Quick question about the storm. I think I might have messed mine up.

ok. I was just cleaning out my Storm block, and I had this bright idea to use the end of a q-tip to clean out the little cup things in the copper part. I cleaned one, and saw what looked like copper shavings on the tip, so I started cleaning each one out like that. I found almost identical shavings in each one, and it took till like the 10th cup for it to click that maybe they are meant to be like that. I was wondering if the block is meant to be like that?Also, if they are meant to be there, should I just remove the rest of them to keep it uniform? Will it hurt performance to not have those in there?

Thanks,
Vaio

no... shavings are bad and might be a quality control issue from the block or something else in your loop.
There's nothing about the block that would make shavings normal, but it makes sense that they could get stuck in the cups.

I found a magnifying glass, and looked into each cup, and each one I had not cleaned had an identical piece of copper in it that stuck up. These were missing in the ones I had cleaned already. I'm assuming that they are there to increase turbulence, or something like that. At this point, I am worried that I may have messed up my block, but I dunno how big of a difference a microscopic piece of copper could make in each cup.

Some pictures would help us better understand the problem.

Vaio said:

I found a magnifying glass, and looked into each cup, and each one I had not cleaned had an identical piece of copper in it that stuck up. These were missing in the ones I had cleaned already. I'm assuming that they are there to increase turbulence, or something like that. At this point, I am worried that I may have messed up my block, but I dunno how big of a difference a microscopic piece of copper could make in each cup.

Click to expand...

Chips will always be bad. The nozzle + cup design is what creates the excessive turbulence that makes the block so efficient and there have been no reports similar to yours. I've been researching waterblock design and there's nothing stating that particulate matter would be a good thing to having in your block. Especially not in one that has easily clogged nozzles.

Do you have the Swiftech Storm block or one of the G-series blocks? The Storm G5 had tiny little pins or a cone in the center of each cup, but you wouldn't have been able to remove them with a Q-tip. And even if you did it was later found that that hampered performance a little. Swiftech had some quality control issues around the time that the Apogee was first being released so that's what I'm thinking is your problem.

Just keep cleaning the cups.

ok. That's good to hear. I'll just continue what I was doing, and see what happens.