Arctic Does What Others Won't: Defective Liquid Freezer II Issues

[Music] here's what's happening in some of the defective arctic liquid freezer 2 coolers that are out there as you can see the gasket is deteriorating and it's starting to stain and gunk up the cold plate that is over here including the micro vent and this is the gasket that's causing all the problems it doesn't look good that's just supposed to be a black basically rubber gasket if you look over here this is the free replacement kit that arctic is sending out to resolve this issue it's a very quick fix to do and again they are sending this out for free to everybody who is affected which is awesome to see so we're gonna be showing you how to do this today and talking about the problem arctic contacted us before we found out about this problem and said we want as many people to know about this product defect as possible that's a quote and that's also different it's very refreshing very deserving of praise and also uh not what we saw from say nzxt's response there it is or gigabytes approach or how enermax handled its own gunk buildup issue we found that every single one of them had been jammed up with some of the most disgusting gunk buildup we'd ever seen so today we're going to talk about the not a recall they're very clear about that of arctic liquid freezer two units including some coverage of the service kit and how they're handling this problem we'll also show you how to do the replacement yourself but we have some details on the science behind what's happening in case you're curious about where exactly things went wrong and overall this is a great response from a company on how to deal with a potentially major defect let's get started before that this video is brought to you by the thermaltake tower 100 thermaltake's tower 100 is a mini itx case to serve as a showcase system for your components the tower 100 has received many revisions since we first saw it and the case now has an open vent in the bottom for intake a mesh cut out in the side panel for some gb ventilation and additional mesh along the side skirts and the side panels of the case the tower 100 is mostly focused on building a showpiece pc that's small enough to fit on most tables learn more at the link in the description below we've reported on a lot of product defects over the years and there's really only three types of responses that we see one of them is the correct response it's what fractal did with its potential fire hazard in the torrent a case that was otherwise very well received and could have been totally ruined by this one mistake uh it's also what arctic is doing the correct response where it's the right and ethical approach to a potential issue that affects your customers now the other two options one of them is total and absolute silence hoping that nobody hears about it and pretending that none of the media outlets reporting on it exist and uh then also potentially blaming them for being the problem the third option of course is where you just pour more gas onto the fire sometimes more literally than not and you get stuff like this now in case you're just tuning in and you're wondering why is gigabyte right now standing five foot deep in a hole holding the shovel right next to another hole with a stone that says msi on it so like in the last example where gigabyte's response to our initial reporting was to post a blog post acknowledging that reporting without naming us and saying some media outfits are causing us to basically globally recall our defective product yep it's everyone else's fault so arctic here is already off to a good start um they again they did exactly it's almost like they followed the playbook of fractal fractal i think looked at nzx he's fire hazard they saw their own coming up and they were like how do we not be them and now arctic is looking at this with a much less serious issue this is not a fire hazard as far as we're aware it's a gunk build-up issue it's a performance problem with the arctic coolers and they said how do we do what fractal did it went well for them here's what's going on with arctic arctic has found that between may of 2021 and march of 2022 some units of the liquid freezer 2 line were sold containing gaskets that were not vulcanized properly arctic says that this is causing a chemical reaction between the copper coal plate and the gasket itself meaning that as you'll see in our sample here you see a potential residue buildup of basically sulfur and ongoing copper plate deposits performance will be hurt as a result of this but this is not an electrical issue it's basically a mechanical issue with a chemical reaction that'll impede the flow of liquid over time and hurt the performance of the copper now additionally if you recall arctic previously announced over a year ago now that it would be increasing its original two-year warranty on the liquid freezer line to a six-year warranty and doing so retroactively and the reason that's relevant here is because that affects everybody who has ever bought a liquid freezer ii because they haven't existed for six years yet they came out around 2019 or so but for what the defect means the degradation here is going to be a slow process similar to what we saw with enter max except arctic is resolving the issue they're not just telling you deal with it peasant and regret that you bought our cooler instead of a knock to a one so arctic is uh is fixing this and the way you know you're affected other than doing the serial number lookup in their website is if you see performance degradation but you're not going to see that right away necessarily you might need to be using the cooler for a few years before it shows up depending on the usage conditions because since the gasket and this is the fixed one is degrading over time and basically plaguing the microfins with all these small particles and then also sort of as you saw discoloring and maybe affecting the performance of the cold plate itself because that process is a chemical process and potentially a slow one it's not like you're gonna turn your computer on one day the next and see it slowly go up by one degree every day so it will take a while and if you are in that affected range you should just replace it now and get it done with because eventually it's probably going to cause a problem for you so what's the worst case scenario then if you don't know about it or if you choose not to act on it most likely the worst case outcome is that the gasket more or less completely deteriorates and gunks up that cold plate to the point where you may see thermal throttling or potentially damage to the components depending on how you've configured bios and your overclocks and things like that so there is a potential very negative side effect where it damages something like a cpu or it's maybe less severe where you just start encountering shutdowns blue screens thermal throttling and if you're a less savvy user probably not watching this video in that case then uh thermal throttling is a very bad issue because you probably won't really notice it's happening whereas most people in this audience will recognize that there's a problem so that's sort of the bad end of it where you definitely want to replace this thing either the cooler as a whole or work with arctic uh they'll send you a replacement or they'll send you the repair kit because the uh the outcome isn't it's not just that the cold plate is discolored it's that you could potentially throttle and lose all your performance the next question that we asked arctic when working on sort of putting together this report of the issue was how do people know if they're shopping for a cooler that the cooler they're potentially going to buy is not immediately going to cause them headaches how do they know it's been addressed already so arctic told us that the way you can tell is if you check the cooler either physically if it's not in the box and it's got this qc passed sticker on it that means it has already been repaired so this unit was they sent this to us as an example this is a repaired unit ready to either go on the shelf or go back to a customer depending on i mean not this specific one they didn't take some customers and give it to us but that's the idea uh i think they also have qc pass stickers on the boxes so if you know it's new in box on a shelf somewhere you've got that now that does not help you if you're buying from amazon or newegg maybe especially or any other online retailer because if that retailer didn't work with arctic to pull them from the shelves which arctic says it tried to do but that does require them getting in contact with every retailer who has one they might not have that complete list so if they were unable to get in contact pull it back and send new ones and the stock is old stock sitting there it might not be fixed yet if you don't mind buying it looking at the box seeing it hasn't been repaired and then repairing it yourself then i guess go for it personally i'd probably wait a little bit before buying one maybe a couple weeks or upwards of a few months but it sounds like this issue has kind of been flushed through the channel since march already i'd still give it personally maybe another two months or so just before buying a liquid freezer too from an online retailer just because i don't i don't want to buy something and then find out i have to fix it that's kind of screwed up so that's how i would do it but if you don't mind repairing it then great although normally at that point you should probably be hoping for a cheaper price because you're doing work to get it functional so anyway to be clear arctic says that everything available at retailers and in their warehouses right now has been fixed it's just that realistically you can't control the entire retail space so that's how i would approach it okay so now we're gonna go through the repair process first step is you go to the serial number checker see if you're affected um i think you can also email arctic support but i wouldn't do that they're probably gonna be inundated right now next step if you are affected is request a kit it will look like this we asked arctic what they think their response time will be so if you request a kit how long will it take to get one they think that it'll be within one to two weeks they're responding to you to get you a kit and if you want them to just repair yours for you you are going to have to sort of deal with the shipping to the warehouse time the shipping back from the warehouse time and then the repair time itself which depends on how many people choose that option so the diy option the queue could be pretty long so um yeah i think most people in the audience are capable of repairing this and i'm going to show you how to do it but they will they will replace it if you're just completely opposed to that or you're worried you're going to mess it up or something so that option is there for you all right let's do the repair so this unit is defective and we're going to take this one apart and show you how to put it back together you open it up and it comes with all the stuff we already have on the table so there is a small bottle of fluid you're going to use this just to top it off in general there's always some permeation of liquid into things like the tube interlining over time so this is just something that it benefits you to do anyway but it's also in case you leak a little bit as you're working now this is not enough to refill the entirety of one of these obviously or we have object permanence issues so if you are going to work on this you'll need to make sure you hold this thing upright this entire procedure can be done with two hands if you want to be safe grow a third one and that's just what i would do so that's the liquid for topping it off or filling it for leaks you also get the cold plate with the gasket pre-installed in the correct orientation that's important this has to go on in the same way so when you take the thing out don't separate them or if you do take note of how it's oriented there's two screws that are spares in case yours are either maybe corroded or something or just if you lose or strip one and stripping them is pretty easy if you use the wrong driver and then there's just basically glorified rubbing alcohol on a paper towel so that's all this is they call it mx wipes if you're thinking of repurposing it for something else uh it is probably not flushable i don't know i think that's a good jase two cents product jay's butt wipes okay so getting started you obviously have to take the cooler off of the system um i would recommend completely dismounting it don't get lazy and try and leave the radiator in there and then hold this thing out you're gonna screw it up probably and and leak stuff everywhere this is just do it right once is my recommendation you will need a phillips 2 screwdriver if you don't know what that is it's one of the larger ones go to a hardware store and get it these are extremely easy to strip if you use a phillips one which is a smaller head and it's gonna suck if you strip them so that's really important as well now next up these screws are different sizes so there's two sizes and four screws we're going to start on the corner that is let's see up towards the vrm fan and work our way around when removing it doesn't matter too much that you do this in order but i like to do a uh sort of criss-cross pattern just to make sure that the tension is being relieved in a fairly uniform way so that you don't potentially this doesn't have enough screws to do it but in some cold plates we've had screws damage the cold plate if they're not all removed piece by piece okay so on the modmat i'm just going to use this corner as for the longer vrm fan there's a way you can tell by looking at it so this is actually the longer screws align with this deeper channel that they have to go into the shorter screws don't have to travel as far so that's how you know what the screw size should be in other words the shorter screws are closer to the labeling here for the pump power so this is another longer one they're both towards the vrm fan all right and now i'm going to take off the nasty one there you go it's looking very enter maxy it's got some bubble action on it too so uh not great this is pretty this is this is pretty bad and removing this thing you could use like a flat head or something but we're gonna get this out of there realistically i mean i would probably wear gloves just to just to not get stuff in your eye if you you know touch your face or something but um i mean i guess i don't actually care personally so but you should wear gloves all right so there is the gasket now take note of the orientation the part that cuts in is going to surround this pump body so the pump's in there and you can see the power notes on it so that comes out i'm going to put that over there next thing i'm going to do is another extra step that arctic isn't mentioning so i'm going to take a piece of blue shop towel just because it doesn't really come apart you could do this with a paper towel as well and all i'm going to do with this is just kind of go through dry it one more time make the install a little easier and also because i want to get out any of the stuff i might have left behind with the first one okay so let's get this thing in there this is what it looks like it's already oriented properly and what we're going to do is i'm actually going to get the gasket in first so that goes down like this looks much better um these two strips here are protruding down not up so that orientation also matters don't put it in upside down the reason i'm doing this instead of just putting the whole thing in there is i'm now going to fill it okay so this is a pre-mix probably has a biocide in it to prevent build-up of things probably distilled water plus biocide i'm going to completely fill these chambers i actually leaked a little bit of it here you can see on the mod mat down here and so this is a good realistic test anyway because probably that's pretty easy to do and we're going to see if there's enough to replace it all it's actually looking very good oh yeah there is cool so i'm actually really happy with this uh that is a perfect amount of liquid next part the plate matters too so you see how the plate has sort of this up towards the top here closer to closer to me that is a deeper channel and the microfins and the bottom down here you can see it's sort of a smaller channel right below the micro fins so those channels are important pay attention to them the smaller channel is going to align with the part that curves in like this and this um deeper channel up here is going to align with the flat edge and ideally you don't touch the plate a whole bunch like i'm doing but i'm demonstrating it so this goes like that let me just show everyone what it looks like one more time that's how we're going to lay it down just like this all right done now the screws go back in we're going to do the short screws towards the circular pump part of the chassis you go angled one corner to the next i am unscrewing these backwards a turn before i start putting them in which helps to prevent cross threading and then using a phillips 2 prevents stripping the head which you will really regret because i've had to drill these out of plates before and it sucks this you're really just going for when it stops a little different with everyone's strength but it should be pretty clear when it's it's not going to turn anymore if you use the right size driver you're going to be fine if you use a drive that's too small not only will you potentially strip these but you also potentially don't tighten them enough and that's where you have a leak so that's it we're done this can come off you can see that mine here i've got some some fluid that leaked out around here around the edges go through with a paper towel or blue shop towel for better results and just clean all that off especially on the cold plate you don't want to reseal this down with liquid on the plate and um just get any liquid away from it you'll be good to go that is of course uh electrically conductive if it ends up on the motherboard okay so final thoughts it is really easy to do the replacement if uh none of that looked challenging to you it's you know using a screwdriver and some common sense to not let it leak too much if perhaps you spill a bunch of it then you could contact arctic to get really specific normally what these companies use is a propylene glycol the mixture is mostly distilled water what i would do is i would buy something like ek cryo fuel or something like that and i would mix it in with distilled water at the recommended ratio i think it's normally nine parts to one and i would just fill it myself with with a basically diy liquid cooler formula so that's how i would do it if you spill too much now concerns overall so one of my concerns was you know looking at the degradation we saw the gasket and some of that oily look in the water when this was first pulled off of the defective cooler my immediate concern was okay great we're replacing the bad part but what about the rest of the particulates that might be floating around in this loop and may come back to haunt us later i suppose the answer from arctic would be well that's not enough to cause a problem or they're just not concerned about it maybe there's not that much of it whatever i asked arctic what is the effect on the warranty so if you do one of these replacements you have some warranties they only cover one type of replacement like this before you're on your own depending on what it is in this instance the repair does not affect the warranty period or the warranty use so if you do this repair and then in another two years there is some sort of problem it sounds like at that point you just contact arctic and then they will either send you a new one or uh whatever the the solution may be at that time upgrade you whatever it is so that's uh really one of my only concerns is what's left in the loop if you really wanted a saturday project and you don't mind doing some extra work then because i have experience with open loops and with refilling loops personally uh if i were doing this repair i would purge all the liquid in here just to be extra safe i don't really think it's necessary to be 100 clear here so i don't want people thinking like uh that sounds like a lot of work and i don't really feel comfortable doing that i don't think you have to do that arctic doesn't recommend it and they say they'll cover you if there's some other problem so i want to be clear about that however i would clear it purge the loop refill it with a different liquid that i've concocted with something like ek cryo fuel so then you don't have to worry about anything ever again and if you're capable of doing that you've worked on open loops easy enough you might have to worry about things you won't have to worry about that specific thing taxes you know um food finally here going forward arctic said when we were asking so now what they said they've implemented new qc procedures at the factory uh they've done the repairs on the existing units that are out there and they've replaced the gaskets permanently with a higher quality one more like what's being shipped in these repair units and also is very similar to what we looked at when we did our first tear down of a liquid freezer years ago so they somewhere in there the supply got switched and it just wasn't made properly and that's a mistake however they've done a good job at owning it finding it before we did or any other independent media and um you know that's commendable i do think arctic did the right thing here this had the potential to really be reputationally damaging to the brand and ruinous for the liquid freezer 2 series so given the options of let's sweep this under the rug and hope no one ever knows like we've seen a lot of companies do and let's just confront this head-on and say yeah we screwed this up here's how we're fixing it given those two options arctic chose the right one the total lack of clairvoyance from other companies to see that those are the options is baffling on a different topic entirely so anyway good job arctic uh much like fractal we were happy to see this response because we would have to pull our recommendations otherwise just like with the torrent where it was able to keep that recommendation because the response and you know all these companies every company is going to ship a product with a problem at some point because manufacturing is complicated with a lot of parts in the chain you don't own and so it's really how they deal with it that matters that's it for this one thanks for watching as always you can go to store.gamersaccess.net if you would like to buy one of the pc work services that i did this repair on this is a gn modmat they're available in large and medium sizes and we now have a seven year retroactive warranty just because apparently i wanted to do one more year than arctic did thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 472,654

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, arctic, arctic recall, arctic liquid freezer ii, arctic liquid freezer ii repair kit, how to repair arctic liquid freezer ii, arctic liquid freezer ii replacement, arctic liquid freezer ii plate, arctic liquid freezer gasket, best liquid coolers, warranty, arctic warranty

Id: jHdEqWpexH0

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022