Upgrading My CPU Cooler Part 2- Bought It And Installation

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Well, I sort of dove right in and bought a AIO and installed it. I ended up getting the Corsair H110i RGB White because it was white and it fit with my build.

Installation of this was quite possibly the hardest thing I had to do with the entire PC build process. It took a lot longer than I thought it would and it had a lot more problems than anything else.

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Ignore the mess of cables

Opening it up, it looked very nice especially with the white fans and radiator.

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It was pre setup for Intel sockets and I had to swap it out for the AMD ones. I initially put on the wrong AMD one(I and had to remove it and put it back on, luckily it was just an easy pull).

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After that was the installation of the fans onto the radiator. The fans are very nice looking Corsair LL 120mm fans, the white ones which sell for $40 each. After that I had to install the would thing onto the case. Luckily with my NZXT case, I had a piece I could remove out of the case to install the radiator onto it and it made it a lot easier.

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After that I had to install the block onto the CPU. That took quite a while as I got confused on how to do it. At the end I figured it out and installed it. No thermal paste needed as it had pre included thermal paste.

After that it was just a bunch of cables that I had to plug in. The cables from the fan connected to the pump which connected to a sata power cable and one to a usb header on the mother board.

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And I thought I was done, but the first problem popped up, I couldn't get the RGB light on the pump to light up. I was wondering what I was doing wrong and after some googling I realized that my power supply had a 4 pin sata and it needed a 5 pin sata cable to light that up. Cheapening out on my power supply caused this problem as most people said that most new power supplies should have a 5 pin sata cable on the corsair discord channel where I went to ask to see if I could buy an adapter to get this working(spoiler alert: I can't unless I build my own).

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Notice how on the left there's only 4 gold pins, I need 5 of them to activate the RGB on the pump block

Then when running the PC, I realized my CPU was running really hot, reaching up to 60 C when not doing anything at all. With the help with the fantastic @kyle I realized that I might have gotten some dried out thermal paste on the block. I opened it up and look at that, there was like no thermal paste on it at all.

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I don't have an image of what the CPU looked like during that time, but trust me, there was nothing on that either. So I went to best buy and bought some Corsair thermal paste(it was the only one they had) and applied that and reinstalled the pump block.

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And that did it(and changing the power settings to balanced instead of Ultra). I had great thermal performance, idling around 30 C and going up to about 60 C with workload on it. Plus best of all, it's near silent. Only way I can hear the pump is when I have it set to extreme mode, which I never do.

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@scrooger told me I should undervolt my CPU if I wanted to get even better thermal performance and I plan on taking a look at that today or tomorrow depending on when I finish putting up the christmas lights. The initial installation took me about an hour and a half and then I spent about another 2 hours of troubleshooting and finally another 45ish minutes to reinstall the pump block with the new thermal paste. This was quite a bit longer than how long the initial build took.



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7 comments
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That picture of the pump block looks like there is a protective plastic cover over the thermal paste..

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There actually is none, corsair used a loose plastic covering over the whole block instead of just a sticker over the thermal paste. I checked when I had it out. Considering that the reapplication of the thermal paste fixed it, I'm pretty sure thats where the problem was.

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