Water cooling near-tragedy

Here's a short story of what almost gave me a wet computer last night.

I go to bed around 10:30, toss and turn for an hour.
Around 11:30, I hear my power supply buzz. It has an inductor buzz when the CPU isn't maxed, meaning Folding just shut down and sent the packet back. This means it's either complete or crashed.
Couple minutes later, I hear my CD-ROM spin up. This only happens when I put a new disc in, never after, so this gets me curious. I take the disc out, and go back to bed.
Five minutes later, I realize my computer is quieter than it should be. I get up, put my ear next to the case, and realize my pump isn't on. *Insert expletive*
So I turn on the monitor, only to be met with the Win2K black bootup screen with an error message. *Insert more expletives*
Next I take the case side off, and nudge the pump. It isn't grounded to the chassis, only to the molex, apparently it isn't enough. The pump turns on after I touch it, and I see lots of bubbles coming from my waterblock. Oh crap! Then the computer shuts completely down.

So, the water was boiling inside my block. Took about an hour of no water flow for it to overheat. Also means my block was over 100C, to say nothing of the CPU die (Mobile Barton 2500+ OCed to 2.4). Definitely not good eh? I hover my hand around the block and the whole area is hot. Without thinking I touched the outer part of the block, didn't burn myself, but it was VERY HOT. the Clearflex was noticably more flexible in the vicinity too.

I left the rig off for the rest of the night, turned it on this morning and the chip is still alive. Still running at 2.4 right now. Thank goodness for thermal shutdown! I'm very lucky I didn't blow a hose and spew water all over the computer guts too.

i wonder what would have happened if you had fallen asleep hmmm

Whoa, that was lucky!

Didn't know that they called for them to be grounded...

WoW Scary indeed! *thanx the GODs for thermal shutdown*

wow, the perils of WC...
lucky save, i forgot to plug in my pump twice when i first got wc...close calls.
now i turn off my comp every night (phase change is a lot of power draw, and i only fold on screensaver), so i still have WC on my gfx card, and if it fails, ill notice before it dies.

What does this have to do with the pump being grounded?

Well the reason I think the pump needs to be grounded is because if I touch the pump, it will sometimes turn off and then back on. So I'm thinking I bumped my case and it shut down for some reason but never turned back on. Some sort of ground protection maybe?

Voodoo Rufus said:

Well the reason I think the pump needs to be grounded is because if I touch the pump, it will sometimes turn off and then back on. So I'm thinking I bumped my case and it shut down for some reason but never turned back on. Some sort of ground protection maybe?

Click to expand...

...or maybe the pump sucks...

very strange, never heard anything like this. Think maybe you have a defective pump?

this is an issue with the MCP600s. talk to billa for more info, and talk to wherever you bought the pump for replacement

I think your molex is possibly bad, not so much anything to do with being grounded.
I had the same with one of my Hard Drives, kept making the system reboot and would not find the HD until that connector was jiggled a little.
If it is not the molex then the pump has a problem, it shouldnt need grounding.

I'll be sure to check that ghettocomp. Worth a shot too.

nice to hear that nothing too serious happened.

I would take that barton and put it in the trophy case too. I can't believe it still ran hehehe.

hmm does the mcp650 have the same problem?
I know that when I first hooked up the wc, i forgot to turn on the pump a couple of times.... (forgot to reconnect teh molex). I was shifting around some stuff... anyway i don't think it did any harm... I hope

I checked the Molex. It's snug enough not to be a problem.

DC pumps shouldn't need grounding like AC pumps do either, so I'm not sure bolting it to the case would make any difference.

The Molex I had appeared to be snug and would be seem ok until I bumped it or something, then the HD would quit. or the system would crash.

Well the block itself probably wasn't 100C, as water will start boiling somewhat before then (since temperature is an average, the molecules in the water with enough kinetic energy to boil will do so, so the above average molecules will boil before most of the water..) anyways it was pretty darn hot. Good thing you woke up

I've done things like that before. For me, it was right after I made a few hardware swaps, so I booted up the comp and forgot to plug in the pump. I started OCing, and noticed reallllly high temps in MBM5 after awhile (I think it got up to ~70C) so I plugged the pump in once I realized what I'd done.

I'm reconsidering running H2O again after this incident. I crimped the molex a bit tighter, and haven't had any problems since. Granted, the problem was hard to replicate in the first place, but if I do run into it again, the pump's gone.

Too bad my A7N8X doesn't have a bios configurable temp shutdown.....I want one now.

Plenty of proggies that will do that for you, so long as the temps dont rise so fast that it freezes before the proggie can shutdown....