I would be highly surprised if it actually worked, even for a second. Motherboards have some pretty high frequencies, and the PCB routing is intricately designed to minimize capacitance so that they can actually carry these signals.
Changing the fluid that is around the board from air (dielectric constant = 1.00059) to water (80.4) is likely to introduce a lot of capacitances that weren't designed for and would be way out of tolerance, especially for channels like CPU to RAM. The additional capacitance just wouldn't allow the signal to switch fast enough to be able to reliably transmit the data. By the way, mineral oil has a dielectric constant of 2.1, so much less capacitancy than water, and some people have had success with submersion in that.
If you would be doing this so that you can overclock everything, then the higher dielectric constant works against that by reducing the maximum frequency that the board can operate at.
The Cray computers didn't have nearly the same challenges to being submerged, since the highest fundamental frequency signal on the board was 125MHz, and modern machines potentially have ~4000MHz signals, with common RAM being just below 2000MHz, with harmonics extending to >5x the fundamentals to form the waveform accurately.
I agree with the others here that have noted that metals are slightly soluble in water (especially copper), so the water would start to become conductive immediately. Voltage differences would also cause electrolysis through the water and H2 + O2 would be produced, as well as forcing ions into aqueous solution.
83I don't think that this is feasible in real life. It is correct that distilled water is an insulator, but as soon as contaminants are introduced into it (e.g. from the tiniest amounts of dirt on the boards, fingerprints etc.), it loses its insulating properties. – Nassbirne – 2016-06-10T13:22:43.733
28What you really want for this trick is de-ionized water. But there's no way for you, outside of a lab environment, to keep a tank of water from picking up contaminants over time that will give you trouble. If you want fluid cooling, try mineral-oil. It's got it's own issues, but it's far less troublesome than water for the average user. – Michael Kohne – 2016-06-10T13:56:58.707
1Simple water heats up relatively quickly and cools down relatively slowly, so pure water, wouldn't do much better the air ( better but not any significant amount). Closed water coolers don't use pure water for a reason. – Ramhound – 2016-06-10T16:28:44.770
17
So, the idea is to immerse a motherboard in the Universal Solvent. The solvent will quickly make its own contaminants. http://water.usgs.gov/edu/solvent.html
– Don Branson – 2016-06-10T17:39:40.903@smitelli yeah, but it's too dark in your gas tank to see the pump, so light a match to see better. ;) – Don Branson – 2016-06-10T20:41:25.107
4
man chemistry
=))) NO COMMENTS!! =))) Use non-conductive oils or other chemically neutral fluids that will not be a part of electrolysis! – Alexey Vesnin – 2016-06-10T20:54:51.90020@Ramhound: what you're saying doesn't make sense. Water has a pretty vast specific heat capacity, hence it is a much better coolant than air (also a lot better than oil), precisely because it does not heat up quickly. It fact this also means that it does not cool down quickly – the heat eventually needs to go somewhere, this is just conservation of energy. But a large volume of water has much more surface area to dissipate heat than a few chips. — None of this has anything to do with whether the water is pure/distilled or has electrolytes in it. – leftaroundabout – 2016-06-11T11:16:11.690
I live in an area surrounded by water, if it's warm the water is warm, if it's cool the water is cool but warned then the air often. I guess my point is water cooling solutions do not use pure water to cool 100+ degree CPUs so they run within specification – Ramhound – 2016-06-11T16:25:39.537
1Water doesn't conduct electricity? Who told you that? Neutral distilled water should have a pH of 7 which means that the concentration of hydrogen ions in the water is only 10E-7 moles per litre. Bear in mind that a mole is 6x10E23 atoms that means distilled water, so a litre of water contains 6x10E16 hydrogen ions. That's quite a big number... – JavaLatte – 2016-06-11T21:58:53.530
10@JavaLatte Pure (de-ionized) water has a resistance of 18 MΩ, which makes it a pretty good electrical insulator. If you could keep contaminants out, it would make an ideal coolant (others have mentioned the high specific heat of water). On the other hand, the wires would probably (very slowly) start undergoing an electrolytic reaction of some kind just due to the voltage applied, which would put more ions in the water, and drastically increase the conductivity. – Riet – 2016-06-12T13:37:47.623
2That's MΩ per cm – Riet – 2016-06-12T13:45:20.027
2i would try it with a raspberry pi first – licklake – 2016-06-12T17:18:23.900
1@Riet: 1.80×10E5 Ω-m sounds like a big number until you put it next to that of air: 1.30×1016 Ω-m. Now that's what I call an insulator. If you dropped your phone in distilled water and managed to get the battery and most of the water out within a few minutes you might be lucky, but for continuous operation over days... the tracks and components will slowly be electrolysed away. – JavaLatte – 2016-06-13T02:26:52.767
1@licklake: no need to cool a raspberry pi: the CPU speed is dynamically reduced as the temperature increases. A good reason not to put a funky cover on your phone: it insulates the processor and so it slows down. I have heard that they run very very very fast if you cool them with liquid nitrogen... now that's what I call a good coolant. – JavaLatte – 2016-06-13T02:32:28.623
3@JavaLatte After a certain point, it doesn't really matter how high your resistance is. The real problem is that your conductivity increases by orders of magnitude when you start re-introducing ions to the water (like when you apply any voltage over about 1 volt, or putting dissimilar metals in solution with each other). You really aren't dealing with de-ionized water after a while, but in a steady supply of fresh de-ionized water, you might be able to pull it off. Of course, that's way too much trouble to be of practical use. – Riet – 2016-06-13T02:52:30.847
@Riet, the dissolution you describes is caused by electrolysis, which would not occur at all if water were not conductive. It does happen even with distilled water.Ok, it will get faster as the number of ions in the water increases, but it will be enough to be a problem over long periods even if you keep refreshing the water. – JavaLatte – 2016-06-13T03:09:09.590
As others have said, the key factor here is the water won't remain pure. I have seen electronics running underwater, though--a company doing a demo of their waterproofing system. Protect the components from the corrosive effects of the water and it runs fine. – Loren Pechtel – 2016-06-15T22:56:55.320
Just use something like https://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Extreme-Performance-Liquid-Cooler/dp/B019EXSSBG/ref=sr_1_6?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1466091164&sr=1-6&keywords=CPU+cooler It works very well. I don't know any benefit to completely enclosing your computer in water. That said, it's not what the question was so I won't make it an answer.
– coteyr – 2016-06-16T15:34:28.843I saw this http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/241404/electronic-components-without-rust-or-corrosion .I think we need a gold motherboard ;) ?
– Suici Doga – 2016-06-17T06:26:30.373On a side note, Tom's Hardware used cooking oil for a system with AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra in 2006 (video).
– Cristian Ciupitu – 2016-06-17T19:07:44.150