Sunday, April 5, 2015

Using Non-conductive fluids in water cooling may not be as safe as you think?

        Ever since the concept of water cooling has been introduced to the PC community all those years ago, the fear of their failure unfortunately hitched a ride right along with it. I came across an interesting article that depicts various fluids that can potentially be used to "Faliure-proof" your PC, you can read that right here     http://www.bittech.net/modding/2008/02/16/watercooling_fluid_shootout/2. People fear that with these types of coolers, the scary idea of leakage would be introduced right along with them, but we as the human race believe that for every dilemma and every obstacle, there is a solution to remedy it, and so to counteract this particular dilemma, the folks who made these coolers would come to use non-conductive fluids, to effectively eliminate the risk of the coolers leaking and shorting out all of the precious electrical components. Now in a sense what the liquids are, are simply put, pure compounds, that show very low ionization, such as water for example, because of the fact that it has very low ionization, it means it doesn't carry electrical current through very well such as for example, a metal like iron, or copper would. Now the most common non conductive liquid used is distilled water, because its pure, cheap, and initially not conductive, notice i say "initially", this brings me to the point of this post, you've so far heard me talk about why and what substances are used to prevent damage, but never heard me say yet why its dangerous, well here it is. The reason these supposed non-conductive fluids are dangerous is because as they move through your water cooling loop, they eat away at all of the metallic parts inside your loop, essentially picking up the one key component to electrical conductivity, you guessed it! Ions... These little particles of metal essentially turn your safe, non-conductive liquids, into deadly, component killing, conductive, computer poisons! All of those little ions makes the liquids become more and more ionized, therefore increasing it ability to allow the flow of current through itself, effectively making it more dangerous to your PC. Now you are probably thinking, "Well with all of these scary statements, there must be a solution to this problem right? RIGHT?"...No...unfortunately there is no way in this day and age to prevent this inevitability,
with coolers such as AIO closed loop water coolers, there is virtually no way to prevent the ionization of the liquid, unless you build a fully custom loop, which introduces maintenance, but will essentially allow you to drain your fluids and replace them from time to time, but that is so time consuming and tedious that it is just not worth the effort. To sum it all up, if you are looking for something that will make your water cooling 100% safe, I've got disappointing news for you, and recommend you stick with traditional air cooling, because ionization is just one of those little annoyances that you just can't get rid of, especially when it comes to liquid cooling. So do you think that non conductive fluids are worth it for the safety, even if it means having to switch it out every month or so?

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