Gadgetory

so my original hypothesis about my water cooling loop was that it had gotten all gunked up due to microbial growth in spite of the fact that I am using primo chill LRT that is why I can't even remember what it stands for um huh well there you go whatever the primo chill antimicrobial tubing I thought it was because I reused some of the segments of tubing so they didn't have the coating enough of a coating left anymore or whatever else but I'm starting to think it was to do with this block and not anything else because you can see there's weird text on the other side of the block see that there's like graphic design going on and it's not on the side see here you can see under my finger it's on the other side of the plexi and this looks like some kind of a corrosion or something see that's not a normal nickel color so I'm going to be opening up this block and seeing if I can even clean it off and let's try and find out what the heck is going on here so my my new loop is going to be using a swift tech block so one way or another whatever kind of issue I know ek had some nickel plating issues in the past but I didn't think the GTX 480 blocks were offended were affected so I guess we're about to find out alright so the cover has been removed and it's interesting because I can I can read the text now so something about Quinn plastics calm and format t something these are in other languages but that's hilarious so this is just yeah it's just gunk C so I can scratch it right off but I guess it was probably from the protective layer that was over the plexi before it was applied and that somehow left like a slight residue in the shape of the text so here there's a phone number so plus four four zero two eight six seven seven four eight eight six and then I wonder if there's something after that doesn't look like it so yeah there you go so you can reach Quinn plastics and ask them about it if you really want to I suppose now let's have a look at the block itself so this is where we start getting into whether or not this block is corroding I mean that looks an awful lot like metal discoloration to me but until I pick away at it a little bit here I'm not going to know for sure everywhere else kind of looks ok oh hold on is that that one's not coming off here hope you guys can see this I wonder if I can switch to macro mode in the middle of filming I don't think I can here I'm gonna switch to macro mode okay we're in macro mode now so I haven't really tried to clean it off yet but there's that one and then here's the one over here right there that doesn't seem to be coming off so I wonder if there were some imperfections in the nickel plating here I'm going to try and clean it off completely now and see what happens going to have to remove the block from the card in order to do that as well so I'm in the bathroom now got my ax got my block here got an old toothbrush that's got some alcohol in it so that might at least help me clear away some of this gunk which it doesn't seem to be doing this is uh this is some pretty robust gunk we got going on here huh it's funny because it no no that doesn't come off that easily does it that's having some success with it before I hope you guys can see what I'm doing yeah not really okay I'll move it a little closer there we go we'll call that good enough yeah no that's not trying off at all what try it like a little bit more scrubbing power no that is a pretty stain block yeah you can see I've got actually yeah that takes off the top layer of it so let's just do this one bar barré wave on my real clock there we go so you can see that the metal itself is is discolored there so there you go I will not be reusing this particular block under any circumstances and yeah so that's a shame well thank you for checking out this little discovery episode of my video blog don't forget to subscribe to my tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos it looks like there's actually a few of these there's one here yeah you can see that there's a couple places here here and here where it seems like there's very very small imperfections but then just from the water flow carried carried away some metal particles that deposited themselves onto the nickel looks like up here was kind of bad and thinks there's a couple more marks in there anyone knows more about metal than I do feel free to chime in and suggest how this might have happened remember this is nickel plated copper and I think we're done here actually one more thing guys I should note that it's been quite a while since the ek has had these problems with their block so this video was just more for the sake of that I was working on it anyway so I figured I might as well shoot a video about it it's not a warning about ek products they've they've tightened up the quality control on their nickel plating processes so many recent blocks should be fine however if you do have a 480 or 470 blocks something from this generation of products might be worthwhile to have a look in your loop and if your case is closed make sure that you don't have any gunk