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     Post subject:How building a computer has the potential to kill a cat.
    PostPosted:Sun Jun 14, 2009 7:40 pm 
     

    Joined:Sun Jun 10, 2007 11:41 am
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    Location:Ninjaville
    So this story starts innocently enough, my friends brother joined the Air Force some time back and is now in techschool and therefore allowed to own his own computer, and offered him his older server computer (A liquid cooled computer with an Athlon X2 4600+, 2 Gigs of ram, and a 7900GT) if he would ship him his newer very small computer. Well My friends current box is a frankenmachine I cobbled together for him out of the very best of my old parts. It amounted to a computer with 2 Gigs of Ram an Opteron 170 and a Radeon 3850, in a cheap beige box with holes punched in it with a screw driver for ventilation. We'd deceided to combine the two machines, putting the superior video card and a gig of ram in the server computer along with my friends hard drives. We'd elected to install Vista x64 to utilize his new 3GB of ram. Before we installed the new video card we realized we had a problem the old card was nVidia the new one was an ATi card the odds of the water cooling block working was very low, as in it wasn't even worth trying. So we removed the block from the video card, taped the block to the wall so as not to break the circuit and continued on our merry way.

    Anyways we got it running, and got it to the point where the install was unattended, and left to get dinner. When we returned the monitor was black and nothing would wake it up, thinking it was simply caught in restart I hit the reset button. What I was greeted with was One long beep and two short, GPU problem. I went to check the GPU was properly seated, and when I checked it the card was wet. Not soaking wet mind you but wetter than anything inside a computer should be. The bottom of the case was wet too, we realized that something somewhere had sprung a leak. We couldn't isolate the leak so we decided to pull the entire water cooling system, this shouldn't have been a problem as the old computer had an Opteron Cooler very efficient and almost silent. I turned off the water cooling block and closed the valves. Then I undid the hose, water jetted out at high pressure. It was everywhere, my friend who was looking for Artic Silver just looks at me and screams "JOE WHAT THE FUCK" I look back and scream "I KNOW I KNOW" theres water everywhere, my friend comes over and blocks it with his thumb while i desperately clean it up and turn everything off. Then I go down to try to get a bucket to dump it in. The only bucket is filled with easter toys. I empty the easter toys and bring it upstairs dumping all the water in the bucket. When the bucket starts to fill up we notice its pink, and antifreeze not water. Antifreeze is used in cars, it is brightly colored, smells good, and has a sweet taste. My friend has cats, so we had to take the entire liquid cooling system outside and hose it down. Then we realized that the hole he had drilled to run Ethernet into his room was directly above the cat food the cat food was flooded with antifreeze. We had to clean that too. Scrub the dishes and all. To top it off my friend used all the Artic Silver when we fixed his red rings of death so he has not even a computer. So be warned building a computer has the potential to kill cats.


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     Post subject:Re: How building a computer has the potential to kill a cat.
    PostPosted:Sun Jun 14, 2009 8:13 pm 
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    Joined:Sun Feb 12, 2006 8:56 pm
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    That's an interesting story. I'm glad I don't go anywhere near liquid-cooling systems. ;)

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     Post subject:Re: How building a computer has the potential to kill a cat.
    PostPosted:Mon Jun 15, 2009 12:18 am 
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    Well, as long as you're using water, and not antifreeze (or liquid nitrogen...), your cats (and everything else that is either waterproof or doesn't need waterproofing) should be safe.

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     Post subject:Re: How building a computer has the potential to kill a cat.
    PostPosted:Mon Jun 15, 2009 1:04 am 
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    Joined:Sat Apr 02, 2005 3:31 pm
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    Something never made sense to me about using liquid to cool something that really doesn't behave well when exposed to liquid.

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     Post subject:Re: How building a computer has the potential to kill a cat.
    PostPosted:Mon Jun 15, 2009 12:50 pm 
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    http://www.maximumpc.com/article/featur ... pc_reactor

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     Post subject:Re: How building a computer has the potential to kill a cat.
    PostPosted:Mon Jun 15, 2009 7:30 pm 
     

    Joined:Sun Jun 10, 2007 11:41 am
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    Location:Ninjaville
    Two things, one it was antifreeze but after talking to my friends brother it was propylene glycol which is actually a GARS(Generally Regarded as Safe by the FDA) food additive and a somewhat less efficient coolant but also much much less deadly. Also Tycho there is an article on Tom's hardware, where they totally sealed a case, and filled it with oil. Oil being organic and a non electrolyte cooled the computer very well and they were able to hit something in the high three Ghzs on a Venice Athlon 64, quite an accomplishment if your recall. Edit:Guess I should have read your link first :oops: anyways Toms used vegetable oil which is funnier.


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     Post subject:Re: How building a computer has the potential to kill a cat.
    PostPosted:Mon Jun 15, 2009 9:22 pm 
     

    Joined:Mon May 29, 2006 6:11 pm
    Posts:266
    Quote:
    Two things, one it was antifreeze but after talking to my friends brother it was propylene glycol which is actually a GARS(Generally Regarded as Safe by the FDA) food additive and a somewhat less efficient coolant but also much much less deadly. Also Tycho there is an article on Tom's hardware, where they totally sealed a case, and filled it with oil. Oil being organic and a non electrolyte cooled the computer very well and they were able to hit something in the high three Ghzs on a Venice Athlon 64, quite an accomplishment if your recall. Edit:Guess I should have read your link first :oops: anyways Toms used vegetable oil which is funnier.
    I'm currently smoking an electronic cigarette which uses propylene glycol as the main ingredient, and i'm not dead yet. Pretty sure it's safe.


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