Ouch, just venting

B

bigbadgreen

Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2003
Messages
680
So it finally happened. Maybe I was a bit cocky, maybe I should have seen it coming. I've been watercooling for a couple of years now, built multiple systems with no problem. Well I just fried my good computer. One slow leak that appeared one week after I installed it during the middle of the night. I had leak tested and not changed a thing, it ran fine for a week, not even a hint of leaking, no drops, no errant condensation.

It took out my MSI K8T-Neo2, 6800GT, audigy 2 ZS, both 512MB sticks of kingston
hyper x DDR500. I guess live and learn and use non-conductive fluid next time. Just needing to vent.
 
why did you not use none conductive water anyways? none conductive water helps with mineral build ups in the system aswell. helps keep everything open and free flowing..
 
arisythila said:
why did you not use none conductive water anyways? none conductive water helps with mineral build ups in the system aswell. helps keep everything open and free flowing..
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There is no such thing as non-conductive water. I beleive he was referring to the non-condutive solutions out there, sold by DangerDen and others. MCT-40, MCT-5, and FluidXP.
 
Pentosin is anti-freeze, use it the same as you would use antifreeze, as an additive to distilled water. And yes, distilled water + 5-10% antifreeze is one of the best coolants you can use.

About the leak, that sucks, are you sure that all of the components are trashed? Usually you only lose one or two things. I would try to test the components in known working systems. About the only failure I have seen where everything was trashed was DFI_Daishi's disaster.
 
arisythila said:
I donno, i use Koolance liquid, Its not suppose to conduct.
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I think the Koolance coolant IS conductive. It is not advertised as conductive and it says that it is basically an additive premixed with distilled water...hints of conductivity to me.
 
well I havn't tested anything but here's what I know. I will test I guess just to see. going from a 6800GT to a radeon 8500LE sucks bad, and a 3000+ A64 to a 1900+XP sucks bad as well.


I can see for sure lots of white residue on the vid card, on the pins where the electricity passed. the monitor wouldn't come on, like it was turned off when it happened. also the mobo wouldn't even respond. It wouldn't boot after drying out. the sound cArd also has the white residue, I have a generic 5.1 surround card which isn't that bad suprisingly, still sucks though because it isn't an audigy 2 ZS. I know for a fact that one stick of RAM is toast, and I could run the other stick but I'd rather go with my 1GB (2x512) kingston DDR333 that hits timings of 2-3-3-6.

I'm pretty sure that most of the parts are toast. I have no way of testing the cpu, although everything looks good with it and no water was near it, and all optical drives sony DVD-RW, and sony cd-rom, and both of my HDD's are fine and I'm using them right now. the antec 430true watt is going strong as well.

I'm just pretty pissed about the vid card, if all I needed was to replace one 512 MB stick of ram and a mobo that would be cool, I'd even run only 512MB until i could save up for the second stick, but throw in a $250 vid card and it's doubles in price.

well here's to good luck testing.
 
this is not the thread I want to be reading while just assymbling the parts for my 1st water cooling project... doh! and this being the reason I have stayed away from it for so long... d00d.. if I see even a drop come out during my leak test I am going to freak!!! :eek:

Man - if I had some extra hardware to give you I would... anyways. Maybe you can get lucky in the BuySellTrade forums? good luck...
 
ok back from some quick tests, one stick of the ram is toast, only recognized one stick, and a very quick memtest86 and the working stick seems to be ok.

the sound card is wasted, but on the bright side the creative drives have given me nothing but headaches. How a sound card driver could interfer with bios temp reporting and system monitoring is beyond me, but it did and I'm %100 that those drivers were the problem.

Now onto the video card, oh what to say about this thing that has tormented me so...
I just re-installed this thing and it booted up just fine, picture on the screen, it was crystal clear. I left for about 30 seconds I'm guessing time for it to totally warm up and all I see is a screen full of colors, major artifacts if you want to label them something. No picture just lines of blinking colors. I restart, and now it wouln't even show the post screen. I switch molex strings and gave it a dedicated connector of power. and all I get is lines of color. I'm pretty sure it's toast.

talk about a roller-coaster though. when I first saw it boot up into a nice clear screen my heart jumped, the 30 seconds I left was actually to grab the phone to call a friend of mine about it, by the time I got back it was dead.

If anybody knows any tricks or something I can try, maybe underclocking etc... I'm willing to give it a shot, trust me a 4x radeon 8500LE is really killing me. Looks like I'll be searching the for sale and trade forum.


Just to let everyone know I was running a 70/30 mix of distilled and antifreeze.
 
wow - well - I would wait a bit longer before putting power on the mobo or video card... clean them with non-conductive electrical component cleaner, then blow them off, then remove the video card sinks clean, re-apply thermal goop, let them both dry more for a couple of days and give it another go.. but you really need to get the mobo and video card dry out well before powering them up again... like days of drying...
 
it has been a couple of days since it happened. I didn't clean them with an electrical component cleaner, I used %99 isopropyl alcohol, and a very soft toothbrush being very gentle. I also removed the heatsinks and cleaned in there as well. I'm pretty much settling into the idea of getting a different card and mobo.

I'll be testing out a barebones setup with the mobo later this week. I'm pretty sure it's toast though as it woudn't post after 2 days of drying. I guess we'll see.
 
wow - ok then - sounds like you did all the right stuff.... Well, good luck with that.... if I see any super great deals on video cards I will PM you.
 
revenant said:
yeah, even DI water conducts, just not as much as water with tons of metals and crap in it. heh...

so, is Pentosin a good non-conductive coolant?
http://www.drivewire.com/audiparts/catalog/audi200oilandfluid.html
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It may conduct, but VERY little. The resistivity of deionized water (I assume you meant deionized and not distilled?) is around 18.2 megaohms.

In other words, chances are a leak on a circuit board will have very little impact since the resistivity is so high. Current will want to travel along the original path.

You do need to take into account, though, that there are many foreign substances in a loop, even if it is cleaned out well. This undoubtably increases the conductivity of the water, especially if you add things such as antifreeze.

I personally use 90% distilled and 10% antifreeze. Sure, it might conduct, but I don't think it conducts very well. I should take out a multimeter and check it out sometime...

In the end, you just need to make sure everything is clamped tight. Even non-conductive fluid such as fluidxp probably conducts once foreign substances are introduced into a loop (I may be wrong here).

Sorry to hear about your equipment being ruined :(.
 
to put things in perspective...

(MicroSiemens refer to the electrical conductiity of a liquid, it can be described as the amount of total dissolved salts (TDS), or the total amount of dissolved ions in the liquid... thus higher is more conductive)

The Atlantic Ocean has an EC (electrical conductivity) of 43,000 MicroSiemens/cm.

FluidXPs website states FluidXP as having a conductivity of 76 MicroSiemens/cm.

The Divide lake is 10 MicroSiemens/cm.

Distilled water is typically 0.3 MicroSiemens/cm. Because distilled water is a liquid covalent compound, in practice it does not conduct electricity.

For reference:
Ultra-Pure water is 0.1 - 0.0555 MicroSiemens/cm.
Pure water is 1.0 - 0.1 MicroSiemens/cm
Purified water is 1 - 50 MicroSiemens/cm

Yes Distilled water is conductive... but it is so low that it's considered negligible. The crucial point is... it's still less conductive than FluidXP.

Get your facts correct before spouting rubbish

Edit: p.s. nowhere on FluidXPs site does it say it's less conductive than distilled water... that's probably because they know it isn't. They only say it's less conductive than other leading products on the market i.e. Koolance fluid,MCP-T etc...
 
J-Pepper said:
to put things in perspective...

(MicroSiemens refer to the electrical conductiity of a liquid, it can be described as the amount of total dissolved salts (TDS), or the total amount of dissolved ions in the liquid... thus higher is more conductive)

The Atlantic Ocean has an EC (electrical conductivity) of 43,000 MicroSiemens/cm.

FluidXPs website states FluidXP as having a conductivity of 76 MicroSiemens/cm.

The Divide lake is 10 MicroSiemens/cm.

Distilled water is typically 0.3 MicroSiemens/cm. Because distilled water is a liquid covalent compound, in practice it does not conduct electricity.

For reference:
Ultra-Pure water is 0.1 - 0.0555 MicroSiemens/cm.
Pure water is 1.0 - 0.1 MicroSiemens/cm
Purified water is 1 - 50 MicroSiemens/cm

Yes Distilled water is conductive... but it is so low that it's considered negligible. The crucial point is... it's still less conductive than FluidXP.

Get your facts correct before spouting rubbish

Edit: p.s. nowhere on FluidXPs site does it say it's less conductive than distilled water... that's probably because they know it isn't. They only say it's less conductive than other leading products on the market i.e. Koolance fluid,MCP-T etc...
Click to expand...


The one thing you are forgetting is just how quickly distilled water picks up ions and becomes much MORE conductive than products like FluidXP. Distilled/Deionized water WANTS (chemically) to be ionized, it is not natural for it to be pure. It will grab ions from anywhere it can, not to mention be corrosive to the metals in your loop. So long as you dont use the distilled water in your loop...then yes it is not conductive. The second you use it though it becomes quite conductive.

Non-conductive products stay non-conductive a lot longer than distilled/deionized water which is what makes them attractive. They can last I think 6 months before they need to be replaced.


So please people, stop talking about distilled water as if it were non-conductive. Yes we all know that in theory it is non-conductive. However in practice, and what we all care about in our loops, it IS conductive because it does not stay distilled or deionized for long.
 
d00d... that guy said seimens.. heh heh... cool..
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yeah by DI I meant deionized. I just remember the speech about it and other conductive/non-conductive fluids in chem lab... and physics... DI is barely conductive now that I recall that info fully... they made a huge point about it, and the fact that it's all the crap in regular drinking H2O which makes is conductive. and obviously, sea water... acohol would be a nice coolant... if it's boiling point (vapor pressure?) was not so low...huh
 
Erasmus354 said:
The one thing you are forgetting is just how quickly distilled water picks up ions and becomes much MORE conductive than products like FluidXP. Distilled/Deionized water WANTS (chemically) to be ionized, it is not natural for it to be pure. It will grab ions from anywhere it can, not to mention be corrosive to the metals in your loop. So long as you dont use the distilled water in your loop...then yes it is not conductive. The second you use it though it becomes quite conductive.

Non-conductive products stay non-conductive a lot longer than distilled/deionized water which is what makes them attractive. They can last I think 6 months before they need to be replaced.


So please people, stop talking about distilled water as if it were non-conductive. Yes we all know that in theory it is non-conductive. However in practice, and what we all care about in our loops, it IS conductive because it does not stay distilled or deionized for long.
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QFT. This is basically what I was getting at, but you did a much better job.

What I would like to know, however, is how conductive distilled or deionized water is in a coolant loop when, say 10% antifreeze and a couple drops of UV liquid are introduced (along with the other foreign substances/metal bits in a loop).

It would be interesting to find out :p.
 
Erasmus354 said:
The one thing you are forgetting is just how quickly distilled water picks up ions and becomes much MORE conductive than products like FluidXP. Distilled/Deionized water WANTS (chemically) to be ionized, it is not natural for it to be pure. It will grab ions from anywhere it can, not to mention be corrosive to the metals in your loop. So long as you dont use the distilled water in your loop...then yes it is not conductive. The second you use it though it becomes quite conductive.

Non-conductive products stay non-conductive a lot longer than distilled/deionized water which is what makes them attractive. They can last I think 6 months before they need to be replaced.


So please people, stop talking about distilled water as if it were non-conductive. Yes we all know that in theory it is non-conductive. However in practice, and what we all care about in our loops, it IS conductive because it does not stay distilled or deionized for long.
Click to expand...

Exactly what i was about to say. Erasmus354

The non conductiveness of distilled water holds true while its in its nice sealed bottle. BUT the instant that you open it it starts even pulling Ions out of the air.(actually have tested this and poured some into a plastic glass and it became more conductive as it sat..To a certain point of course) It really gets after it when you put it in contact with all the metal parts in a cooling loop. Oh and dont forget about putting any additives! that just makes conductivity go up to!!
 
wow... I guess that's why DI or distilled would be good with like an aluminum rad... al+++ very eager to get electrons... so neither of them will donate easily? er... I think I am confusing ionization with oxidation here.. *sigh*
 
bigbadgreen said:
it has been a couple of days since it happened. I didn't clean them with an electrical component cleaner, I used %99 isopropyl alcohol, and a very soft toothbrush being very gentle. I also removed the heatsinks and cleaned in there as well. I'm pretty much settling into the idea of getting a different card and mobo.

I'll be testing out a barebones setup with the mobo later this week. I'm pretty sure it's toast though as it woudn't post after 2 days of drying. I guess we'll see.
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, what will you do with the fried video card?
 
ok just a follow up. The card has actually improved in performance. I have since cleaned it again, really well, again. Now it'll run fine... Until I install drivers. With no driver, well ATI drivers because of the old radeon 8500 I'm using, it shows a crystal clear screen. I know those are just very basic drivers. when I install nvidia drivers it gets halfway through the install and then a screen full of artifacts.

I really had no plans for the card other than a trophy of sorts. If you want it, we may be able to make a deal. I'm interested in what somebody would do, other than art. Aside from fraud...
 
bigbadgreen said:
ok just a follow up. The card has actually improved in performance. I have since cleaned it again, really well, again. Now it'll run fine... Until I install drivers. With no driver, well ATI drivers because of the old radeon 8500 I'm using, it shows a crystal clear screen. I know those are just very basic drivers. when I install nvidia drivers it gets halfway through the install and then a screen full of artifacts.

I really had no plans for the card other than a trophy of sorts. If you want it, we may be able to make a deal. I'm interested in what somebody would do, other than art. Aside from fraud...
Click to expand...

PMed you.
 
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