CPU Liquid Coooling Issue

The gray material is most likely thermal paste that helps conduct great from the cpu to the heat sink. Maybe in taking it apart you dislodged whatever was making the noise?

That is way too much thermal paste. Along with the fact that whoever installed it, did not remove whatever old paste was on the CPU. I would clean all of it off and use Arctic Silver. You really only need a very small amount that is spread across the CPU. http://www.arcticsilver.com/# Also you have a lot of dust in there that needs to be cleaned out.

gregzoll said:

that is way too much thermal paste..

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yup!!

Too much paste and too much dust won't make noise.
Noise is coming from a bad bearing in a fan or something.

There's also green corrosion on the copper backing of the pump. Does that indicate a leak? Joed, the sound is coming from inside the pump, not any of the fans. This is what I found surprising in the first place.

What is the best way to remove the excess thermal paste?

The pump will have a motor in it. If it is noisy, then the pump must have a bearing going bad. If it is critical I would get another one on order as I suspect this one is about to die.

Anianna said:

There's also green corrosion on the copper backing of the pump. Does that indicate a leak? Joed, the sound is coming from inside the pump, not any of the fans. This is what I found surprising in the first place.

What is the best way to remove the excess thermal paste?

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That Patina is the Thermal paste getting contaminated. I would order a whole new thermal kit from Newegg.com Toss the old one. You can also order the Silver Solder Cleaner and Silver Solder from them.

If you take it to a local shop with the new supplies, they should back it up with their warranty for the work if something goes wrong. Plus they can give it a good cleaning and testing for any hardware issues.

Definitely sounds like your pump in going. If that is a closed loop cooler it can be easier and more cost effective the replace the entire unit. Corsair units have a thermal compound on them that is already a good mid-range product. No need to use a third party one unless you want and even better compound. AS5 is not any better than the stock compound. AS5 is still an okay compound but it's old tech now. Look at Gelid GC-Extreme for a very good moderately priced compound. Definitely clean that junk off. I use the Arctic cleaning compound and purifier I've had for years and coffee filters to remove the residue after scraping excess off with an old credit card. The Gelid compound should come with a spreader to evenly coat the new block.

I ended up replacing it with the ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro which barely fit, but is less expensive and works really well in that PC and came with the thermal paste already applied. As per the advice of some other friends, I cleaned the old gunk out with an alcohol swab first. The computer runs really well now and is quiet.

Sounds good. Nothing wrong with a good air cooler. Liquid is really overkill unless you game heavy or do a lot of CPU intensive work like video editing. I went liquid just because I didn't want a massive chunck of metal hanging off my mobo.

Good thing you replaced it with an air cooler, less troubles and if the fan dies your computer wont overheat completley