The System Is Down.
May 2nd, 2007 by Jerry
Late tonight, a very annoying and blood-boiling shriek erupted from my computer. Although the noise was too loud to pinpoint, I had previously heard the sound and traced it to the water pump, but that time the sound stopped after a system restart and a handful of death threats.
This time, the sound didn’t stop, despite the death threats, and as I watched, the CPU temperature rocketed to 150° F before I got the system shut down. It turns out that the shriek comes from a flow sensor attached to the water pump. The pump is no longer pumping, so my main computer is dead until I either replace the water pump unit or the entire water cooling setup. Either is a royal pain, but replacing the pump (if it’s even possible to find one in Waco) is better than draining all the water lines and assembling a new kit. The only other alternative would be to replace the CPU heatsink with the stock fan unit. Talk about lame.. but it would be less lame than a system that can’t run for more than 30 seconds at a time. A pumpless water cooling system is little more than a naked CPU, which would last seconds before burning itself out.
Update: Once I fixed the water pump problem, the system wouldn’t boot up. I figured it was some kind of heat stress from the water pump ordeal, but I tried again this morning and it worked. I still don’t trust the hardware at all, so I’ll be shopping around for upgrades.