By now, most of you should know I'm a big fan of water cooling. During yesterday night at 2am, when I watched 'Windtalkers' on secondary PC, I heard some weird water splashing sound. At first I thought it was from the movie! It sounded more and more suspicious. Then I looked at my PC! OMG! I was in total shock! My water cooler has basically dried out, water was everywhere! HDD, PSU, and my precious R9500!!! Fortunately the top of the HDD and PSU were splashed with water, and it didn't leak into the internals. I quickly dried them with tissue. When I look at the R9500, I was shaking my head. The whole back of the card was filled with water! I did wipe with tissue, and using another slice, and the card was still wet! Imagine the amount of water! After drying the surface, I quickly tested the card, and it didn't work unsurprisingly. I didn't gave up hope, because this isn't the first time water leaked while the PC was running. I didn't use hairdryer because it was in middle of the night. Not too nice to wake the whole family up. At first no beep from motherboard. So motherboard was affected too. Then about 15mins later, the motherboard started giving 'no video' error beep. So I know R9500 was the culprit. So I removed the card from the motherboard and dry it properly with tissue. No visible water traces on the PCB. But the water could trapped in the components, especially under the BGA RAMs, and those tiny components. After drying, I gave another try, same thing, 'no video' error beep. But I kept trying by reseting the PC. Keep getting the same error. But I noticed something, the card was becoming warm to touch, so I knew the card wasn't dead yet. I could feel the water coming out from those components, especially around the back of the core and the RAMs. I wiped them with tissue. Hoping that it will work again. But after 40mins, the card still refused to work. I still haven't give up, but my morale was extremely low, knowing that a moddable R9500 is virtually impossible to replace. At this moment, I was messaging Donovan on ICQ using the secondary PC, telling him what happened. He was actually laughing! Well, he's an experienced water cooling guy. Giving me hope by saying, 'the card is in coma state, and it will work again'. Water leakage has happened to me numerous times, and nothing was damaged before. All the components like CPU, motherboard, graphics card worked fine after drying. So I knew that at least 75% of chances that it will work again. Even then, I was still worried, because R9500 is not cheap, and I can't afford to replace it, and wouldn't want to downgrade to R9600! Since I was watching Windtalkers half way, I actually continued watching, while leaving the card outside the system to dry. After watching the rather sad movie (war movies seldom have happy ending )I gave the R9500 another try, finally the monitor switched on, motherboard giving the normal beep! I prayed and thanked god!!! It was around 4am. I was rather tired, so I quickly refill the water, and make sure it won't leak again. So I started up my PC, run all the usual programs in the background, and quickly jumped to bed and slept in peace. Phew! What a horrible experience. Conclusion, water is not electronic's best friend, but they are not the worst enemy! Like I said earlier, this isn't the first time water leaked on my system, and I've never damaged anything! Everything worked fine after the 'coma' state! So I will still continue using water cooling despite all these horrible experiences. Note that all water leakage was due to user error, not components failure. So water cooling is very safe, if you follow instructions properly. Sorry, no pictures because I was panicking!
Oh, I forgot to tell why it leaked! I was filling up water using a mineral water bottle with 2 tubes into the bottle. Because the tube was rather stiff, the bottle will not stand straight. So the bottle was tilted a little sideways with very little water in it so even if the bottle lay down sideways, the water will not spill. But surprisingly, for no reason, one of the tube (outlet) came off the bottle, spraying the water everywhere since it was the outlet tube! Ok, so it's not really water leakage, but you get the idea.
Err...the water bottle was lying there for a few weeks already, only yesterday the tube suddenly felt that being inside the bottle was boring... And decided to come out!
heeeeiiiiiiiiii.........how come ur pc still running when water enter ur computer??????? ........in movies......when water touch the computer......the computer quickly SHORT.....got a lot of sparks......then FIRE........
TB .. why dont you do an experiment ?? LOL .. evn my friends nokia was soaked in water.. no fire also .. LOL .. after dying it propoerly ok liau
Sparks? I don't think low voltage devices will create sparks like that, unless the water goes into the PSU...
anyway. just to add... water is no longer electronic worst enemy. I've seen/read reports that talks about electronic gears that literally get soaked into water and still work once all the water dries up. yeah. I've read one where the same camera as mine got soaked into the icy cold lake water and after 2 days of leaving to dry.. it continued to work as usual.. 8)
