My back is still hosed from yesterday, to the point where it took 10 minutes to get out of bed and another 5 to walk from one end of the house to the other. Good stuff.
My nephew texted yesterday, saying his roommate's PC was acting up. Though it was a problem with the heatsink, and that it sounded like a lawnmower at speed. Usually means bad fan, right? Sure, bring it on over - I'm not able to go anywhere. So they bring it over. Well, it didn't sound that bad; then again, we weren't taxing it that heavily and it was still pretty cool up in the shop. I did notice a couple case fans not running and figured we'd take care of that later.
Give him the a demo copy of 3dMark, to put some stress on the thing and see what we could see. Got a pretty low 3,400 score on an i5-6600K / GTX 1060 6GB combo; internets says closer to 4,000 is to be expected. Poked around a bit more and thought the fan setup on the water block's radiator looked a bit odd. On a push-pull configuration I could see the same label on each fan. Told me that one of them was facing the wrong way.
We removed the radiator and yep, the push fan was facing the wrong way. While it was half apart we decided to remove the water block from the CPU to check for a good blob of thermal paste. Looked fine - though maybe a bit too much on there - but we cleaned it off and put down a new layer just in case. Got it back together, reconnected the wiring for those two case fans that weren't running, and ran 3dMark again. Got a 4,100. Really happy with that result, though I'm not sure why our changes made that much of a difference. I mean, at no time did we hear the fans cranking up high to compensate for a hot CPU when things weren't right, and I figure they would run higher if it was throttling due to high temps. Unfortunately, I didn't consider installing HWMonitor until AFTER we made the changes so I have no idea how hot it was actually running.
Also fixed some sound problem he was having that was causing game glitches. Easy enough solutions. He took it home and tried out the system, and said it was running better than it had in a long time. Felt good to be able to make it run better without spending a dime, and doing so while I'm otherwise mostly out of commission.