Wet rig..

[FractiousPerson]

I have a question...

But before the question, here's some background..

Hi all, here's a quick pic of my rig..



CPU: Intel i7 5930k Over Clocked to 4.4GHz. Water cooled.
GPU: 2x GTX680 in SLI.
RAM: 32GB Avexir DDR4 2400MHz.
MB: Asus Rampage V Extreme. (SCUBA version?)

Notice the red coolant, keeping the ROG colour scheme...

Anyway, that's before the above mentioned red coolant leaked ALL over my brand new Gaming Rig! I was flying about in Elite Dangerous, I had just jumped into a new system when everything froze/crashed, I glanced up at my rig and could see coolant sprayed on the inside of the window! ARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!! I leaped out of my chair, moved to the back of the rig, and pulled the power cable. I mean I nearly yanked the rubber off it, that's how fast I was moving!!

I took the side off the case, and looked inside. There was coolant everywhere. I knew that my rig (which I only built two weeks ago!) was totally fried. There was coolant on the left hand bank of RAM, all down the board, I saw a run of coolant down by the side of the CPU, and coolant all over the top of my topmost graphics card. And coolant was still coming out of the rear radiator barb. The tube had slipped off the radiator!

Deep depression settled over me as I took all the components off the board. I also got a phone call that my day off was cancelled and I was working the next day. No time to do a full teardown. I cleaned off the components as best I could and left them on the side to dry out.

I went to work, and all I could think of was totaling up the cost of the damage.

Came back home yesterday afternoon after two days of work, and had a good look at all my components. All looked nice and dry. "What have I got to lose?" I thought. I checked each stick of RAM and graphics card for any more liquid, saw that there wasn't any and just bunged them back in. I took a deep breath and hit the power switch. Just as I pressed the power switch, one of my dogs wanted some attention, so I gave her a scratch behind the ears and the next thing I knew, the Windows logon music was playing! Everything was working!

EVERYTHING WAS WORKING!

All 32GB of RAM, Both graphics cards, and of course the Asus Rampage Extreme board!

I have of course tightened all the compression fittings. BIG TIME!

Anyway, here's my question...

Have Asus been putting some kind of secret liquid cooling protection into their boards? Asus you bunch of awesome winners!

The moral of the story is this..

When using compression fittings on your tubing, tighten it, then when the rig has had a chance to warm up, switch off and tighten again, because when the tubing is warm it gains flexibility and will 'give' more, and that's why I ended up with an extremely overpriced water feature instead of an evenings gaming! I was used to jubilee clips and longer barbs, you can tighten them up big time, first time! And if it does all go wrong, don't lose faith, dry it out and try it out! But give it a few days to dry out properly!

Anyway, hope this doesn't put you off liquid cooling - in fact it should add confidence!
Have fun all,
FP 🙂

[Korth]

You could use Midel 7131 in liquid cooling loops. It's a dielectric fluid, nonconductive, non-staining, non-residue, the same stuff people use for full-immersion rigs. Designed for sustained cooling of high-power transformers. Liquid spill on electrically hot parts would not be a concern. Although your options for dielectric dyes and pigments are somewhat limited (plus they might stain components when they leak).

Circulating Midel in a loop is easy enough, it has properties comparable to decent coolants, not the best and not the worst, it doesn't really affect temps much either way in a small system like a PC.

Where it gets interesting is the 49C vapor point - some guys at the shop are devising a hybrid cooling system, part circulating coolant, part phase change (at hot points on top of loaded parts running >49C), high efficiency, low noise - a pressure compressor and pressure regulators seem unavoidable, but they're attempting to combine pump+compressor and rad+regulator into self-contained units. From what I've seen, it would be very easy to translate their work into a liquid-cooled PC - if they can ever get the thing working, lol.

[xeromist]

Fractious: No special protection. You can bet if ASUS had a feature like that it would be advertised. 🙂

Mainly you got lucky that the coolant didn't get into the PSU or short any power on your GPUs. You did the right thing powering down ASAP and letting everything dry for an extended period before trying again.

In the early days when everyone used hose barbs I had some problems, but since switching to compression fittings for the majority of connections I've not had a problem as long as the base is threaded tight. So just make sure everything is tight and if you make any changes to your loop always do a leak test before powering components.