Seemly stupid question about submerging a motherboard

I was reading a cpu magazine some time ago and came across and add for the “reactor” computer that’s submerged in mineral oil for cooling. After looking around here for a bit and seeing what people who hade submerged a mother board in mineral oil thought about doing it, I promptly ruled out using mineral oil for this project
But it got me thinking, why don’t people dip their motherboards in distilled water? Distilled water doesn’t conduct electricity (that’s why many people use it in water cooling) it conducts heat better then oil, it’s not as messy, it doesn’t eat rubber and it doesn’t thicken up until 32F. Now to my point
If you dipped a mother board into a distilled water tank (assuming it didn’t short out right them) couldn’t you take a hose from the tank and connect it to a water distiller inlet (water to be distilled) and from the out let of the water distiller (fresh distilled water) pump that back into the distilled water tank that houses your motherboard, this would keep the water distilled (none conductive) until it was time to change the filter in the water distiller.

Is this feasible?

-blue

Distilled water can pickup conductive properties from the metal it contacts with AFAIK.. So while it may be non conductive at first, after a while it can become more conductive. At least thats what I have read.

CGR said:

Distilled water can pickup conductive properties from the metal it contacts with AFAIK.. So while it may be non conductive at first, after a while it can become more conductive. At least thats what I have read.

Click to expand...

Correct, anything that dissolves into the water will make it conduct electricity. Dust, residue on the board or anything it comes in contact with will do that.

Not a good idea.

Petra posted a video of pouring distilled water on a mobo and a leading 'non-conductive' liquid. It took half a gallon or so but it began to glitch and finally BSODed. Both liquids caused BSOD.

Mineral oil is truely non conductive and stays that way, it also doesn't degrade like vegetable oil and it's very low viscosity. And not stupid expensive.

as said above, it will gain conductive properties. and overall its generally not a very good idea. very messy if you want to change out components, still need somewhere to mount hdds.

we get this question every now and again and it usually ends up in people deciding not to do it, its a lot easier to just get water cooling.

this is unless you want it for a temporary show pc or something in which it can look quite impressive.

A freezer alone will not be able to handle the heat for an extended period of time. Years ago I used a meat freezer to keep a mixture of water and antifreeze at -32 degrees. The water was pumped through a copper block on the cpu to chill a 1 GHz T-Bird which ran at about 1.6 if memory serves. With upwards of 40 gallons of coolant I was able to get run times of about 5-6 hours before shutting down until the next day so that the freezer could recover. Overall it was a good experience though and proved a better solution then pelts at least for me. Pelts just have to much variation in temperature when going from idle to full load to be worth the trouble.

If you do decide to give it a try mineral oil as someone stated above is the way to go. I prefer to stick with something reliable and lug-able. A nice deep mid tower case, mount a rad and room temperature water cooling.

Even pure water ionizes slightly.

Freshly distilled water at room temperature has a hydrogen/hydroxyl ion concentration of

10 Exp -7 mol / dm Exp 3 (10 to the negative seventh moles per cubic decimeter). Hence a pH of 7.

A mole is 6.022 X 10 Exp 23 molecules.

That means that there are roughly 6.022 x 10 Exp 17 hydrogen ions in a cubic decimeter of water able to conduct electricity (at a minimum). As was said above, water will become more conductive over time just being exposed to air as the CO2 will dissolve and make the water more acidic over time. Higher temperature will also contribute to acidity and increase conductivity.

Ok so distilled water is not an option, so back to mineral oil (I don’t have a problem taking a dump and I don’t own a farm where horses have problems taking dumps, so I’ve never used-owned it before) how thick does it get when it’s around 32f? if you did dip your mother board in a mineral oil tank and put a air conditioner evap. in the oil as well to cool it down (and maybe even use a strong pump to move the oil around the tank) would that work to super cool the all oil to around the same temp (+/- 10 F)?

The few pics or threads on this have shown the oil will heat up in time, on a high powered CPU/GPU system you'll get a few hours of cool running. And it takes HOURS too cool back down to a usable level.

It will need a pump and an external rad to pull the heat out of the liquid. You can actively cool the oil or just use fans like a normal watercooling setup.