket that he had removed from the rear of the motherboard to fit the AIO? Without that, we would have been doomed because I only had AM3 brackets, but they are slightly narrower. Fortunately, he hadn’t ditched it, and I was able to fit the stock cooler, monitor the temperatures, and all was normal – idle temps of around 45 °C.
But I’m none the wiser about the problem because, assuming the UEFI shows the pump speed when it’s connected to the CPU pin-out, it showed around 3000rpm. In the end, I advised him to keep an eye on the CPU temperature through HWMonitor and to consider an aftermarket cooler, but at least he can carry on gaming.
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The stock cooler for AM4 is definitely a worthwhile cooler to use, even when gaming. The 5600X just doesn’t need much more at stock at least. A bit of tuning using Ryzen Master and you can drop the temps to sub 40. The default voltage on AM4 tends to be a bit high and the boards will all work just fine if the CPU is under volted to about 1.1V.
Thanks Marc
Unless fluid has actually leaked out or evaporated (probably unlikely as there would have been some evidence of a leak at least) it can only really be that there has been a pump mechanical failure or an air lock / fluid blockage. The pump motor seems to be spinning but the impeller could not be damaged and not doing anything to push the fluid. You could have checked the temps of the hoses – one would be warmer than the other if there was circulation – if no liquid was flowing they’d both stay cold. Either way it definitely looks like new AIO time. They have come down a lot in price comparative to what you used to have to pay – at least your client got four years out of the old one. And you are right, a successful build at eleven years old is mighty impressive.
In all my years of building PCs I’ve never had an AIO fail on me but I am sure it happens. That said, you ruled everything but the AIO out. I would never go back to an air cooler for a high end build despite their niche cheer squads.
Cheers
Reg
“……the impeller COULD be damaged…..” meant to type.