- Joined
- Jul 22, 2002
- Location
- USMC.. OoRah!!
Hey there guys! I wanted to share with you my adventure over the last several days of cleaning, re-wiring, and re-tweaking my PC!! It’s been a little over 20 months since I last wired and cleaned out my PC. Yes I know that’s FOREVER!!! Shame on me 
But I wanted to share with you all the fun I’ve had of completely rebuilding my PC!
What started out as a simple attempt at cleaning out some dust from my radiator turned into this multi-day ordeal
So, let’s get started!
This is my cpu and my water block after ~19 months on the same thermal paste, Arctic Silver’s Ceramique:
Not too shabby I guess, but you can definitely see the dust!!
Upon tearing down of my system and undoing the tubing, I finally inspected my pump in some detail. I hadn’t done this since 2007 when I purchased it here off the forums. I realized very quickly that my pump was actually a D4!!. I thought it was a D5 for years!!! Needless to say, I feel dumb. On top of that, it was manufactured in October 2004, so it had been running for 7 years!!! I can’t complain about that one bit. I consider myself *very* lucky. You can see it’s had much better days and the wiring was beginning to fray
Here’s a pic of my PC finally dis-assembled for the first time since December 2009 (when I ripped out the old motherboard and re-installed my current one). Don’t laugh too hard! (You can see my fans super glued directly onto the Radiator!!)
Once I tore it apart, I set out to *thoroughly* clean everything. I ended going through almost 4 cans of air, a ton of Q-Tips, countless paper towels, and a lot of Windex and Rubbing Alcohol!
**Warning Graphic content below**
Folks, get your chest paddles handy for this one (you’ll need to re-start your heart after looking at this). This is my Thermochill PA 120.3 after almost 20 months without a real cleaning
Yes. You see it. I’m ashamed to present it
But it is what it is… LOL.
After washing out my Radiator and letting it dry to re-clean it, I set out to finally lap my CPU. I taped each piece of sandpaper down to my glass coffee table and proceeded to sand the CPU 30 times in each direction, rotating the CPU 90 degrees after each 30-count of sanding. This was to help ensure even lapping.
Before: A regular i7 940:
400 grit prepped and ready:
After 600 Grit:
1000 Grit:
2000 Grit:
Finally, after going back down to 1000 and re-sanding it a few more times just to make sure I got it as flat as I could (and to work out some rough spots), this is the final result after polishing it with 3000 Grit (yes I know, I know – overkill!):
Ain’t no regular i7 940 now, is it?
After lapping the CPU, I decided to lightly polish the base of my Apogee XT water block to buff off some old Ceramique. I know they have a slight bow in the base on purpose, so I only *lightly* sanded the base with 3000 Grit sandpaper.
Here’s the result:
Like new! Yay!!
Now comes the mid-project tragedy....
Once I lapped my CPU and block, I decided to work on re-mounting my radiator fans. Previously, I was in such a hurry to build my rig, I just superglued the fans to my Radiator. LOL. Lazy I know!!! But hey, it held up for over a year and a half!! Loctite is da boom when it comes to super glue lol.
I decided to space out my fans a bit so that there wouldn’t be so much of a dead-zone right on the radiator. I have a really strong feeling that was a cause for such awful dust buildup on my 120.3 PA. I purchased several #6 screws and some nylon spacers from Lowes to actually screw in my fans to the radiator this time The #6 screws were *just* a tad too big for the 120.3’s fan holes, so I had to drill them out ever so slightly…..
Annnnnnd…… I poked two holes in the Radiator’s tubing!!!!
: I pushed just a *tiny* bit too hard on a couple holes that had old super glue clogging them, and the drill bit plunged into the radiator. I was terrified. My heart literally stopped and I yelled out . I had committed a great sin against the Thermochill gods. Time to go to Wal-Mart at 2am and get some JB-Weld… Thank god they had JB Water Weld!! I grabbed a tube and hurried home to patch my beloved Thermochill.
I had to pry back the aluminum fan mounting bracket to get to the two holes. I applied a decent amount to the biggest hole (the size of a small pea) and let it set overnight. I ran some warm tap water through it in the morning, and low and behold, it was patched!!! Now, onto my other pin-sized hole. Again after applying an appropriate amount of Water Weld, I let it cure for 4-5 hours before testing it. Success again!!! Disaster had been averted!! I swear I really did a happy dance in my kitchen LOL.
After successfully patching my Rad, I mounting the spacers and fans. Here are a few pics of the fans installed: (I still had to superglue the last one because of clearance issues in my Lian-li)
I used Q-Tips with some alcohol to clean off the months and months of built up dust on all my fans, including these. I must say, they look *SO* much better!
And my awesome duct tape job to seal off the fans a bit and act as a shroud:
The Radiator re-installed:
With the hard drive cage installed: (I turned the drives around so that I could use 90 degree SATA cables to help clean up the wiring mess and improve the airflow/professional look)
The back side of the motherboard tray:
And the visible side:
I also *thoroughly* cleaned out all the built up dust in the nooks and crannies under my PSU, in the front of the case, and everywhere else. I practically made the metal look like new some using rubbing alcohol to remove old tape residue and Windex to clean off dated smudges.
Refilling the loop:
After filling the loop, I moved the PC back into my man cave here. I grabbed my HD5970 and took some canned air to it as well, since I noticed it’s fan looked quite nasty from neglect. Here’s what I blew out of my video card alone: (The dust chunks are actually a bit larger in person!)
Pretty gross, huh? Needless to say, my GPU doesn’t whine anymore and is much more quieter and cooler
PC almost fully re-assembled:
Applying TIM:
One last look at my block!
Everything re-installed:
After letting it run at stock for a day to work out the remaining air bubbles in my loop, my new stuff finally arrived from the good folks at Performace-PCs:
Need packing peanuts anyone?
The goods:
Out with the really old, in with the brand new!!
The new pump installed and working:
My system finally back to normal!
After doing all of this extensive cleaning of my cooling system, lapping the CPU, replacing a 7 year old pump and spacing my fans from the radiator, I can certainly tell you it’s helped reduced my temps by about 5C at idle and ~8-10C on load. I’m currently priming my CPU at 19 x 195 for 3.79Ghz with 1.33v vcore and 1.4v QPI/vtt. Here’s my temps right now while running Prime 95 for a bit over an hour:
Not too bad for a old C0 stepping I reckon. Before, I was seeing load temps in the low-mid 70’s! And my temperature spread from Core 0 to Core 3 was sometimes as large as 5-6C! There’s still a spread as you can see, but the temperatures are much more evened out and closer together across all the cores. I’ll be working my way up to 4.0Ghz slowly again, now that my PC is clean and like new My goal is to get to 4.0Ghz with much less volts (previously had to give it ~1.48v!!) than before and hopefully with much lower load temps while Priming (was hitting low 80’s!!! )
Hopefully, this thread was entertaining! Let this be a Lesson to everyone – CLEAN YOUR PC MORE OFTEN THAN ONCE EVERY 20 MONTHS!!! Don’t believe me? Just scroll up and take a look at my disgustingly sexy clogged radiator
Thanks for reading!
-Dave
But I wanted to share with you all the fun I’ve had of completely rebuilding my PC!What started out as a simple attempt at cleaning out some dust from my radiator turned into this multi-day ordeal
So, let’s get started!This is my cpu and my water block after ~19 months on the same thermal paste, Arctic Silver’s Ceramique:
Not too shabby I guess, but you can definitely see the dust!!
Upon tearing down of my system and undoing the tubing, I finally inspected my pump in some detail. I hadn’t done this since 2007 when I purchased it here off the forums. I realized very quickly that my pump was actually a D4!!. I thought it was a D5 for years!!! Needless to say, I feel dumb. On top of that, it was manufactured in October 2004, so it had been running for 7 years!!! I can’t complain about that one bit. I consider myself *very* lucky. You can see it’s had much better days and the wiring was beginning to fray
Here’s a pic of my PC finally dis-assembled for the first time since December 2009 (when I ripped out the old motherboard and re-installed my current one). Don’t laugh too hard! (You can see my fans super glued directly onto the Radiator!!
)
Once I tore it apart, I set out to *thoroughly* clean everything. I ended going through almost 4 cans of air, a ton of Q-Tips, countless paper towels, and a lot of Windex and Rubbing Alcohol!
**Warning Graphic content below**
Folks, get your chest paddles handy for this one (you’ll need to re-start your heart after looking at this). This is my Thermochill PA 120.3 after almost 20 months without a real cleaning
Yes. You see it. I’m ashamed to present it
But it is what it is… LOL.After washing out my Radiator and letting it dry to re-clean it, I set out to finally lap my CPU. I taped each piece of sandpaper down to my glass coffee table and proceeded to sand the CPU 30 times in each direction, rotating the CPU 90 degrees after each 30-count of sanding. This was to help ensure even lapping.
Before: A regular i7 940:
400 grit prepped and ready:
After 600 Grit:
1000 Grit:
2000 Grit:
Finally, after going back down to 1000 and re-sanding it a few more times just to make sure I got it as flat as I could (and to work out some rough spots), this is the final result after polishing it with 3000 Grit (yes I know, I know – overkill!):
Ain’t no regular i7 940 now, is it?
After lapping the CPU, I decided to lightly polish the base of my Apogee XT water block to buff off some old Ceramique. I know they have a slight bow in the base on purpose, so I only *lightly* sanded the base with 3000 Grit sandpaper.
Here’s the result:
Like new! Yay!!
Now comes the mid-project tragedy....
Once I lapped my CPU and block, I decided to work on re-mounting my radiator fans. Previously, I was in such a hurry to build my rig, I just superglued the fans to my Radiator. LOL. Lazy I know!!! But hey, it held up for over a year and a half!! Loctite is da boom when it comes to super glue lol.
I decided to space out my fans a bit so that there wouldn’t be so much of a dead-zone right on the radiator. I have a really strong feeling that was a cause for such awful dust buildup on my 120.3 PA. I purchased several #6 screws and some nylon spacers from Lowes to actually screw in my fans to the radiator this time
The #6 screws were *just* a tad too big for the 120.3’s fan holes, so I had to drill them out ever so slightly…..Annnnnnd…… I poked two holes in the Radiator’s tubing!!!!
: I pushed just a *tiny* bit too hard on a couple holes that had old super glue clogging them, and the drill bit plunged into the radiator. I was terrified. My heart literally stopped and I yelled out . I had committed a great sin against the Thermochill gods. Time to go to Wal-Mart at 2am and get some JB-Weld… Thank god they had JB Water Weld!! I grabbed a tube and hurried home to patch my beloved Thermochill.I had to pry back the aluminum fan mounting bracket to get to the two holes. I applied a decent amount to the biggest hole (the size of a small pea) and let it set overnight. I ran some warm tap water through it in the morning, and low and behold, it was patched!!! Now, onto my other pin-sized hole. Again after applying an appropriate amount of Water Weld, I let it cure for 4-5 hours before testing it. Success again!!! Disaster had been averted!! I swear I really did a happy dance in my kitchen LOL.
After successfully patching my Rad, I mounting the spacers and fans. Here are a few pics of the fans installed: (I still had to superglue the last one because of clearance issues in my Lian-li
)
I used Q-Tips with some alcohol to clean off the months and months of built up dust on all my fans, including these. I must say, they look *SO* much better!
And my awesome duct tape job to seal off the fans a bit and act as a shroud:
The Radiator re-installed:
With the hard drive cage installed: (I turned the drives around so that I could use 90 degree SATA cables to help clean up the wiring mess and improve the airflow/professional look)
The back side of the motherboard tray:
And the visible side:
I also *thoroughly* cleaned out all the built up dust in the nooks and crannies under my PSU, in the front of the case, and everywhere else. I practically made the metal look like new some using rubbing alcohol to remove old tape residue and Windex to clean off dated smudges.
Refilling the loop:
After filling the loop, I moved the PC back into my man cave here. I grabbed my HD5970 and took some canned air to it as well, since I noticed it’s fan looked quite nasty from neglect. Here’s what I blew out of my video card alone: (The dust chunks are actually a bit larger in person!)
Pretty gross, huh? Needless to say, my GPU doesn’t whine anymore and is much more quieter and cooler
PC almost fully re-assembled:
Applying TIM:
One last look at my block!
Everything re-installed:
After letting it run at stock for a day to work out the remaining air bubbles in my loop, my new stuff finally arrived from the good folks at Performace-PCs:
Need packing peanuts anyone?
The goods:
Out with the really old, in with the brand new!!
The new pump installed and working:
My system finally back to normal!
After doing all of this extensive cleaning of my cooling system, lapping the CPU, replacing a 7 year old pump and spacing my fans from the radiator, I can certainly tell you it’s helped reduced my temps by about 5C at idle and ~8-10C on load. I’m currently priming my CPU at 19 x 195 for 3.79Ghz with 1.33v vcore and 1.4v QPI/vtt. Here’s my temps right now while running Prime 95 for a bit over an hour:
Not too bad for a old C0 stepping I reckon. Before, I was seeing load temps in the low-mid 70’s! And my temperature spread from Core 0 to Core 3 was sometimes as large as 5-6C! There’s still a spread as you can see, but the temperatures are much more evened out and closer together across all the cores. I’ll be working my way up to 4.0Ghz slowly again, now that my PC is clean and like new
My goal is to get to 4.0Ghz with much less volts (previously had to give it ~1.48v!!) than before and hopefully with much lower load temps while Priming (was hitting low 80’s!!! )Hopefully, this thread was entertaining! Let this be a Lesson to everyone – CLEAN YOUR PC MORE OFTEN THAN ONCE EVERY 20 MONTHS!!! Don’t believe me? Just scroll up and take a look at my disgustingly sexy clogged radiator
Thanks for reading!
-Dave
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