Is my cooler on its last legs? Enermax Liqtech 240 TR4

[romeozor]

I have an AMD Threadripper 1920X, (not) cooled by an Enermax Liqtech 240 TR4. The build is not even a year old and CPU temps are... bad. The mobo is an ASRock X399 Taichi micro ATX board, and the case is a matching Corsair Carbide Air 540 I believe.

After booting into Windows, I look at temps and after warming up it idles 60+ C. One pipe is hot to the touch, the other is not, so there seems to be circulation. I touched the side of the radiator and it felt cold, not sure if that’s a place where I can feel heat tho.

Inside the BIOS, I set the pump to Performance mode, which reports ~2300 RPM. The radiator fans run in Silent mode @500 RPM or Standard @1500. Obviously I played around with different combinations, which had no affect on the temps, and even Standard fan speed noise is not something I can sit next to all day.

The layout of the cooling is the radiator and attached fans are in the front of the case taking air in, and there’s an fan in the top back for outtake. There’s no fluid leakage that I can see.

There’s also something wrong with setting core speeds in BIOS. I tried to fix the speed to 3.5 and 3GHz instead of letting it auto fluctuate, but it gets ignored, it still boosts to 3.7-3.9... I even tried disabling cores in Ryzen Master to keep temps down, but that didn’t help either.

I don’t know how long I had this issue, but last november I tried some gaming and noticed serious throttling to 500MHz.

Changed thermal paste yesterday: Arctic MX-4. No dice.

I gues this is a long post to ask, are the days of my cooler numbered?

 

[magda]

Have you tried removing the fans and cleaning the radiator?

 

[Deimos]

I don't know man, does an AIO qualify as 'water cooling'? Custom loops or GTFO.

But seriously though, you should not be able to feel a difference between inlet and outlet temp wise. Any loop with a decent flow rate should only have 1-2 degree temp difference between inlet and outlet so if one side is hot, and the other is cool, you have a flow issue, possibly a blockage. Pull that sucker out.


Also, seriously, why bother with an AIO? My rule of thumb is to get the best air cooler possible because they can match the performance of an AIO with the same surface area, the only time I would go with an AIO is if space is an issue, e.g. the Phanteks Enthoo evolve, this is the only PC I ever used an AIO which I built for my wife, I was still tempted to go for a custom loop and still might.

 

[jhsu]

Enermax AIO's are a total crap shoot, I'm waiting on my 2nd RMA, though honestly I'm just doing it because there's no way I can get a refund at this point.

You should checkout this thread: https://hardforum.com/threads/enermax-liqtech-tr4-aio-liquid-cpu-coolers-review.1945204/page-2

I've gone with an air cooler for now. I found NH-U14S TR4 with a TY-143 fan to have the best performance in my scenario. I compared it with the Thermalright's Silver Arrow, and even though online you'll see better performance out of the box than the Noctua, I found when you actually pair the Noctua with the same fan it performs better.

I think I was getting slightly better performance with the Enermax when it was working well, but at this point I've gone through 2 units with failing performance, so air cooling makes way more sense.

Good Luck!