waterblock has a leak, or 10000?

a few weaks ago i purchased a Thermaltake Aquarius II Water Cooling Kit. since then, it's been nothing but problems.. instead of writing a story about it, i figured i'd just list the steps in which they happened

up and running in no time.. aside from the fact that my waterblock has a leak in it. i found out after it cost me an xp2000, due to overheating.

put the block under forced air in a bucket of water, find the hole (not in the nozzles, or hose connections, but on the side) grind off the tin coating, solder the hole.

back into the bucket of water to make sure my solder joint was sufficient. everything looks good @ almost 20PSI of air.

block goes back into system, fill it with water and run. only to find there is water slowly leaking out of the waterblock on the opposite side from my patch.

back in the bucket, this time at almost 40PSI i find not only a new hole, but my joint has leaked.. at this point in time, more PSI = more holes.

i've given up on patching a possibly infinite amount of holes on the block; am going to order a new one. but my question is.. how could that block have so many holes, and why does it take a REALLY high air preasure to find them? (opposed to the very low preasure my pump put through it) on the fisrt one, i'd say it was just a poor casting.

any takers?

Water will find it's way through the smallest of openings and cracks. Unfortunately the Aquatiusis a piece of garbage IMO(and countless others).

i knew water could find it's way through just about anything.. but i thought air would do about the same. apparently it takes more preasure.. right?

anyway, i should have read reviews on kits before i ordered mine... DOH!

i would think air would find leaks better as well. maybe testing all the way to 40psi helped create some more weaknesses/holes.

did you presherize it and then put something like windex on it or some soapy water

no, but what would that do differently than without?

If you are using air to test for leaks then you need to put soapy water around the outside so you can see it bubble where the leak is. The air flow will be so small otherwise you'll never be able to fidn the leaky spot.

he put it into a bucket fill of water and looked for bubbles, isnt that the same idea?

how else do you think i found the hole.... "lol"

not like i just guessed here

well if you know where the hole is

Isn't 40PSI rather high for testing leaks in a system primarily concerned with much lower pressures?

Shadowcat said:

Isn't 40PSI rather high for testing leaks in a system primarily concerned with much lower pressures?

Click to expand...

Was just about to quote this:

Cathar said:

There's such a thing as too hot of a pump. For most people's setups, that's anything above about 40-50W of rated power draw.

"too strong" is pretty hard to achieve for most pumps that people can afford. A pump that supplies more than about 30PSI can be dangerous to most people's radiators, depending on how their loop is sequenced. A pump that supplies more than about 100PSI (with flow capacity to match) is just plain dangerous, period. Fortunately you don't need to worry too much about "accidentally" picking up a pump anywhere near as strong as that, as the large $$ amounts for such pumps tends to scare most people away long before they lose reason and buy one.

Click to expand...

perhaps someone has missed what i said in my initial post.

water leaks at whatever PSI my pump puts out. air doesnt' find those holes until about 40PSI.

common sense would tell you to only test 1 part of the system at a time, and not the whole system. i knew my leak was in the block from the get-go. so i only tested that.

furthermore, if mywaterblock is supposed to be leak free, and isn't made

accidently hit enter, and the forum isn't allowing me to edit my post. leaving off where i stopped:


furthermore, if my waterblock is supposed to be solid/leak free, and isn't made of 1MM copper, 40PSI shouldn't hurt it.

kits = nightmare

matt1562 said:

accidently hit enter, and the forum isn't allowing me to edit my post. leaving off where i stopped:


furthermore, if my waterblock is supposed to be solid/leak free, and isn't made of 1MM copper, 40PSI shouldn't hurt it.

Click to expand...

Well, what I believe Shadowcat and I were suggesting is that, with it being a kit and not really made at the highest standard, 40psi might have caused your problem. It doesnt matter that it leaks at little to no PSI after you put 40PSI into your system, if it leaked before hand thats a different story. And the thickness of your WB doesnt really matter. What matters is how quality the brazing job or solding job or how ever the parts were assemebed was. While DD might test their blocks to 80psi the WBs in most kits arent exactly DD quality...

it was 40PSI or air while testing. i know it leaked before hand, because i woke up to find a CPU running at 90C, therfore not working. obviously the block has holes in it from the factory, i've known that much. but my question still remains: why does water leak from the system at basically under 5PSI, and it takes up to 40PSI of air (while the block is submerged under water), to show any leaks?

well with the water or air is leaking outta the block no matter what pressure its at, its just that small amounts of water are more visible tahtn tiny bubbles of air.
so in teh bucket there will be small bubbles forming at 5psi, tehn there is the psooibilty of the water in the bucket exerting too much pressure on the block fo ir to leak out too.

hence why you should use soapy water or windex to check as it will bubbme up even is ther is only a samll leak.

Where is the leak coming from? Around the barbs or around the lid/bottom seal?