#3: A big oily surprise

The final fourteen cards for the family arrived, and ten of them are soaked.

Oct 27, 2022

At last, the final fourteen Xeon Phis have arrived. I’ll spare you photos of the first four, as they are basically identical to the first two cards we unboxed two weeks ago, and because we have a surprise: oil!

Those heatsink shrouds are looking slick in the sun. Let’s fix that.

Initially I tried to swab it off, and soon found this futile because there was simply no way I was going to get a thorough clean inside those heatsink fins by hand, even with a complete disassembly.

These cards are about to be slung like baby Achilles!

After a minute of outside-the-box thinking, I quickly realised the easiest thing to do is what was done to them with oil, but with alcohol – specifically, isopropyl 70%.

After all of the alcohol evaporated it left some considerable water volume behind. That’s okay, none of these things were powered and I was careful not to short them! But it will mean I need to sundry them for a day or two depending on how sunny and warm it gets here in the Piedmont autumn. We’ll take a look at that next time. 😉

Some bubbles of oil that collected at the top. This is why we dipped ‘em!

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