Just installed water cooling system, PC won't boot though!! help!

Hey all, I'm having some kind of a weird problem here.

I installed my water cooling system, here's what it consists of:


chevette heater core (1985)
Maze 4 Waterblock
Via Aqua 1300 Pump / Reservoir combo

I unhooked everything, installed the system, turned the pump on and let it run for a few minutes to bleed the air out. I had tightened the nuts on the maze4 basically hand tight, nothing major, but not loose either, it was definitely a nice snug fit.

So I turn on the machine, it powers on for all of a half a second, and then turns right off! I think perhaps it thinks that my CPU is overheating, or that there is no fan attached, so its turning off right away. However I have the radiator cooler fan (just a thermaltake 80 mm for the moment) plugged in to one of the fan ports on my motherboard. so why does it think there is no cooling? (if that is what is going on).

I took out the cpu, which was a royal pain in the *** with the waterblock already screwed on, and then turned the machine on, and it stayed on (of course it wouldn't do anything with no cpu).

I find it EXTREMELY hard to believe that my cpu is screwed up. I think the mobo thinks there is no fan attached.

anyone have any ideas? please help! thanks in advance, I'll go do some trial and error stuff now.

if you can get in to the bios, look in the health settings for a setting to not check for a cpu fan.

Just connect a fan to the CPU Fan header. With some boards you can hold down Insert when it starts to bypass anything like that and get in the bios.

ok this is F'in ridiculous.

I just took my other water block from my via watercooling system, and simply held it up against the cpu, and turned it on. the waterblock was ice cold from laying around for a while. the machine booted and brought me to the bios. then it finally got too hot and shut down.

However I had time to see that my cpu autoprotect and shutdown features are turned OFF!

In addition, this leads me to believe that the problem is that the cpu is actually overheating almost instantly?? what the F--K!!!!!!!
this setup is supposed to be freakin awesome, and it can't even keep the damn cpu cool for a half a second??? the water has gotten warm from circulating through the pump, but it shouldn't be THAT warm!!!! and even if it is, how the hell am I supposed to cool it, if the god damn machine won't turn on and let the fan cool the radiator?? jesus christ!!!!!!!!!!

any ideas? I'm going to have to hook up my old crappy system! this is ridiculous, i'm so ****ed off

take out your motherboard and install your waterblock with the mobo out of the case. This way you can make absolutely sure that the block is seated properly. It sounds like the block is not making good contact with the CPU.

I did do it that way, it was seated perfectly. have you seen how the maze 4 seats? its screwed in at all 4 corners, you slide it straight down on top of the cpu and screw it tight, its great.

I'm back to my old watercooling system that keeps it at 58 with no overclocking. real f--king nice. 140 bucks I spent getting all this sh-t and its not working for crap.

Have you used all the nylon washer for the mounting bracket of your maze4? Because I had a problem like you and I remove those tick one and realised that was the problem.

Maybe you have too much spacer.

hmmm yea maybe... I'll give that a shot now, thanks

Mike521
I still have zero of my own experience with WC, but from what i've read it looks like it's or BIOS settings or bad contact of water block with CPU mentioned above. (i say it becasue i saw articles/reviews in which reviewer checked the temps when pump was off, so flow failure shouldn't give such a quick shut down)
I would recomend you to go back to cooling the systems that worked fine with your PC just to make sure nothing was damaged,
then (you mentioned you have another WC) i would replace component by component of WC to find the troublemaker. It's quite a stupid straight forward aproach, but it works.

Charloz24 said:

Have you used all the nylon washer for the mounting bracket of your maze4? Because I had a problem like you and I remove those tick one and realised that was the problem.

Maybe you have too much spacer.

Click to expand...

wow, you were absolutely right. I took out those 4 spacers that I THOUGHT were there for a reason, and now its working perfectly.

so you guys were right, the damn waterblock wasn't seated properly. I screwed it on nice and tight, but those spacers were blocking it from contacting the cpu, and I couldn't see this of course. well I'm glad its working now, I can't wait to see what kind of temps I get with this setup.

thanks for the help guys

I had the same problem as you the other day when I was testing my tc-4 and cyclone 3 block. My pc would turn on for about half a second, some fans would spin, and then instantly shut down. It turns out that the block was actually sitting on the plastic socket But I assume thermal protection shut it down before my chip fried. What is odd is that I cleared the cmos after a couple failed boots which turns off thermal protection by default but my comp still failed to boot. After a remount I figured out it was seated improperly and now everyone is fine and dandy

Ahh, looks like I was too late

yep thats exactly what mine was doing too, and I also had my cpu temp protection BIOS settings disabled. I guess there's something in there still that shuts it down. Maybe the CPU itself automatically shuts down when it gets too hot.

I gotta say I'm amazed at how hot these things get, and how fast they get that hot.

when I hooked up my other watercooling kit, there was a problem and the crappy little pump wasn't pumping the water, unbeknownst to me. so I turned the machine on and got to windows and it shut down (same cpu fail safe I guess). I realized what had happened and pulled the block off and it actually burned my fingers. it got this hot after only about 2 minutes, and it was ice cold before this. still can't believe the chip isn't fried.

well my temp right now is 50 C, which is about 14 C less than what it was on the other cooling system, which is very nice considering that I'm only using an 80 mm fan.

I hope a 120 won't be much louder though :/

In fact (depending of the type of fan you choose, a 120 mm will run quieter than a 80mm.

yea....those spacers suck.

I wish AMD would do a better design that those sh*tty foam thingies....like a heatspreader or at least an integrated shim to prevent crushed-core syndrome.