[SOLVED] Computer survived massive water damage. How is it still working?

Jan 5, 2020
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3 days ago there was a storm here on Connecticut, lots of wind and rain. I went to work and left my window open, my computer sits right by the window where my desk is located at, I came back from work to find my desk completely soaked, and so did my computer, which was on and the fans were spinning wildly, with the monitor displaying no signal. I immediately unplugged it from the wall , took a look inside and there were droplets of water everywhere, I'm no computer expert, but there and then I just knew that computer was done for. As a desperate attempt to save what I had, I grabbed a hairdryer and set it to the lowest temp, not to hot, just a warm air, spent like 30 mins blowing everything to try and dry it out. When I thought I was done I put everything back on, pressed the power button, and the fans started spinning wildly, the GTX 2070 Super fans sounded like it was going to take off. "I killed my GPU" so I thought. I decide to lay the computer aside and just mourn my loss. 3 Days later I thought about trying to diagnose which components I needed to replace after the water damage, if everything was not dead. I plugged on the wall, press the power button, and it just boots up to the windows desktop. I open apps and programs to see if everything is ok, and it is, next I fire up some games and it works as if nothing happened. Now I'm here amazed by this comeback and I just need to know how did it manage to survive this? Are computers nowadays that resistant? Or did I get lucky? Is the PSU responsible for somehow protecting the components?
 
Solution
You did the right thing and you were lucky. It's likely that the first bit of water that hit your internals did so in a way that set off one of the safetys and it shut off.

Once the PC was off, there was no further damage; it's not the water that directly cause damage (it's not enough to cause corrosion), but the particles in the water conducting electricity that causes the damage. If you had spilled distilled water, your PC likely never would have even turned off (though I don't recommend it, because there will still be H30 and OH, and autoionization is a thing).

DSzymborski

Titan
Moderator
You did the right thing and you were lucky. It's likely that the first bit of water that hit your internals did so in a way that set off one of the safetys and it shut off.

Once the PC was off, there was no further damage; it's not the water that directly cause damage (it's not enough to cause corrosion), but the particles in the water conducting electricity that causes the damage. If you had spilled distilled water, your PC likely never would have even turned off (though I don't recommend it, because there will still be H30 and OH, and autoionization is a thing).
 
Solution