[SOLVED] AIO cooler pump is making weird noise. How do I resolve this?

[devilborne]

I bought this Cooler Master ML120L RGB AIO cooler about a week ago. It was working fine at the beginning. But yesterday while gaming it started making this weird noise. First I thought it was the fan. And thought it had come loose or something. But I ad to open the side of CPU and realized it is the pump making these weird azz noise. It is very annoying and audible even on quiet mode. It sounds like an old ceiling fan which has something wrong with it's bearings.

Please help, I can't stand this racket anymore.

 

[Ralston18]

Bearings or perhaps cavitation.

How are the temperatures?

Do you have the User Guide/Manual?

Doublecheck your installation and work through any troubleshooting procedures within the manual.

 

[devilborne]

Bearings or perhaps cavitation.

How are the temperatures?

Do you have the User Guide/Manual?

Doublecheck your installation and work through any troubleshooting procedures within the manual.

I don't know about bearings or cavitation, I'll research about it.

The temperatures are fine. I read somewhere that it's sometimes due to air bubbles. but how they got there, I don't know as this is supposed to be closed loop. Also, they said for bubbles you have to lie it down to the side and tap the pipes to release the bubbles. I tried that, made no difference still makes noise.

I have the User Guide/Manual. It contains bare minimum information about installation procedure and that's all. I'll try to re-do the installation but I'm not hopeful. As I said, it's barely a week old, if the problem persists any longer, I'm going to send it back to amazon and request replacement. I have that option apart from Cooler Master Customer Service (which is near to none in India).

I just thought anyone knew about how to do it home so that I didn't had to do this hassle of requesting replacement.

 

[rubix_1011]

Much depends on the actual noise being made ( I can only make assumptions that my experiences of the 'sounds like' noises are similar to yours ).

It likely is air and cavitation - the noise made by the pump impeller when air is being introduced into the coolant as it runs. The same thing that causes noises by boat propellers under the water.

Nearly all AIOs have air in them, that's a simple fact we have to account for. They are never filled 100% to capacity without air. If a liquid cooler makes any sort of sloshing sound when you shake it, then it has air. Something that is filled completely with liquid has no ability to 'slosh' and displace air, and therefore would not make noise.

A few things can be attempted - laying the PC down on the side, or tilting it while tapping on the pump unit and the tubing. Also, depending on the tube orientation leaving the pump and the tube orientation on the radiator and how it is mounted in the case, this might take longer or shorter amounts of time.

Long story short - liquid cooling pumps do not like to pump air. They are not good at it and when a complete airlock occurs, temps can spike and continue to rise until the air blockage is removed. Air bubbles, even small ones, can cause noise when the impeller is moving air+coolant and this is likely what you are hearing...sometimes sounds like a garbage disposal when the sink is full of water, or kind of a gurgling/growling sound.

 

[devilborne]

Hey guys, early in the morning I decided to see if I make the problem go away by re-installation. I laid the Case on it's side and removed the tampered glass side cover. And just for surety I connected the power cord and tried turning it on again and as expected it made that awful noise. I shut it off and before I could disconnect the power cord from PSU, I got a call and spend around 30 minutes on that. And when I came back I accidentally turned the thing on again and it was eerily quiet. I was shocked and I logged into my account and even put it on full speed mode and it was still quiet (I mean it made some noise but very smooth and not that stupid old ceiling fan noise). And temp held fine at 34°C.

TLDR:
I think it might have been the air bubbles and laying it down on the side for longer time helped.

Now it is very quiet. I can barely hear it at all on standard mode (which is above quiet mode).

Thank you for the replies. I appreciate the help.

 

[SuperSid]

Much depends on the actual noise being made ( I can only make assumptions that my experiences of the 'sounds like' noises are similar to yours ).

It likely is air and cavitation - the noise made by the pump impeller when air is being introduced into the coolant as it runs. The same thing that causes noises by boat propellers under the water.

Nearly all AIOs have air in them, that's a simple fact we have to account for. They are never filled 100% to capacity without air. If a liquid cooler makes any sort of sloshing sound when you shake it, then it has air. Something that is filled completely with liquid has no ability to 'slosh' and displace air, and therefore would not make noise.

A few things can be attempted - laying the PC down on the side, or tilting it while tapping on the pump unit and the tubing. Also, depending on the tube orientation leaving the pump and the tube orientation on the radiator and how it is mounted in the case, this might take longer or shorter amounts of time.

Long story short - liquid cooling pumps do not like to pump air. They are not good at it and when a complete airlock occurs, temps can spike and continue to rise until the air blockage is removed. Air bubbles, even small ones, can cause noise when the impeller is moving air+coolant and this is likely what you are hearing...sometimes sounds like a garbage disposal when the sink is full of water, or kind of a gurgling/growling sound.

I registered just to upvote this. I unplugged my tower and used dust-off to blow off dusts, and then I guess I was not careful in handling the tower, so my AIO cooling system probably shook around and created small bubbles of air inside, making that weird swooshy noise.

Everything started to slow down after 1-2min of windows loaded, and when I tried to play the usual games, the FPS dropped dratically. Then I opened HWMonitor, the CPU temperature had gone up to dangerous degrees of 90-100 degree celcius. I immediately shut down the computer and looked up online to see what I can try. I took out the cooling system, cleaned out the thermal paste, re-applied, rebooted in bios, and it still stayed at 90 degrees in BIOS.

After asking a friend about it he referred me to this post. Laying on its side for about 30 min. as well as tapping the tubes and the pump unit, completely fixed it. After starting up, it made some air noise at first, but it quieted down after a few seconds. The temperature now reads 48-50 degrees on idle, which is normal for my i7-7700K, instead of previously 90 degrees. Thanks!!