Dual-Opteron liquid cooling leaking
I'm not really having that much luck with the liquid cooling system of my main workstation. Today, one of the CPU coolers (dual socket 940 board) started leaking. Unfortunately it was the cooler of the CPU sitting above the AGP and PCI-X slots, spilling coolant on th Radeon 9200 and E1000 cards.
Coincidentally all that happened while I was having a bath, but that just as a side-note.
Now the box still boots up and is accessible from the network. Just no graphics output. Pretty bad for what I use as a dual-head compile and development workstation. So far it looks like at least that AGP card has died. I already bought a used one on eBay (you can't get any Radeon 9200 these days, and that's the really last 'free' graphics chip out there [apart from Intel on-board stuff]...). It could also be the AGP socket or something completely different. I don't have any spare AGP cards, just PCI... 5V PCI that don't fit in the 3.3V-only PCI-X slots, so I couldn't test it with a different card right now.
Now since this is the second time I'm having quite big trouble with that liquid cooling system, this is a good time to re-think whether it was that good an idea. I still think it was. I mean, for the better part of two years, this system has been running day and night, without any problems. In fact it is so quiet that I now regard my Quad G5 (unloaded, all fans at minimum) as extremely loud. And it is that quiescence which I love so much, and it is even worth at least those two times I've now had problems.