Rant: my AIO pump died mid-render and I almost blamed the wrong part

Was finishing a 3 hour Blender render at 2 am when temps spiked to 95c and the PC shut off, so I immediately ordered a new CPU cooler. Turns out the pump was making a grinding noise for weeks and my custom fan curve was masking it, so now I check pump RPM in BIOS before touching anything else. Anyone else had a silent failure that looked like a different component?

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the_sarah23d ago

Used to be the first thing I'd blame was the CPU or the motherboard whenever temps went crazy. Then my old loop did the exact same thing, grinding pump for a month while the fans spun up to compensate and made everything look normal. Now I keep a hardware monitor open on my second screen during renders and check the pump header first. Makes me wonder how many dead GPUs got RMA'd that were actually just a dying AIO.