Today I was testing the RAM of a friend in my PC and since I had it opened up anyway, I thought I could renew my thermal paste as well. When removing the block from the CPU, I saw this:
To me, this looks like corrosion. The AiO is roughly 6 years old, so it’s nearing its end of life anyway, but is that normal? Should I still use this?
Thanks for any advice.
Doesn’t look like corrosion, since that would likely be a blue/green color from the copper (you can see a little of that oxidation in the third pic), but it probably is a buildup of minerals as the main plate has slowly leaked fluid out the sides.
Should you use it?
It’s leaking fluid. Unless you know for a fact it’s using some kind of non-conductive fluid, it’s a matter of when it leaks onto something more important, not if—probably your GPU, if not your CPU.