 The Desk PC's desperate need for maintenance has been kind of easy to ignore because all I had to do to not be able to see, come check this out, colored foam at the top of the water in the reservoirs and the disgusting amount of dust on the motherboard was to just cover it with hoodies and Galaxy S9s and that sort of thing. But it's gone to the point where it's actually loud. Like listen to this. That's because of all the air in the loop. So by popular demand, welcome to Desk PC Water Cooling Maintenance. A video that is going to be absolute hell. Brought to you by Thermaltake. Their P90 Core tempered glass case features five millimeter thick glass and angled open frame design, different layout options, vertical GPU mounting with a riser cable included and more. Check it out at the link below. The Desk PC Water Cooling Maintenance Desk PC Water Cooling Maintenance Because this thing is so large and heavy, during the construction project of the wallpaper TV window, we actually didn't take it out of the room. So even though I did eventually get my filters installed here, look at this, look at this. If I touch this filter, see that dust? There was so much dust in this room that, I mean, even what did get through the filter has made it just grody. This one's the worst. Although what's cool is that for the doubters out there who thought that the airflow scheme for this thing wasn't gonna work, yeah, you're wrong. Oh, it's inching over. Oh, there we go. And for those of you who figure I'm probably just whining, look how thick that sucker is. Look at this, oh lordy. Oh, that is gross. I need my Dyson. Let's just make this video not about the desk at all. Let's just make it about a vacuum again. You guys like that? I'm just kidding, but I do need a vacuum. Hi. I legitimately hadn't really given a lot of thought to where to start with this. So one thing I did think of was that it would be good to be able to pull these out to drain the lube. I don't know if I ended up actually leaving enough slack. I take kind of a YOLO approach to water cooling maintenance. So you might as well get as much adrenaline pumping during that time as you can. All right, so this is a little bit tricky because what we don't want is any water on our MDF desk. It is painted and that does help us out a fair bit, but it is still suboptimal to get water on it. It'll swell up and basically get immediately ruined. All right, now this is a bit of a hack. Now, normally I wouldn't recommend blowing into a water cooling loop because you introduce all kinds of microorganisms and stuff in your breath. But the reason that we don't care here is that we are about to clean everything anyway, so that's not a big deal. How would you if you weren't blowing into it? You would just have to open up somewhere, open up the highest point of the loop and then drain at the lowest point of the loop and then the whole thing should just kind of drain on its own. But you'd have to kind of carefully plan your loop in order for that kind of a strategy to work and we didn't. Because this loop was more planned for looks and less planned for, so that we can maintain it properly. All right, so the adventure just got a little bit more interesting here. This pump that I'm pulling out right now, this one's fine, but if you have a look at the inlet of the other one, there's actually a bunch of micro cracks where the fitting goes in. Check this out, this is very disappointing because it's clearly not leaking now. It looks like we might have to replace this pump. Holy crap, this might be a problem. I can't even take apart the first thing that I'm pulling out of here. Ah, good. All right, one down. There's a reason that most water cooling manufacturers use Delrin or Acetal anywhere where you're gonna thread in a fitting rather than Plexi like this. And the reason that it is more prone to cracking. And additionally, Plexi is kind of sucky to clean because you can't really use solvents like isopropyl alcohol on it. You gotta be very careful. So the fittings we can just go at with some rubbing alcohol and an old toothbrush. And then one of these handy dandy pipe cleaners. And for this guy, we just wanna use, we'll start with just our scrap water just to get some of the gunk off of it. So for my next trick, I'm gonna be replacing the PWM versions of this pump that I have in there. These are great if you don't cut off the PWM lead like we did when we were installing it. And I'm gonna replace them with the older regular DC control with a little knob on the back. So I'm actually ending up with a double whammy of work here because I gotta clean this before I put it away. And I definitely have to clean this before I use it. That is supposed to look like that. Okay, alcohol seems to be working a little bit better. I don't mind if the metal is stained, but I do need to get the bulk of the actual sediment that's built up on it off. This is gonna be a bit more challenging. Oh crap. I think I just ruined this. It's an impeller, it's a magnet. I just touched steel wool on it, it's all over it. I am gonna pull the one from the other pump. Boop. Got two pumps and one reservoir done. The reservoirs are permanently stained from having an air bubble. Do you want me to eat it? No. You had a moment where you thought I might actually do it. Yeah, I should try and get this off. Reservoir's done. Let's go find out if we have any tubing. Oh, this is not a good sign. Not if I wanna maintain the white and black color scheme anyway, I just need a really long stiff object. Sorry, I had something caught in my eye there. Unfortunately, no an automator stick this time. Has to be thinner for optimal penetration. Of the tubing, Jake. God, get your mind out of the gutter. Hey, look at that. Get that right in the tubing. Let's actually get the pumps back into place. So while you guys were gone, I got these pumps all swapped around. So they are now D5 Varios and these are really tight fit. And they're all cleaned up now. You put your cleaning stick in, you take your cleaning stick out, pick up this jug and try and wash it down. That's what it's all about. Okay, let's just spit on it to lube it up. Spit really is nature's lube. I mean, not like for this, but. Bam, no, you missed it already. It's up, it's done. There was no fundamental problem here. Just needed more lube. Also this hole was a bit looser. None of the bolts for these pumps were tight anymore. Once I took them off, they all vibrated themselves loose. All of a sudden you're having a heck of a time. Ew, before and after baby. Okay, there is definitely some trash in there though. Oh, that's so dirty. That's actually not as bad as it looked. Got a little bit of yellow gunk. So there's definitely cleaning to be done. Oh, right. Okay, so that's worse. It's scrubbing time. You know, I don't know how clean this is gonna come. Like I could pull out the scouring pad, but then I've got metal shards all over the place and making matters worse, I'm gonna end up with an uneven finish cause I'm only gonna be able to scour some parts of it. There may just not be anything we can do about this because part of the problem here is just that the nickel plating is being worn away to expose the copper over time. I mean, it's a funny thing about water. Like I'm not blaming the manufacturers here. Water erodes, it's like what it does. So we've got some erosion, not corrosion in our block. And I think we're just gonna kind of have to live with it. So I did more closely inspect this pump top and yes, it does have some like spiderweb cracks around it, but it seems okay. I think it'll hold up for quite some time, but that's actually why it used to be that the threads were directly in the acrylic on GPU blocks as well. But that's, I think why a lot of manufacturers started putting these on. That and it gives them compatibility with those multi-block manifolds. Something to note is that most water block manufacturers void your warranty if you open up the blocks. Wow, that is a very, very poor thermal paste application there. Oh, it smells. Ah, you wanna smell it? No. Look at that, it kind of looked like an oil of some sort. Like I wonder if whatever I'm touching is like some kind of microbe. Can you imagine that on my tombstone? Here lies Linus Tech Tips Sebastian, died of weird alien organism growing in his water cooling loop. That's embarrassing. All right, so we're gonna do a slightly better job of this this time around. Okay, just a little bit more tubing and then we're good to go. I'm not gonna watch Linus Tech Tips videos, that guy has no idea what he's doing. Mm, mm, mm. Ha. Blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub. Awesome. All right. Well, let's just finish getting this thing filled up. Ah, okay. Oh, what the hell? Oh crap, oh crap, oh this is really bad. You're gonna keep throwing paper towel at you. Okay, I think that's enough paper towel, thank you. Are you sure you want more? I can't even see what I'm doing. Okay, all right, all right, all right, jeez. It happened because I opened up the other side as well and because I can't remember which order they're in in the loop, but I guess not the one that I hoped for. And so it basically didn't go very well. Made this one start spilling. This is OGPT Nuke from Petra's Tech Shop. Okay, just a few drops of that should keep anything nasty from growing in the loop. Oh, there's a bubble, I see it. I see it. There it is. Yep, that's better. Finally done. For those of you out there who were wondering why it is that we'll take a water-cooled pre-built system and we'll say this thing's beautiful, it's gorgeous, it's got great temperatures, but we're not sure if we'd recommend buying it to a water-cooling novice, anyone who couldn't build it themselves. This is basically why, because water-cooling maintenance does have to be done and it is as difficult, if not far more so than the actual initial build. But you know what's not difficult? Building your own beautiful website on Squarespace. Squarespace offers 24-7 tech support and they've got tons of gorgeous templates, so all you gotta do is pick one, decide on what text and what pictures you want, where, and you are pretty much up and running. And Squarespace has tons of great features, including their logo designer, their cover pages feature, which allows you to set up a beautiful one-page online presence in just minutes, and commerce built into every one of their website templates. You can set up your own online store. So if you've ever wanted a website, go try Squarespace for free. We're gonna have it linked in the video description, no credit card required. Then when you sign up for Squarespace, make sure that you use our link. It's offer code LTT and you can get 10% off your first purchase. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured. I don't know, maybe we'll put like, I don't know what'll be down there, maybe some of the parts from this thing. Also, while you're down there, you can check out our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum as well.