I Spilled Coke on my Gaming PC… NOW WHAT??

Oh, no! What do I do? What do I do? AHHHHHHHHHHHH! While this is all totally understandable, it’s possible that our friend here can still slavage this situation. But, he needs to get through step one as quickly as possible and get right to step two. Shut down and unplug all the things. Assuming you haven’t flooded the entire room, all you gotta do is flip the switch on the back of the power supply or rip out the power cord. If there's any liquid near your AC power though there could be some risk

of electric shock so you'll want to head to your breaker panel and turn things off there instead. Just be quick about it. With that out of the way now it's time to prep our operating table and our tools. There's no job too messy for our new Noctua Edition LTT screwdriver and we can get those hard-to-reach screws with our new shaft extension LTTstore.com and we've got everything else that we're gonna need laid out here. Before we use any of that stuff though there's a couple more safety measures

that we need to take. First we need to get our power supply unplugged from any other sensitive components in the system. Remember that the capacitors in the power supply can still hold a charge even when it's not plugged into the wall and it is imperative that no power is running through any of your components because it's not the liquid that kills your electronics it's the stuff dissolved in the liquid that makes it conductive and can cause a short circuit or in the long term can cause corrosi

on. For that reason it's also imperative that I get to the CMOS battery on the motherboard as quickly as possible. Oh, oh, oh, oh. In case anyone was thinking, oh they faked it. Hey there little buddy please don't power anything okay? Okay. Depending on your cable management you might have some difficulty removing connectors from the motherboard side of your system. I actually couldn't get at the 8-pin CPU connectors because of this AIO liquid cooler and if that's the case you'll be happy that y

ou have a modular power supply. In this case it's actually Corsair's side modular one that made this super convenient to disconnect. Let's unplug this drive while we're in here. This looks an awful lot like a crime scene doesn't it? And believe it or not the similarities are more than just cosmetic because now that we've taken care of any immediate threat it's time for us to slow down to a more methodical pace. While also taking a moment to acknowledge our sponsor for this video, Origin PC who b

ravely offered up one of their custom gaming PCs for our little science experiment. Nothing that you've seen so far, nothing you're about to see is simulated. We glammed up the intro a little bit obviously but we really did dump a full can of coke into here. Not because we support the senseless destruction of computer hardware but because we are optimistic that we can at least get most of this back to Origin in working order and learn a few things and maybe show you guys a few tricks along the w

ay. These guys were especially concerned about the Corsair IQ-Link components. IQ-Link allows up to 14 devices like RGB fans, coolers and pumps to send power and data through a single cable to a system hub simplifying your wiring. All that we need to know now is whether it survived. Before we proceed there are a couple of don'ts. First you need to take careful stock of the situation and avoid any unnecessary movement that could spread the spill into difficult to clean areas. Depending on the ori

entation of your components you could be dealing with anything as small as little droplets that got blasted everywhere by a spinning fan to a giant carbonated pool on the back of your GPU that turns into a waterfall pouring down the PCIe slot down your motherboard or tumbling straight over the other side into your power supply. Which brings us to don't number two. Don't open a power supply. Especially one that's full of Mountain Dew. Number three is don't trust old forum myths so you can put awa

y your bag of rice and instead grab a box of shop towels to get started. I'm gonna begin with the GPU. A because it's the most valuable component in my system and therefore the one that I'm most concerned about and B because being oriented horizontally here it took the brunt of the spill. Regular paper towels will work for this in a pinch but they're more prone to leaving behind lint and other contaminants so if you are using a paper based product just ensure that you're using a dabbing motion r

ather than a wiping motion. This particularly matters when you're wiping a bare PCB where there's a chance that as they disintegrate they can grab surface mount components and carry them away. If you prefer and if you have the budget for it microfiber cloths or coffee filters are popular lint free options that are frequently recommended for this but I don't know about you usually I'm just going for whatever is the nearest thing and realistically our priority at this stage is soaking up as much o

f the spill as possible as opposed to worrying about every little piece of lint. We're gonna have links to all the different sort of recommended materials for this job in the video description. Once you've shaken and dabbed as much liquid as possible out of each component you're gonna want to set it aside and move on to the next. Some relatively okay to manhandle this GPU for example has very little exposed PCB so just get everything you can off of it shake it and put it down. Others you're gonn

a need to give them a little bit more care for example on your motherboard please don't start pawing at your CPU socket trying to get the fail out. Even if there is liquid between the CPU and the pins and there is there are other ways to remove that that don't risk damaging the fragile pins because I guarantee you put a paper towel or a microfiber anywhere near those you will bend them and it is game over. As for the power supply if there is any chance that liquid got in there my lawyers told me

that I have to say buy a new one. $100 is a lot less than a trip to the hospital or to the cemetery but this is me and I'm willing to take the risk so I do plan to take a crack at this but later and with a healthy dose of please please don't try this at home. Now that all the sensitive components are out of here we can use a wet microfiber cloth to wipe it down and de-sticky-fy it but as clean as it might look when we're done with that you must resist the temptation to throw it back together. E

ven if it looks good and even if it does fire up it's probably a ticking time bomb at this point and we need to give it a proper cleaning because the thing is the areas you can see are not the places where the spill is gonna gather dry out and eventually cause corrosion and getting into some of those nooks and crannies dim socket that's gonna require some disassembly of heat sinks back plates or other accessories and some liquid courage that wasn't that far off at the beginning with my strat but

also not alcohol yes just not the kind you drink and not yet as crazy as this is going to sound and look our first cleaning pass is actually gonna be a rinse with good old-fashioned water but you need to watch out because not all water is created equally. It's worth noting at this stage that sometimes the thermal pads are going to come away with your heat sinks in which case no problem little dab right there and these can probably be reused as for the ones that stay behind on the motherboard I

would get those off as best you can and then put them in a safe place ideally back where they came off of so that they a don't get lost and B don't get dissolved we'll get to that in a moment I guess we've waited the warranty of our GPU as part of this process but realistically that was when the can of coke spilled over the back of it not when we removed that warranty void of removed sticker Beautiful. In the case of the GPU leaving the pads on the cooler isn't really an option because the coole

r itself needs to be cleaned so taking pictures is your friend. Tap water varies wildly depending on where you live and it can be full of impurities including ions of calcium magnesium and so much more that might be left behind as the water dries so we are generally better off avoiding the tap deionized water is a much better option having passed through an ion exchange system trading most of those random ions for additional hydrogen and hydroxide which team up to make us more of that sweet pure

h2o the removal of those charged ions leaves deionized water unable to conduct electricity which is another nice bonus but it can still have organics or other uncharged impurities if you're worried about those a reverse osmosis process might be more suitable for your needs deionized water is commonly used by PCB manufacturers to clean circuit boards during production distilled water meanwhile which is what we have here is the product of a completely different process the water is heated to boil

ing and vaporizes the impurities remain in the original container while the water vapor is collected and condensed into pure water free of any contaminants that might be left behind when it dries it's also free of any electrical conductivity at least until it picks up ions from the crap that you put in it which we're about to do as you may know water is an excellent solvent and we haven't allowed our spill to dry yet so any contaminants on our boards are likely to get picked up and carried away

with the water as we rinse them we would recommend a bath followed by a pour from a fresh bottle this is gonna be a little hard with just two hands that Jordan do you mind oh hey that'll do we want to pay extra attention to any contact pins like in our memory slots PCIe slots CPU socket I'm having way too much fun right now if a spill has started to dry and leave residue some gentle attention with a soft brush like a toothbrush will go a long way warming up the water for that matter also goes a

long way in breaking down those stubborn dried-on stains I feel like I'm in a detergent commercial right now anything with moving parts can be a little on the trickier side so fans conventional hard drives optical drives for these ideally you're just gonna wipe off any surface spills just like we did before a little bit of alcohol can help here but you're gonna have to be aware that some plastics don't respond well to alcohol and you're gonna want to try to avoid getting any fluid into the beari

ngs so that's back here on that note it's probably worth noting that I would not recommend using any sort of detergent if you can avoid it it's going to leave behind a residue and going to cause as much damage as it potentially saves now that we've got all of our spills rinsed away we could probably just take all our components leave them somewhere warm ideally with some airflow to dry out but if we're impatient we can accelerate the process with a second rinse this time with 99% isopropyl alcoh

ol which means it's disclaimer time if you are going to do this make sure that you are in a well ventilated space away from any flames or sparks or motors and the smoking lamp is definitely out alcohol is not only an excellent solvent helping us to remove any non water-soluble contaminants it's also hygroscopic which basically means it loves water and it wants to hug it and squeeze it and call it George that means that it can pull any non evaporated water out of its little hiding spots by reduci

ng the surface tension then because alcohol evaporates much more quickly carry that water away allowing you to put things back together in as little as I'd say about six hours in your warm drying well ventilated spot to accelerate this process even further some pressurized air from a can or a battery-powered blower will help to push the water and alcohol out of those tight spaces and encourage it to evaporate it can also help you do a sanity check on your cleaning job if you're watching the liqu

id disappear and seeing white or gray residue left behind that's bad. Time to start over. Now let's turn our attention to the original power supply I know I said already not to do this but it's still possible Origin’s gonna be like no you can't even have that in the video but come on guys how about a watermark like one all over the screen okay okay in a perfect world we would discharge the power supply before doing anything with it you can do this by like shorting out the backs of capacitors whi

ch is a thing but please don't you can also do this by pressing the power button on your computer we don't really have any of those options so without opening it because I still really really wouldn't recommend that and don't want to show you that we're just gonna give it a quick iso bath anything that was gonna discharge is probably discharged that fan I mean it might live you know even with the isopropanol we're gonna want to leave that for a while. Wait as I was putting this out to dry I real

ized something the Coke is not getting carried away by the isopropyl at all. We might have to water bath it. That feels so much more wrong for some reason can't put my finger on why but the coke is definitely soluble in the water. I didn't even think of that before we started is Coke isopropyl soluble? The answer is no. Now we throw it back in the iso just to accelerate the drying process. Then we hope for the best. Oh. Once everything is dry I would strongly recommend a test run on a non-conduc

tive surface like a cardboard box which of course we did but I didn't want it spoiled for me so I'm here for the moment of truth you guys ready? Okay what are we looking at here none of the RGB is lit up that's a little scary this fan’s not working these fan’s are not working. Now I talked before about how moving parts can be very very difficult to clean but that doesn't necessarily mean that it won't boot up no signal that's not good okay I was pretty confident until now oh by the way if you no

tice there's a power supply sitting here we're taking our first crack with a replacement power supply and all the original cables we're not going to try this until later. I'm a little stressed right now though maybe the GPU. There’s some work to do. To be clear I'm pretty sure these still work and we're gonna try and resurrect them with the help of this bonus IQ link cable that we forgot to put in when we were reassembling but it's probably worth mentioning that depending on the cost of the item

you've got to factor in if your time and cleaning materials are worth what is in most cases probably a $7 case fan or $25 optical drive I mean these aren't $7 case fans so we may want to tear them down wash them re-lubricate and reassemble them but your mileage may vary. Speaking of mileage I'm gonna try replugging the GPU cable from this side check the plugs see if there was any melted connectors or anything like that which we wouldn't be blaming on the design in this case if it was on the ben

ch during this troubleshooting I would have the advantage of being able to quickly pop things off and inspect a lot of the time you can find any corrosion or any shmoo that's built up in connectors and slots more easily when it's not in a case but I wasn't here for that and I have told the person who was here for that to not tell me anything so I'm flying blind. Curse you d6. If there’s any error that can't be explained through other means it's either power supply or RAM ah yeah but it's worth t

rying this will tell us is it the GPU or is it the slot we don't want it to be the slot well depending on the cost of the item we may want it to be the slot on the motherboard compared to our GPU but from a troubleshooting time standpoint it's easier to swap a GPU it's kind of crazy how clean the whole thing looks though. Come on tell me something oh no this still might not be game over here time to go deeper now you'll probably think Linus said graphics what are you doing pulling at the CPU but

here's the thing all your PCIe and memory endpoints make their way to the CPU socket if there's any shmoo or other contaminants in it it's easy for it to get in the way of these contacts which can cause a slot to not work for example I don't see any though there's a bent pin I don't think it's bent enough to be causing the problem but it's certainly not helping so I'm gonna poke it. Well Jordan I hope whatever it was that you were hoping to tell me about this was not additional things other tha

n what we just found well don't don't tell me anything though guys we've got this. Origin PC I got you. Maybe that was it we could look up the diagram if it's leaked or posted somewhere and kind of see what those pins correspond to but for our purposes all we really care about is does this computer work now so we're just gonna see. Are we stuck on 7f now? Are you oh no we're not oh good oh geez. The good news is this GPU might still be good the bad news is that the motherboard almost certainly i

sn't. I'm assuming you encountered something similar while it was on the bench no oh which doesn't necessarily mean that Jordan did a bad job and wrecked everything because he's you know clumsy or awful or I'm just teasing it really doesn't mean that I am those things. I'm just teasing it really doesn't mean that sometimes these things can work for a bit and then fail however it is possible that Jordan made a mistake so it's worth doing a little bit of investigation yes so when I hit it on the b

ench my hit power I immediately got stuff on screen huh like your typical BIOS yeah you've replaced the CPU and all the things yeah and I'm like okay good enough turn it off cool so we got farther than you've gotten today all right yeah let's go I have new hope one quick troubleshooting step is just to pull everything out of the motherboard you never know when things can be confused hey real troubleshooting guys to everyone who complains we never actually do tech tips on this channel I see you.

Without changing anything else yet we're gonna try a different slot for the GPU. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa Are you rolling what the hell just happened? No touching. Full touching wait what did change this time did I reseat it this time yes I reseated it. Reseated the CPU. I would suggest let's go into the BIOS first and make sure it's set properly I would suggest let's go straight for the Hail Mary whoa full complete victory GPUs going in now let's go. So that’s the screen I got before. Nice!

All right I'm caught up to Jordan. One thing we never considered yeah we never turned this on before we've dumped coke in it did we really not I mean it was running to show the fans were on I mean it's Origin PC right? I mean if it worked now then it probably worked when they sent it to us I mean I'm just saying you know I'm not I might have done some stuff to it but hey maybe it was broken when I got here. Mafia tactics I mean his legs was already broken I had to unplug that PCIe connector in

order to plug in the other one so hold on one sec. Here we go, here we go, here we go, I'm confident I’m confident. I don't want to miss it yeah okay ah we probably cut a lot of it out but we've been sweating for a while here okay we dumped a can of coke in this computer you gave it a bath twice then you gave it a bath can you guys believe after what you saw that anything came out of it? These are the real tech tips you guys. We got you yay 32 gigs of RAM both SSDs detected Wow who doubted I saw

you doubt before do you doubt any longer well we haven't seen Windows yet. Wait did we put the fans back on in the wrong orientation that's entirely possible balls oh no balls Oh balls whole rads got to come out. really cuz you can't get in here Really? Cuz you can't get in here frickin eh, man there it is that is awesome. Okay ah on the AIO there's a USB connection that's presumably for data and then there's two of these IQ connectors yeah one of them needs to go in and one of them needs to go

to this fan which is buried. Hey yeah okay everything's online we'll be with you in a moment. Ah it's not time to close it yet though we've won but we haven't achieved complete victory. Really please don't try this at home for actual reals. Here we go, here we go, here we go. What are the Vegas odds on this one? Give you 47%. The real moment of truth. And she's back on now look nothing about this video was a recommendation to pour soda pop into your computer and even if you spilled a fraction o

f what we did your results could be completely different there are a lot of variables at play the one thing that we did really well though is we acted fast and that's the most important factor whether you've spilled a little bit or a lot of fluid is to get it powered down and get the cleaning process started right away of course we're not a hundred percent out of the woods yet I think that until we actually run a game you guys aren't gonna be quite on board with that this system is fine all righ

t low-key 300 plus FPS no problem this is it there's no denying we did it you guys but just because it's working today doesn't necessarily mean that it'll work forever if there is still some coke on any of the electronic components there is a possibility that it will eventually cause corrosion so if we did a great job of cleaning it this system could be a workhorse for many years to come but if we didn't it may only be a temporary fix so with that in mind it's very important that this doesn't ma

ke you over confident about the sensitivity of your electronics realistically speaking then Origin PC took a big gamble sponsoring this video they've got an excellent warranty but it doesn't cover things like dumping cola into your PC the good news is even when you don't have warranty through them anymore they do do lifetime tech support so you can give them a call or email them if you need help with something if you guys enjoyed this video man when's the last time we did something this crazy th

at would be similar oh yeah go watch the one where we used weird Aliexpress cleaning supplies on PCs that was actually a lot of fun that is an under watched video it's really funny