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I have read that distilled water doesn't conduct electricity. This, in other words, means that we can submerge electronic devices like PCs/laptops in it and run them without any problem. I haven't seen much information about this on the internet, but it should be possible.

So, can you really run a PC in distilled water? I don't know if you can, but I think if you could, it would start rusting/corroding in a few days. ;)

Excellll
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Suici Doga
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    I 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 Jun 10 '16 at 13:22
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    What 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 Jun 10 '16 at 13:56
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    Simple 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 Jun 10 '16 at 16:28
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    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 Jun 10 '16 at 17:39
  • @smitelli yeah, but it's too dark in your gas tank to see the pump, so light a match to see better. ;) – Don Branson Jun 10 '16 at 20:41
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    `man chemistry` =))) NO COMMENTS!! =))) Use non-conductive oils or other **chemically neutral** fluids that will not be a part of electrolysis! – Alexey Vesnin Jun 10 '16 at 20:54
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    @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 Jun 11 '16 at 11:16
  • 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 Jun 11 '16 at 16:25
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    Water 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 Jun 11 '16 at 21:58
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    @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 Jun 12 '16 at 13:37
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    That's MΩ per cm – Riet Jun 12 '16 at 13:45
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    i would try it with a raspberry pi first – licklake Jun 12 '16 at 17:18
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    @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 Jun 13 '16 at 02:26
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    @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 Jun 13 '16 at 02:32
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    @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 Jun 13 '16 at 02:52
  • @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 Jun 13 '16 at 03:09
  • 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 Jun 15 '16 at 22:56
  • 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 Jun 16 '16 at 15:34
  • I saw this http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/241404/electronic-components-without-rust-or-corrosion .I think we need a gold motherboard ;) ? – Suici Doga Jun 17 '16 at 06:26
  • On a side note, [Tom's Hardware](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/strip-fans,1203.html) used cooking oil for a system with AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra in 2006 ([video](https://youtu.be/pb4UumU6ee0)). – Cristian Ciupitu Jun 17 '16 at 19:07

7 Answers7

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I've done it. Don't do it.

I set up a computer in an acrylic case with good quality distilled water and a cheap motherboard as a test, with heatsinks only (no fans/moving parts). I cleaned the inside of the case with isopropyl alcohol, thinking that would remove any existing contaminants.

Within a day or two, I noticed that all the contacts/metal parts on the board began to rust. Even the stainless steel on the case of the SSD had begun to rust. Another day later, the motherboard died. When I removed the motherboard, being the first time anything physically removed (no fans), a huge cloud of rust particles came off and turned the water a lovely brown color.

Stick with something that metal parts can be friends with, like mineral oil.

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    And all that rust was due to electrolysis of water I suppose. – Ruslan Jun 11 '16 at 10:37
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    @Ruslan It is not to due to the electrolysis of water. It is due to the fact the water is "begging" for minerals to be dissolved. It is highly undersaturated, that is why it tends to be corrosive. – cinico Jun 11 '16 at 18:23
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    Rust requires water, oxygen and heat. Water and heat are available, and I guess the water was saturated with oxygen from the start or after handling it. Would be intersting to see in a lab enviroment if without oxygen the whole system would work better. Though I think in the long run the lack of real cooling and heat dissipation could be a problem, depending on the volume of the water and the purpose of the computer. – HopefullyHelpful Jun 11 '16 at 18:45
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    Heh, dissolved oxygen is not your friend, first you deionize your distilled water, then you introduce it to a nitrogen or argon environment. The whole exercise is a total waste of time for other reasons mentioned by others. – Fiasco Labs Jun 12 '16 at 02:49
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    So, you're saying he should write his code in Rust? – user541686 Jun 12 '16 at 04:19
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    I'm assuming you actually powered up the PC. So what exactly did you run on the PC? What was the performance like before it died? Was it powered on continuously until it died? – Amani Kilumanga Jun 13 '16 at 01:32
  • Even though it's not *exactly* what OP asked about, I'll just [leave this here](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/strip-fans,1203.html). – Vegard Jun 13 '16 at 06:30
  • @FiascoLabs you need to cool it from near boiling point (where O₂ solubility goes to zero) under N₂, then *keep it sealed*. It will take a while but otherwise it will reach equilibium with the air. – Chris H Jun 13 '16 at 10:36
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    Mineral oil submerged PC build log from LinusTechTips, gives you a good idea on the work needed to build this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V06LLTNxc4 – BlueCacti Jun 13 '16 at 12:00
  • I tried it both ways. It works better without the water. – Ivan Jun 13 '16 at 13:23
  • In a flurry of full fairness, a quick polish with a dash, or even a bunch of dashes of IsoPropanol isn't going to take away _all_ contamination. So even if you can get the water oxygenless, you need to flush everything, because over the course of a year even a small amount of contamination can start dissolving metals under electric stress across very close pins on busses and start a snowball effect, causing electrolysis which then creates oxygen radicals, and more snowball. – Asmyldof Jun 13 '16 at 19:53
  • Was the HDD underwater ? – Suici Doga Jun 14 '16 at 05:22
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    May I ask *why* you did this? Or was it just for the hell of it :) – shantnu Jun 14 '16 at 10:53
  • In other words, it works but not for long. – micheal65536 Jun 14 '16 at 13:26
  • @SuiciDoga It was an SSD, and yes. –  Jun 14 '16 at 19:57
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    @shantnu Just for kicks and giggles. It was an older motherboard I had no use for and no one wanted. –  Jun 14 '16 at 19:57
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    @AmaniKilumanga I ran processor and GPU benchmarks w/ temp tests for a few hours if I remember correctly, plotting it all. I left it overnight the night that it died, though and the last bit of testing data was lost. –  Jun 14 '16 at 19:58
  • well what is one cheap motherboard if you can get 254 likes on an answer! @Moses –  Jun 15 '16 at 10:54
  • @GeorgeGkas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAGwNtI26w#t=25s –  Jun 15 '16 at 13:47
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    Opening line makes me feel like a teenager asking his dad about smoking pot or something. – corsiKa Jun 15 '16 at 16:18
  • I can't answer 'cause of new status, but DI would work, but you would have to precoat the board in epoxy using vapor deposition. ALSO, you would have to change the Dionizing cartridge FREQUENTLY. Sooooo, other things have been used though. I have seen one of the CFCs or HFCs used to immerse and cool. Here is a wikipedia article on this: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjT_s_HyqvNAhVB1mMKHcGtARYQFggeMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FServer_immersion_cooling&usg=AFQjCNF1zhMGfoakkedqYciXUPUOil4ZMw&sig2=6_1y_uXnLznzn99QI6lCIw – Dennis Jun 16 '16 at 03:16
  • Here is a TWO phase system of immersion cooling. The liquid evaporates eventually and condenses evertually, like an aircoditioner. http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/NA-DataCenters/DataCenters/Solutions/EfficiencySustainability/ImmersionCooling/# . – Dennis Jun 16 '16 at 03:19
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    Here's a patent on the whole idea. http://www.google.com/patents/WO2010123671A1?cl=en – Dennis Jun 16 '16 at 03:21
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Yes it is. Running a computer in distilled water is no issue.
However, keeping the water distilled is near impossible.

As soon as contaminants pollute the water even in very small amounts, the water will begin to corrode and given enough ionic contaminants, the water will stop being an insulator and become a very good conductor.

This kills the computer.

Now various people will say different things with regards to the amount of time it takes for the water to become contaminated enough to cause problems but in almost all cases it is within weeks in sealed environments, days in open.

Mineral oil is a far better alternative for a submerged build.

Ctrl-alt-dlt
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    Mineral oil has it's own problems as has been noted by another commenter. Please do further reading on pro's and con's before carrying out anything of this nature. – Ctrl-alt-dlt Jun 10 '16 at 13:58
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    Even if the water is kept unconatmined with anything, afaik H2O + O2 + Metal = Rust. Rust probably has other electrical properties than the original Metal, which might cause the motherboard to not be part of the electrical closed circuit anymore, as it's connection is severed by a wall of rust. – HopefullyHelpful Jun 11 '16 at 18:49
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    @HopefullyHelpful H2O + O2 + Metal = Rust? Wrong! Only metals containing IRON will rust. Other metals will corrode too, but it won't even look like brown rust... Copper turns green, and aluminum-oxide is white... – svin83 Jun 13 '16 at 07:21
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    Oxygen isn't needed for it to rust. The solder on the anode can react with water. – v7d8dpo4 Jun 13 '16 at 09:21
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    I love how you say "in almost all cases" which also serves as "computer cases" here :) – Konerak Jun 14 '16 at 13:39
  • @Ctrl-alt-dlt The article on mineral oil was interesting, particularly the line, "Due to the risk of tank failure if the oil reaches temperatures above 50C..." – Pace Jun 19 '16 at 23:51
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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.

Keith Procter
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    Well, at the risk of posting a link that may become outdated: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/56574/how-to-calculate-parasitic-capacitance-in-a-trace Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_capacitance – Keith Procter Jun 10 '16 at 20:13
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    Fluorinert has a dielectric constant of 1.9, so supercomputers run in something like that wouldn't have the capacitance issues that they woudl in water. Also [this paper](http://www.radioeng.cz/fulltexts/2012/12_01_0201_0206.pdf) demonstrates that the capacitance properties of air vary a lot with humditiy. – Chris H Jun 13 '16 at 10:43
  • Mismatched lines can already be tremendous trouble at 125Mhz :) Some of the capacitive (and resistive) effects will be reduced, though, by the lacquer that is on most traces of a modern motherboard; extra capacitance on bare chip pins will of course still be a problem. – rackandboneman Jun 15 '16 at 13:38
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I cannot speak to the use of water but a liquid cooling system was implemented years ago using fluorinert. This was done on the cray 2 and 3 I believe. The following snippet can be found on wikipedia. I did have the opportunity to see the cray-3 running in a tank of fluorinert completely submerged in liquid much like a fish tank.

The cards were packed right on top of each other, so the resulting stack was only about 3 inches high. With this sort of density there was no way any conventional air-cooled system would work; there was too little room for air to flow between the ICs. Instead the system would be immersed in a tank of a new inert liquid from 3M, Fluorinert. The cooling liquid was forced sideways through the modules under pressure, and the flow rate was roughly one inch per second. The heated liquid was cooled using chilled water heat exchangers and returned to the main tank. Work on the new design started in earnest in 1982, several years after the original start date.

EKons
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KayKay1313
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    If you want to do this with your own PC, it is possible. But I'd advise you to find a source of recycled fluorinert -- the stuff is *extremely* expensive. – Jules Jun 10 '16 at 19:32
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    Fluorinert is also useful if you want to send Ed Harris to the bottom of the ocean. – hobbs Jun 12 '16 at 23:43
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    Something a little more modern is Novec, which is a 3M product. It's used for everything from fire supression (where water would damage equipment) to cleaning electronic equipment. Unlike oil, which can provide problems if you need to change hardware, it won't stick to your hardware. It's used in some CPU coolers ('water' cooling) and I've seen a display at one of their sites where a normal mobile phone was submerged and fully operational, allowing you to send texts or call it. – Baldrickk Jun 13 '16 at 15:34
  • Some models of the ETA-10 submerged the CPU in liquid nitrogen. Nitrogen is easy to obtain. You just need a good way to cool it down enough – Theodore Norvell Jun 18 '16 at 16:21
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It would seem that pure water would not cause any electrical problems given its insulative properties, and it's further suggested that you would want deionized water, but the problems that arise are only partly due to the introduction of contaminants (e.g. minerals, salts, metals, etc.). Even if you could guarantee that no contaminants entered the water, problems are inevitable on account of the autoionization of water. Neutral water does not remain neutral.

benJephunneh
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    having un-insulated electrical circuitry running in water will ionize it quickly too... – svin83 Jun 13 '16 at 07:24
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    @svin83 It sure will. You essentially have a bunch of cathodes and anodes in the water. – benJephunneh Jun 13 '16 at 14:54
  • @svin83: Only if it exceeds 1.23V. DDR4 runs at 1.2V and is safe, but PCI-e causes problems. – MSalters Jun 16 '16 at 10:43
  • @MSalters: Care to elaborate on why it has to exceed 1.23V to become a problem? – svin83 Jun 16 '16 at 12:53
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    @svin83: 1.23 Volt is the voltage needed to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. It means you don't just have auto-ionization from 2*H2O => H3O+ & OH-, but you are also getting all the ions from the electrolysis process. – MSalters Jun 16 '16 at 14:13
  • That wouldn't mean it's safe, as you say, you'd still have auto-ionization :) – svin83 Jun 30 '16 at 13:25
  • And you'd still have +12v, GND and even -12v in the ATX connector. I don't know if water knows where 0v is or if it just reacts to the *potential*. But +12v and -12v, that would give a voltage difference potential of ~24v. – svin83 Jul 12 '18 at 18:13
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As the water (in conjunction with oxygen which is always in water, taken from the air to some equilibrium) would corrode metal parts, you have to prevent the metal parts come in direct contact with the water.

This can be done by painting of the components in some water resistant finish. There are several coatings out there exactly for this purpose, protecting electric components from water. Although this paints are meant for occasional dew, some of them work quite well for total submergence.

You just have to made sure your finish doesn't break contacts that are needed (just spray paint after connecting all plugs needed) and doesn't stop cooling (eg. keep the paint off the CPU heatspreader or sand it to a very thin layer there).

While some special praised paints doesn't seem to provide a long term protection (see here: http://hackaday.com/2013/12/26/neverwet-on-electronics/ ), more simple plastic sprays or expoxy based resin paints may do if the layer is thick enough.

dronus
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H2O

does not conduct electricity, however distilled water is more like

H2O  <-> H20 + H + OH

Actually the % of the ions is really low

just 10^-7

So every about 10.000.000 molecules of water you have also a H and a OH ion. (If I remember correct my studies over pH, in case I'm wrong just let me know I'll refresh some book or look at wikipedia)

but enough to cause troubles in the long/short run (depending on intensity of current and magnetic fields)

And here you need just a minimal differential of potential to cause water be subject to electrolisis, hence the ions will be pulled out of water thanks to the magnetic field and will react with metal parts.

So actually you have ions inside water that can still carry charge (and so electricity, even if low currents), and despite that any magnetic field, even minimal will cause ions to separate from water and hence attack any metal part (beacause also parts in different metals act as catode-anode)

In reality water is corrosive for metals even without currents (well technically the metals will create a current even if not plugged into a power source), but current can accelerate/mitigate the corrosion (of course since computer parts are not designed for that, it is likely that a computer part would provide the exact current to counter the corrosion and hence will corrode.

CoffeDeveloper
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    The positive ion is actually H3O+; no free hydrogen ions in water. That makes a big difference here because the H3O+ ion is much bigger and heavier than a H+ ion, and a much worse conductor. And the pH=7.0 is for pure water at room temperature; heating causes quite a bit of extra ionization. – MSalters Jun 16 '16 at 10:46
  • Thanks I suspected I was remembering that in a wrong way (6 years from last chemistry exam XD) – CoffeDeveloper Jun 16 '16 at 10:54
  • All those un-insulated conductors will become anodes and cathodes as soon as the board is in contact with water, so the ionization will only accellerate no matter how pure your water is... There will always be impurities.... The Motherboard and all other components ARE impurities too... Unless you clean them all thoroughly first... Thermal paste, residue from the manufacturing, fingerprints, dust etc. will also contaminate the water. and different metals in water, several of them conducting electricity... NO DICE. – svin83 Jun 16 '16 at 13:00
  • There are also trace amount of deuterium and tritium in water. Any chance that the rig could turn into an atomic bomb if it ran long enough? :-) – fixer1234 Jun 16 '16 at 19:02