Question Pc won't post after little water spillage

JentleSticks

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May 3, 2014
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Hi,
Let's start off by saying I'm dumb for having a water bottle next to my PC. Now onto my issue.

I knocked my water bottle off my desk onto my PC's top vent and water spilled into it, it was a little bit but I panicked and shut the power off from the PSU.

After a few minutes I thought hey let's try turning the PC on, so I did, it would shut off after a few seconds, so I gave up and kept the PC to dry out for the next 2 days.

Here I am after 2 days, and my PC won't post. I turn it on, nothing on the display, the PC then shuts off and restarts and then keeps running without post until I shut it off.

The fans of the rear vent, CPU fans and video card fan spin, I get a light on the audio booster, but no post.

What I've tried:
  1. Reseat the video card.
  2. Swap the ram single channel vs dual channel.
  3. Reset cmos by shorting JBat1 and try plugging the display into mobo onboard display.

My specs:
Mobo Msi z87 g45
CPU i5 4670k
GPU GTX 1060
PSU Corsair cs650M
Ram 2x4GB gskill

Help is appreciated :/
Jentle
 

Quarkzquarkz

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Sep 18, 2013
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What you should've done is try to soak up the spillage by examining it on that day after everything was powered off. Your biggest problem is that if water did splash on your motherboard components, it's a good probability that it might have breached critical capacitors which soak up that stuff like a sponge. Then you're pretty much screwed if that's the case.

What you can do at this point is start from the basics, take out your GPU and use the integrated graphics, take out all memory modules except for 1 stick and put that in accordingly, take out your CMOS battery wait couple minutes and put that back in, start everything up, cross your fingers, and hope for the best... Good luck!
 
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JentleSticks

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May 3, 2014
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4,510
I did take a look inside after a few minutes and saw drops of water on the edge of the motherboard but no water anywhere near any circuits. The water was a small amount, maybe 50ml.

I took out the graphics card and ram modules and removed the cmos battery and put it back in, plugged my monitor into the on board graphics dvi port and tried inserting the ram in one at a time in different slots, still no post.

I just don't understand how a damaged mobo will still make the fans spin.
 
There are countless ways for a MB to fail/have damage, and yet still allow fans to spin....depending on where the water landed and on exactly what was shorted momentarily...

It's not an 'all or nothing' failure....much like failing PSUs, the fact that it 'seems to power up' tells us quite little...
 
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