(Answer requested by Victor Zamagni)
You can use vodka. You can use almost any liquid you want — hamster pee, chicken soup, gasoline, melted ice cream, ketchup, unicorn tears, pickle juice, whatever — as long as you accept the attendant extra risks, costs, and engineering involved.
Most PC cooling systems use plain air or distilled/stabilized water specifically to avoid extra hassles. Air and distilled water are both abundant, almost free, and have innately low electrical conductivity and corrosivity, making them excellent for cooling electronics. Cheap, safe, easy — what’s not to like?
But you can, if you wish, use a wide range of flammable, corrosive, conductive, sticky, bioharzardous, or otherwise flawed fluids to cool your electronics.
No one’s stopping you!
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If water had low electrical conductivity, it wouldn’t be so dangerous to drop a toaster into a bathtub.
But in a water cooled system, the water doesn’t come in direct contact with any of the electronics, so it doesn’t really matter if water is conductive or not. The water is pumped through non-conductive tubing, and that tubing is what comes in contact with the parts, not the water. The heat is then transferred to the water that is flowing through the tubing, then carried away to somewhere cooler, leading the water to cool again, before being circulated back to pick up more heat.
Otherwise you could just drop your computer into a fish tank filled with distilled water, turn it on and it would be a viable way to cool your computer, without anything bad happening. I wouldn’t suggest anyone try that, even as an experiment.
The truth is that any non-corrosive liquid with a higher boiling point than water could actually work BETTER than water, so long as the viscosity was low enough to allow it to easily flow through the tubing.
Except mineral oil (aka baby oil). You can actually skip the tubing and submerge the computer into a fish tank full of mineral oil, without anything bad happening, because mineral oil is non-conductive. And plenty of people do build really awesome looking mineral oil cooled fish tank computers, that work better and run cooler than water cooled systems.
Distilled water (not tap or spring water) is actually a pretty good insulator; it’s dissolved salts and other impurities that make water conductive.
You use distilled water in a water cooled system because the minerals and salts in plain tap water can cause corrosion or a build up of minerals inside the tubing, slowing down the water flow rate, leading to inefficient cooling and higher maintenance costs (time & money spent replacing the tubing). And if the tap water evaporates, over time, it just gets worse and worse, with the water having an even higher percentage of salts and minerals to cause problems.
“Not a very good conductor” is not a synonym for non-conductive, and thinking that it is, can be dangerous enough to get someone killed. Distilled water is still conductive, just not as conductive as plain tap water. I still wouldn’t suggest running a PC submerged into a fish tank full of distilled water, like you can with mineral oil, because water is still conductive, even when distilled. It’s at least conductive enough to short out the PC’s circuits and be a danger to anyone that might reach their hand into that tank of distilled water, while it’s still powered.