 So my original hypothesis about my water cooling loop was that it had gotten all gunked up due to microbial growth in spite of the fact that I am using Primochill LRT that is, oh I can't even remember what it stands for. Um. Huh. Well there you go, whatever. The Primochill antimicrobial tubing. I thought it was because I reused some of the segments of tubing so they didn't have the coating enough of a coating left anymore or whatever else. But I'm starting to think it was to do with this block and not anything else because you can see there's weird text on the other side of the block. See that? There's like graphic design going on and it's not on the sides here. You can see under my finger it's on the other side of the plexi and this looks like some kind of corrosion or something. See that's not a normal nickel color. So I'm going to be opening up this block and seeing if I can even clean it off and let's try and find out what the heck is going on here. So my new loop is going to be using a Swift-Tec lock so one way or another. Whatever kind of issue. I know EK had some nickel plating issues in the past but I didn't think the GTX 480 blocks were affected so I guess we're about to find out. Alright so the cover has been removed and it's interesting because I can read the text now. So something about quinplastics.com and Formatty something. These are in other languages. But that's hilarious. So this is just gunk. So I can scratch it right off. But I guess it was probably from the protective layer that was over the plexi before it was applied and that somehow left like a slight residue in the shape of the text. So here there's a phone number. So plus 440-286-774-886. And then I wonder if there's something after that. Doesn't look like it. So yeah there you go. So you can reach quinplastics and ask them about it if you really want to I suppose. Now let's have a look at the block itself. So this is where we start getting into whether or not this block is corroding. I mean that looks an awful lot like metal discoloration to me. But until I pick away at it a little bit here I'm not going to know for sure. Everywhere else kind of looks okay. Oh hold on. What's that? That one's not coming off. Here I hope you guys can see this. I wonder if I can switch to macro mode in the middle of filming. I don't think I can. Here I'm going to switch to macro mode. Okay we're in macro mode now so I haven't really tried to clean it off yet but there's that one. And then here's the one over here right there that doesn't seem to be coming off. So I wonder if there were some imperfections in the nickel plating here. Going to try and clean it off completely now and see what happens. Going to have to remove the block from the card in order to do that as well. So I'm in the bathroom now. Got my block here. Got an old toothbrush that's got some alcohol on it so that might at least help me clear away some of this gunk which it doesn't seem to be doing. This is some pretty robust gunk we got going on here. Huh. It's funny because it... Oh no that doesn't come off that easily does it? So I was having some success with it before. I hope you guys can see what I'm doing. Yeah not really. Okay I'll move it a little closer. There we go. We'll call that good enough. Yeah no that's not coming off at all. Try like a little bit more scrubbing power. Nope. That is a pretty stained block. Yeah you can see I've got... Actually yeah that takes off the top layer of it. So let's just do this one bar. Bar wave I don't know whatever you want to call it. There we go. So you can see that the metal itself is discolored there. So there you go. I will not be reusing this particular block under any circumstances. And yeah that's a shame. Well thank you for checking out this little discovery episode of my video blog. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. It looks like there's actually a few of these. There's one here. Yeah there you go. You can see that. There's a couple places here. Here and here where it seems like there's very very small imperfections that then just from the water flow carried away some metal particles that deposited themselves onto the nickel. It looks like up here was kind of bad. And there's a couple more marks in there. If anyone knows more about metal than I do feel free to chime in and suggest how this might have happened. Remember this is nickel plated copper. And I think we're done here. Actually one more thing guys. I should note that it's been quite a while since EK has had these problems with their blocks. The whole thing was just more for the sake of that I was working on it anyway so I figured I might as well shoot a video about it. It's not a warning about EK products. They've tightened up the quality control on their nickel plating processes so any recent blocks should be fine. However if you do have a 480 or 470 block, something from this generation of products, might be worthwhile to have a look in your loop and if your case is closed make sure that you don't have any gunk. And I'll see you guys in the next one.