Gotta work on PC tomorrow. Need advice.

Lot to unpack here.

To start, no, you have very little reason to be concerned about CPU damage. That’s what thermal throttling is for.

As for your temps, is this idle or under load? Are you actually thermal throttling or just running hot? Those chips are pretty well known for being able to fry an egg.

Assuming we are actually throttling, you have a handful of possible points of failure:

1. Incorrect pressure on the cpu bracket
2. Clogged cold plate
3. Clogged radiator
4. Pump malfunction
5. Radiator fans malfunction
6. Water level too low (which you’ve already checked)

With all of that said, if you’re just replacing the cooler, none of that really matters, but figured I would lay it out regardless.

As for your PSU, I’m a bit surprised at the question as most coolers simply plug into the motherboard, but if for some reason you need SATA power, you should be fine regardless. You shouldn’t be dealing with any proprietary connectors, though I suppose stranger things have happened.

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Oh psu question was unrelated to the cooling. Just figured if i had the machine apart i may as well swap out to 1200 or 1300 and didnt want to create a bigger mess than im trying to fix.

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Ah, got ya.

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I googled my PSU, helios p2-1000g. It’s modular but the brand isnt sold locally. With it being modular, the plugs should fit into a corsair, right?

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Unfortunately, probably not. Not only can cables vary between brands, they can also vary within them. Last I looked (which admittedly was about five years ago), I want to say Corsair alone had three different cable SKUs. As a general rule, you want to use the cables that come with a given PSU unless 1. You have a really good reason not to, like if you have an expensive set of custom cables and 2. You really know what you’re looking at and have confirmed that the cables are compatible.

If you’re just trying to avoid having to run new cables, the juice likely isn’t worth the squeeze.

The radiator itself has 12 holding it in

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The radiator itself has 12 holding it in

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That’s fair; it’s been a minute since I had to remove mine

Oof, yeah, unless you have a local microcenter, anything at all exotic should be ordered online

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My money is on it being a pump issue. Nothing's actually flowing through the rad.

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I didn’t go through any of the troubleshooting steps because he was already planning to replace it (and there wasn’t much else he could do, otherwise), but my money was on pump. Easy to confirm, too, as your pump rpm is tracked by your system just like fan rpm. If it’s at 0, you’ve got a problem.