Big Leak, Water Everywhere, Is it Over?

F

ferr

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 4, 2004
Messages
145
I came home this afternoon to find my PC turned off. The reservoir looked a little strange, kind of lower than usual, but I saw nothing at a glance inside the case to convince me of a leak, so I turned the PC on. Received a long beep, nothing, opened up the case to see if there was an error code I could use and WTF OMG WATER COMING OUT OF A HOSE THAT SHOULD BE CONNECTED TO THE STUPID NORTH BRIDGE BLOCK!

So there was a lot of coolant (12 month old coolant) leaked from the north bridge directly on top of my video cards. Am I fucked? Should I start stripping out parts to re-build or is there any hope that I can clean this all up? It's coolant.. and that shouldn't short out hardware, right? But after 12 months, there's bound to be enough bio in the loop to mess shit up with such a bad leak..
 
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R1ckCa1n said:
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I'm not sure if putting more water into the reservoir, taking the problematic hose back off, and turning the PC back on so I can take pictures would be the best plan. It did look awesome, though, seeing all that coolant leaking on my 680i and modified 8800 ultras. Maybe I'll draw a picture. :p
 
I think you are fed. While I have gotten a little water on my motherboard before, this was usually with new coolant and while filling up or doing leak testing.
 
i would remove everything from the case..... dry it off, then use isopropyle alcohol (rubbing) and be liberal with it.... take the HSF off the GPU and let it sit for 24hrs.

to the same for any and all conponenets.... remove the ram and everything.


then outside of the case, 24-48hrs later, put it back together and pray...


I had a leak when i water cooled and it went right on to the GPU also and i followed my steps above and it worked fine.... you could also put the components into an oven and set it to 120-180*F and let them sit for a while....
 
Take it all apart and dry everything in a sunny window for a day. It will most likely work.

Use better clamps.

Not sure where you got the "coolant" wont short out stuff, its all mostly water. But worst case you might have a dead video card. Dry it all out and see what happens, dont have much to lose.
 
BillParrish said:
Not sure where you got the "coolant" wont short out stuff, its all mostly water. But worst case you might have a dead video card. Dry it all out and see what happens, dont have much to lose.
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Well I seem to remember something about it's not the water that shorts out hardware, but the minerals/etc in non-distilled water.
 
Its not the water that kills it. It is the water on the parts when you power them ON that kills it.

Let everything dry a lot longer than you should.

One of the main reasons people kill electronics stuff after it gets dunked in water is turning them back on too quickly to see if it is working or not. Of course, the answer to that is NO since you turned it on while it was still wet. Water doesn't hurt. Water + electricity hurts. Completely dry it off. Let it sit out with no power for a while. Let it dry some more. Then, after everything is completely dry, let it dry some more.

:)

Good luck.
 
Thats why i dont like water cooling because of leaking tubes (Horror Stories with Water Cooling). I prefer Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. It beats the water cooling that cost below $100 water cooling kits. Read up at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-cooler-charts-2008,1779-20.html . It lists only MSI water coolingI and Thermalright air cooling as Best and rest are market hype garbage with fancy looks with pipes. It lists as 45% of the products tested here either fail the tests or simply aren't worth their price. So finally iam against water cooling. If people want more eXtreme cooling then they should start with Nitrogen cooling. Bye
 
Jatt5 said:
Thats why i dont like water cooling because of leaking tubes (Horror Stories with Water Cooling). I prefer Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. It beats the water cooling that cost below $100 water cooling kits. Read up at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-cooler-charts-2008,1779-20.html . It lists only MSI water coolingI and Thermalright air cooling as Best and rest are market hype garbage with fancy looks with pipes. It lists as 45% of the products tested here either fail the tests or simply aren't worth their price. So finally iam against water cooling. If people want more eXtreme cooling then they should start with Nitrogen cooling. Bye
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Thanks for you insight. Im sure your opinion will clean up the water on his components.
 
Jatt5 said:
Thats why i dont like water cooling because of leaking tubes (Horror Stories with Water Cooling). I prefer Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. It beats the water cooling that cost below $100 water cooling kits. Read up at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-cooler-charts-2008,1779-20.html . It lists only MSI water coolingI and Thermalright air cooling as Best and rest are market hype garbage with fancy looks with pipes. It lists as 45% of the products tested here either fail the tests or simply aren't worth their price. So finally iam against water cooling. If people want more eXtreme cooling then they should start with Nitrogen cooling. Bye
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Ignorance must be bliss. :rolleyes:

Were you running distilled water with additives or were you running alternative fluids?

Ofter just letting everything dry out as mentioned above often solves the problem. The only disaster I've had was actually having the coolant soak into the thermal tape on the mosfets on a 680i. That cause the heatsink to lose contact with them, evn when dried (tape expanded and split layers). Didn't realize it until the magic smoke came out of the system.:mad:
 
Now i was not trying to ignore him all i was telling how i feel about water cooling. I wish him good luck of cleaning it without damagiing the current components. Bye :)
 
BX_TECH_GOD said:
+1 :D

That way we can give you a better assessment.
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Not much to show. I cleaned up the coolant (probably about half a cup's worth) and refitted the hose. There's no smoke and fire or anything. It turns on like a perfectly fine PC, except I get a long beep after a few seconds and "7F" on the mobo code LED (supposedly the "bad" error code).

I wonder though, if I'm getting this far in the boot up process, would that just point to a video card error? I'd like to figure out what's f'd and what's not f'd. The video cards are both using water blocks, no HSF, so I have no way off the top of my head of telling if they're "functioning". I don't have another board compatible with these parts, and even if I did, would I dare stick these in there anytime soon? Right now I'm just in a wait and dry situation. The real problem is that just about every component that could be water cooled is water cooled, so it's not a simple matter of pulling something out and letting it sit in the sun and then plugging them back in.

I'm willing to buy a new mobo and video card, but I don't want to re-use a part (cpu, ram, hdd, psu) only to have that part short out the new mobo.
 
If it is a 680, 780, or 790 refverence board 7F is a post check error. Technically it should be displaying a message on the screen and giving additional info on the problem. Sounds like there is a video card problem, but maybe more as well. Get video working and go from there.

Croaker
 
I've had various small leaks in my system before. Best advice is to refrain from trying to see if it still works and get it dry. Just wiping off the water doesn't cut it. Things like mofset and capacitors get wet spots between them and the board, and those are most likely to short.
Get a can of air and blast every little thing that isn't flat. Let it dry for a night, and do it again (you could have blown water from one thing to another). After that it should be relatively dry. Most of the time the short isn't enough to kill the component, just enough to make it fail to work. If you didn't let out the magic smoke, it probably still works.
Did the pc smell funny? I dont mean like watercooling smell, but that alcoholish plastic smell that you get when you kill something.
 
hl3395 said:
I've had various small leaks in my system before. Best advice is to refrain from trying to see if it still works and get it dry. Just wiping off the water doesn't cut it. Things like mofset and capacitors get wet spots between them and the board, and those are most likely to short.
Get a can of air and blast every little thing that isn't flat. Let it dry for a night, and do it again (you could have blown water from one thing to another). After that it should be relatively dry. Most of the time the short isn't enough to kill the component, just enough to make it fail to work. If you didn't let out the magic smoke, it probably still works.
Did the pc smell funny? I dont mean like watercooling smell, but that alcoholish plastic smell that you get when you kill something.
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The smell of heated coolant, no burning plastic smells. I'm going to try air blasting. It's going to kill me not to turn it on to test it, but I'll give your technique a shot and try this every day for the next couple of days. It seems like the easiest method as everything is hooked up to the loop.
 
I had a "friend" happen something like this during a leak test on first filling, it leaked everywhere near the SB. He left it out for a few days to dry. Reassembled, and back to business. Ran good for 2 months.

Here is the stupid part:
He said, "Crap I'm nervous I could one day catch fire or short everything out and the worst could happen." so he disassembled to clean it up with some alcohol, stripe here and there, bit by bit, for 3 days. Left it outside the valcony to catch some sun shine to dry nice. He went to his room watched a movie. It rained... and said "Ohw cool, a little cool time on this hot summer day" and continued watching his movie........ forgetting all about the motherboard and video card... well you can imagine the rest ;)
 
Phrik said:
I had a "friend" happen something like this during a leak test on first filling, it leaked everywhere near the SB. He left it out for a few days to dry. Reassembled, and back to business. Ran good for 2 months.

Here is the stupid part:
He said, "Crap I'm nervous I could one day catch fire or short everything out and the worst could happen." so he disassembled to clean it up with some alcohol, stripe here and there, bit by bit, for 3 days. Left it outside the valcony to catch some sun shine to dry nice. He went to his room watched a movie. It rained... and said "Ohw cool, a little cool time on this hot summer day" and continued watching his movie........ forgetting all about the motherboard and video card... well you can imagine the rest ;)
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Wow. People like this are the reason they do the Darwin Awards.

I've done some dumb or careless stuff. We all have. But some people, it honestly surprises me that they can feed and bathe themselves, or get through the day without falling down a lot.

To the OP, if you turned parts on before drying them off, yeah, it sounds like you're pretty boned to me. Sorry, man. After drying everything out and checking, all that's really left to do is diagnose the problems part by part and see how much you're in the hole on replacement parts.

~Semi
 
let it dry and all will be well.

@Jatt5, if you dont like watercooling GTFO of the watercooling forum, the TRUE circle jerk is over in the air cooling section
 
Headpunter said:
let it dry and all will be well.

@Jatt5, if you dont like watercooling GTFO of the watercooling forum, the TRUE circle jerk is over in the air cooling section
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haha. Yea your post was really helpful jatt5.

Whats the maker of your gpu? If its evga they will most likly give you a new card.
 
Thanks people for making fun of me. Just because i said i dont like water cooling. That really tells me that you people think iam Jerk. Somehow i think i was not making fun of the people on these board not even this topic. I said on previous page i wish him good luck trying to recover his computer without frying his current hardware.
 
the point is that if i dont like chinese food, i dont go to a chinese restraunt. that was the point of my comment.
 
If you let everything dry thoroughly, then it will probably be fine. I know it is a pain in the ass to take out all of the equipment, but it is a MUST to dry properly. Keep in mind that motherboards, video cards, etc. are multi-layered. If a spot gets drenched, it may be possible for the lower layers to get wet as well. Just because the top layer looks dry, it doesn't mean the bottom layers are, so you need to leave them out in a well-circulated room (preferably near a window) and let them dry. It also gives you time to make sure your blocks are well secured, and retighten clamps.

Remember, in many cases you don't need to drain the loop and disconnect tubing to take out the hardware. It might take some interesting twists and turns to get hardware out, but you can keep everything connected if you want to get the motherboard, video card, etc out after unmounting. I'd take out everything from the case. You don't want water settling behind something and not realize it (i.e. on top of an optical drive). You might move your PC one day and the water could unknowingly spill on a critical part, bricking your equipment.

Patience is a virtue :).

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!
 
I let it dry for a couple of days, but the mobo is likely pwnd. After getting the same results from turning it on, I drained everything and pulled out every block and component to see if I could find any damage. I found coolant crust on the video cards and inside the PCI-e slots. I don't think the video cards would mind the crust as much as the mobo would freak out about having crust in the PCI-e slots. What might be the best way to clean this visible crust up.. isopropyl?

For the heck of it, BEFORE:


AFTER (note the crust on the PCI-e slots if you can even see them):


Close up on the video card's blue coolant crust:
 
If there is a "crust" on your cards, you probably had a leak over time. That doesn't usually form from one spill, but rather the evaporation of the liquid part of your coolant mixture over time. You probably shorted something out, but there is no harm in trying to revive it and dry everything out. Good luck, and keep us posted.
 
I had this happen to me with my old Aquagate setup. The acrylic block just cracked and hydrx leaked all over my 6800GS. I cleaned it up, used some can air and let is dry for a couple of hours and wallah, it booted and worked perfectly.
 
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