A Viewer Sent Me This Broken AIO...

this here is a package from a viewer and I'll give a huge shout out to Dennis if you're watching Dennis big thanks for sending this out not only did you offer to send it but also cover shipping and on top of that you're also a patreon supporter so just very appreciative across the board in here is an AIO you'll see from who the second but it

has some problems and we're gonna do a bit of a deep dive into what specifically is going on with these units and who might be affected are you ready stay with me to get rid of that annoying Windows activation Watermark head on over to VIP SCD key purchase a Windows 10 Pro OEM key for a fraction of the price of retail just see the secure payment

method like PayPal enter your product key into your PC settings window and say goodbye to the watermark and be sure to use our offer code skgs for a so wheat discount so a bit of backstory here Dennis reached out via patreon told me to hit an AIO that was running exceptionally hot it's something that wasn't happening to begin with so we assumed there was either a

leak or the pump that failed or something had clogged the Loop he reached out to the manufacturer and they offered to replace his unit completely for free in fact they didn't even ask for his old unit back which I think is the way to handle these sorts of issues especially ones that affect many individuals across the world turns out this issue is a lot bigger than

just a single problem so this here is the lean Lee Galahad aio-240 RGB I believe even the 360 mil variants of this cooler have been affected by what is essentially a clogging issue again very similar to what we ran up with the MSI AIO Fiasco that you can check out I don't know put a video in a card somewhere maybe in the description but long story

short lean Lee is approaching this entire ordeal a bit differently than MSI is I not only want to call to attention that in this video but also want to talk about why these units in particular are failing and compare and contrast these issues with those that we saw in the dying MSI AOS as well there's a lot that's going to happen here the first thing I'm

going to do is unbox this will physically inspect it and then we will connect it to an open air test bench see if we can replicate the overheating issue Dennis was initially describing we're going to treat this kind of like a fix or Flop video Dennis was kind enough to include his mounting Gear with this AIO so that's good we don't have fans but that's not

a big deal we can just tack some of ours that we have on hand also I'm going to take a moment to show you that nope there is no leak in this system that would not be the cause of the thermal issue supposedly it is a bit dirty overall but it's not likely to affect thermals to that extent the block looks fine there aren't any you

know large gashes or anything in it now unlike the 240rs from MSI we looked at previously these Galahad alios have their pumps mounted inside the block which is pretty typical of most acetec designs there's nothing here in the radiator apart from the fins so we're going to jump straight into the first test which is going to be our control I've got a 5700g here paired with

a b550 motherboard with a compatible bios we don't need a discrete curve of course this is an APU and then we're going to throw on a wraith prism cooler which actually doesn't ship with this normally but this will allow us to establish the fact that the CPU does operate within normal temperatures at idle especially if the AIO that we're going to be dealing with here is

tests since we won't have to keep reapplying and cleaning up thermal paste all right and it's been about 15 minutes off camera here between Clips I've allowed the system to Simply idle in the Bios you can see temperatures are pretty much flatlined at around 44 degrees Celsius this graph here represents about a five minute time frame and attempts have not changed it typically only takes about

10 or 15 minutes for a air cooler like this one to thermally equalize now it's the aios turn and for this test we're going to allow it to run for around the same time maybe a bit longer it depends on how quickly the fluid in this Loop thermally equalizes it takes a bit longer usually than an air cooler I'm also going to slap on two 120

mil fans I'm not going to change anything in the Bios we're going to run the exact same fan curves as the CPU Cooler from the earlier test yes I know it's a bit of a mess but just know everything is connected if you can connect with some silent Wings four fans which I think are a bit better than the Lee and Lee ones you normally get

in the box I'm going to go ahead and power this on and see how she fares now right away I can tell you we definitely have air moving through the radiator we definitely have fluid churning in the loop so the pump is perfectly fine but time will tell as to how these temperatures fare also if you hear thunder outside sorry welcome to Florida in the summer

a few moments later and you know what it hasn't been all of two minutes yet and I'm gonna go ahead and show you the screen because well it's pretty obvious what's happening so this my friends is the current state of things 61 degrees Celsius 62 now and climbing you can see those temperatures slowly creeping up over time and I imagine this will only continue to get

worse until it hits again some sort of equal equilibrium it'll be probably around 75 80 degrees Celsius which is what we've seen with the MSI aios that have also clogged in a similar fashion so I'll let it run a bit longer I don't want to totally cook my chip that circulation is definitely being hindered by something because again we've checked the mounting itself is fine we've

checked that the pump is working we've checked that the fans are spinning the only other culprit here apart from maybe not having enough fluid in the loop is a clogged Loop and that's what I expect we'll see when we take it apart foreign [Music] the sound it is absolutely pouring outside but uh we've got a bit of a situation here so as you saw in the

little time lapse 84 degrees that is definitely no good and you can see here our CPU v-core has actually dropped significantly to accommodate for this increase in temperature in an effort to keep things as cool as possible before it's before it was like 1.4 which is frankly way too high for idle with most CPUs anyway that is confirmation enough for me that this is in fact

clogged Dennis you were right on the money my friend one more thing I want to do is look at this through our thermal cam I expect we're going to see a lot of heat built up in one particular tube yeah okay so this tube here is extremely hot and then this one feels almost room temperature it's really strange to have such a big disparity in temperature

between tubes that are frankly pretty close together and that suggests again that there's a clog somewhere in here oh yes as we thought that tube on the left is super hot up to about 120 degrees Fahrenheit whereas the tube on the right is just stone cold room temperature below evens that's just yeah it's another Telltale sign that this is clogged so we're gonna go right ahead

and uh Power this thing off I don't yeah I don't want it running any longer than it absolutely has to I think our Point has been proven Dennis's Point originally has been proven this thing's super clogged now let's go ahead and uh tear it apart shall we I think we're just going to focus on the Block side of this unit I expect that's where we'll see

most of the clogging since this is where the fins are not necessarily where the pump is you could have some clogging in the pump and we've seen that before with the MSI aios but I think in this case most of it's going to be right over the micro fins Let's see we need torx bits uh this is another why do they why this is the second

time I've seen tamper screws on the bottom of a cold plate this is ridiculous and it suggests to me at least that you don't want us going inside for some reason other companies Corsair Arctic Asus as far as I'm aware and from the aios that we have from them they don't use tamper screws usually it's just a Torx bitter too and that's fine but tamper screws

are ridiculous so I've got to use my uh fancy little iFixit split head thing here I don't know what this is but it seems to help remove tamper screws you can see the way these heads are shaped they're only designed to be tightened the moment you try to loosen one the flat head I'm assuming that's what you would use here would just slip over these little

ridges on both sides and yeah it's just a sleazy way to keep people out so to speak I'm gonna deal with the tamper screw first just because it's going to be the most difficult I don't want fluid spilling everywhere before we get this out oh I get a push down quite hard to get this thing to grip I just realized there's another temper screw underneath some

of this thermal paste okay so now I think we are ready to disassemble oh yeah oh yeah that's uh that's some Gunk right there folks basically all of this goo should not be here this is pretty gross and even after a solid year or two of use in an area like this you shouldn't have anywhere near this much Gunk bill that maybe you see a few

specs accumulate particularly in the little fin stack here which we'll look at more closely in a second but all of this is just clogging and preventing fluid from circulating which means all of your heat is going to get pent up right here in the block and it's not going to be able to circulate to the radiator where it's supposed to dissipate to atmosphere and you can

see much of that debris has already clogged the thin stack so we don't have a central Channel like we did in the earlier MSI AOS we looked at but all these micro fins are there to increase surface area so that you have more fluid contact with the heat being absorbed by this copper cold plate essentially the more of these channels you clog the less efficient the

Loop becomes because you are basically taking away channels for that fluid to travel through and it looks like almost all of them are clogged here I mean I I would be surprised if there was any channel that was totally unclogged the fluid could just travel freely this is pretty sad and would explain why temperatures skyrocketed even at idle conditions I would hate to see what this

rig would do with an AIO like this under load that is definitely PC shutting down worthy like there's no way your system would stay on with something this clogged a CPU would just throttle itself into Oblivion geez this is so bad I imagine much of this Gunk probably works its way back up into the radiator as well if we have large debris here we probably have

some in the small channels inside the radiator so it's just clogging all around none of this is good so now you know what goes on behind the scenes if you have an AIO and your pump is definitely working grab the tubes you can feel the vibration there that's the fluid moving through the loop or at least attempting to if your fans are spinning and your block

is mounted correctly you're still getting an overheating issue it's very likely a clogged Loop and if it's happening within a year or two of use that is definitely premature in something your manufacturer should address globally if it is a global issue but here is where I have a bone to pick with Langley and look I'll be blunt we've been paid by Lee and Lee in the

past for certain projects and things I'm a big fan of their cases generally speaking I like some of their power supplies I've never worked with Galahad AOS before not directly that I can recall maybe in a fix or Flop video or something along those lines but the issue I have is how long it took Lee and Lee to make a public statement regarding these clogging loops

if you go back a year year and a half on sites like Reddit users were reporting extremely high CPU temperatures particularly at idle with their Galahad 240 and 360 ml aios I think the right thing to do here would be to issue a public statement after say a hundred or heck maybe even a thousand users publicly Express their discontent with a product around a particular reason

that being overheating which a 240 or 360 mil should never do to a consumer grade chip unless the user is doing something in the overclocking department or just doesn't know what they're doing and you know changing crazy bios settings those are one-offs and I'm sure that happens from time to time but when hundreds or thousands of people are making the same statements expressing the same concerns

over the same issue that I think warrants some sort of public statement and the fact that it took over a year from what I can gather for lean Lee to make one that's the issue I have here's their statement there have been concerns over a drop in heat dissipation performance from earlier gal had AIO units after usage of one to two years we were made aware

of this issue in 2022 q1 see there that's again over a year if you were aware of this issue over a year ago why did you leave so many folks hanging this is an important and frankly fairly serious issue you're just leaving folks in the dark for this long who knows how many how many have been affected by them and the fact that Dennis one of

our few patreons at this point patreon supporters reached out to me with his unit I mean that tells me that there's probably a good chance several thousand were affected here if not tens of thousands depending on how many they sold that's not a small number and again you're leaving a lot of folks hanging questioning themselves questioning their rigs part swapping doing whatever they feel like they

have to do because the last thing they expect is for their brand new AIO to clog like this the issue is that some of the units went through a second time soldering flux repair for the radiator and QC missed that the residue might corrode with coolant over time resulting in Failure possibility this is somewhat broken English but again this is probably being translated from a simplified

or I don't know traditional Chinese the supplier had fixed the manufacturing process in 2021 October to make sure no corrosion occurred within coolant and no flux residue within radiator they only also immediately enforced a zero tolerance for second time soldering of the radiator and required a thorough QC process for each batch of coolant used in Galahad therefore the Galahad units produced after 2022 q1 should not

have these issues now here's where I want to compare and contrast their response now despite it being much later than I think it it should have been with what MSI has done for frankly a very similar issue at this point this looks pretty much spot on with what the MSI Loops have gone through so since 2022 q1 we have also internally prioritized the RMA process for

Galahad AIO for users affected any customer that reports a decline in heat dissipation performance were sent a replacement unit by doing so we make sure users that are affected or taken care of as fast as possible we will continue to follow this policy until every affected user is taken care of they go on to mention eligible serial numbers which I know I showed earlier in the

video just in case yours Falls before this number that you see on screen it's possible your AIO is already clogged or clogging you can check your idle and load temperatures to verify and even if your temps aren't super hot I would still recommend being proactive they are to their credit stating that they will continue this Advanced RMA this quick replacement policy until every affected user is

taken care of but again that's just that's what's written here so you've got to really put that to the test long term and I'd rather have a replacement now than wait until temps are just skyrocketing and my rig is shutting down randomly because of that thermal load that's not being taken care of by a loop like this so that's the difference between what Lee and Lee's

doing and what MSI has done and is still doing based on the emails I'm still getting to this day MSI said hey if you're in the US or Canada and you have an affected serial number we'll send you a replacement and then you can send us your old unit back after you receive your replacement that means that we were talking minimal downtime maybe an hour or

two whatever it takes time wise to replace the AIO itself because you'll have the replacement already on hand before you swap your old one out that's it right very just quick and just a nice solution all around I was happy that they did this I was not happy with the fact that they limited this Advanced RMA to just USA and Canada I know I've already beat

this dead horse but just you know know that that's what I'm really disappointed with on MSI side Lee and Lee as far as I'm aware based on what I'm reading here is not even requiring that you send your old unit back so they're just again verifying that you have an effective unit maybe based on your serial number uh and they're sending you a replacement no questions

asked this old unit was not asked for back by Liam Lane uh Dennis said that he was sent to replacement and that's it they didn't ask for this that's why we had it because it wasn't sent back to their headquarters so that's nice I think that's also just a frankly better quicker solution uh for every affected individual it's it's a shame that not everyone handles things

the way we'd like them to in our heads no company is is without sin um you'll never find one that way it's they're all going to have issues what sets certain companies apart from others is how quickly they address the issues and what they actually do to remedy the issues lean Lee did it right by providing Replacements free of charge really no questions asked apart from

proving that you purchased an older one but they did take a very long time to make the statement as far as I'm aware they were still replacing units prior to this announcement but the fact that it took them this long to make a public statement is what I think is disappointing here and and this goes off the back of what we had already discovered with the

MSI AO issue right I mean I I still to this day believe that that first fix or Flop video where we found the clogging AIO was at least in part what led to the advanced Army that the recall even though they didn't call it a recall and we pushed them hard on it we pushed them as far as we could until essentially we hit a wall

with HQ in Taiwan they wouldn't do any more for us Beyond Advanced rmas for U.S and Canadian residents it's a bit of a shame that they're singling out several regions around the world and kind of just leaving affected users up to chance if it's if the retailer is not going to take care of you and your local MSI Branch isn't going to take care of you

you're screwed whereas Lee and Lee saying it doesn't matter where you live they they made no Regional stipulations at all if you're affected we'll send you a replacement unit no questions asked so good guys lean leave there but you should have been faster about the public statement think about all the folks that were affected and had no clue that their brand new AIO was the issue

that's not right for them so uh in the future be more proactive about that and and we have other companies that have been um I Know Arctic was with their issue I think there was a leak somewhere around the gasket with a tube connected to the block if I recall correctly uh fractal design had an issue they figured out very quickly uh what the issue was

and offered a solution almost as quickly as the AIO was launched if I recall so that's how to handle it in a timely manner and this is how to handle it from a replacement standpoint just send a send a replacement unit no questions asked it was our screw up right and we manufactured these are bad we want you to still trust our products here's a replacement

we're sure that it's not going to have the clogging issue anymore by the way if your serial number comes after the ones we showed earlier on screen and you are still having overheating issues let us know send us an email I'd like to investigate again we have some experience already with this from competing Brands so it'd be cool to see uh wouldn't be not cool but

it'd be interesting to see how it all pans out in the long run if in fact we can hold them true to uh what they're saying here in the article with that I'm going to go ahead and end it I want to thank Dennis again for sending this one out if you guys found this interesting give the video a thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't

already let me know what you think about aio's the fact that we've had so many issues with clogging recently and it feels like it's all happening all at once I don't know it's definitely not restoring any faith in aios for me at least I'll say that sorry about that my name is Greg thanks for learning with me [Applause] foreign