Surface area of the fin stack matters. An air cooler will always be limited by the space available around the CPU. A water cooling radiator has more flexibility to be placed in around the case.
That said, having less than a 360mm AIO is probably a waste. Also, higher end Intel chips these days are so power hungry that they can’t be physically cooled properly with the surface area available on the package.
By extension, air cooling is global thermal mass cooling, which, by extension is radiative cooling, which by extension is universal entropy cooling or whatever you’d call that.
It depends on which part of the environment the heat is being exchanged with - if your watercooling system is releasing heat to the ground under your house or a somebody else suggested (which is even more effective) a river next to your house, it’s not at all equivalent to air cooling.
Further, the heat storage capacity of a material depends on both the kind of material and its mass, so almost all liquids have a higher heat sforage capacity per unit of volume than air (certainly water does) and solids even more (much more, given their much higher density) so even in the big scheme of things (i.e. were will most of that heat end up in given enough time), even heat released by a watercoolong system to the air will mostly end up in tne Earth’s crust and oceans and only a tiny fraction of it will remain in the athmosphere.
As I pointed out further down in my comment, solids and liquids have a much higher heat capacity than air (or in other words, they can absorb a lot more heat before they warm up), so most of the heat dissipated to the river would end up stored in the Earth’s Crust and Oceans and very little of it in the Air.
Water cooling at what kind of scale? Since you can engineer a system with the final heat exchanger to the environment stuck in a river. Is that air cooling with extra steps?
Some guy once built a geocooled system back in I think 2010, just to cool quad SLI 580s. He had some crazy 6-screen Sony FW900 setup with a fresnel lens.
LinusTechTips has a cooling system that uses a water loop under his backyard pool to water cool an entire home server rack.
Granted uptime seems… less than ideal. They keep not hiring a plumber to do/inspect it and effectively re-jury-rigging it for videos. But solid (liquid) idea.
Well yes. It is. Liquid cooling does have merits. I won’t say it’s better than air cooling in a general sense; at the end of the day, the heat ends up in the air.
With liquid cooling, you can transport it further, use larger radiators… The list goes on.
My key point is that as long as the components get cooled, who cares which you use? Do what you want.
Idk, needs more steps, put a Peltier in it, a heat exchanger with a second loop, and don’t forget the compressor for extra chill.
And also make it so that the end radiator doesn’t radiate heat into the air but into the ground instead, so that it won’t be just air cooling with extra steps.
nah, radiative cooling means that radiation is the only mechanism for heat exchange in use. I’m pretty sure most modern air coolers use forced convection as one of their heat exchange mechanisms.
How does heat get from the water radiator to the air?
Radiation.
Atoms don’t physically touch. The electrostatic force that both binds atoms into molecules and keeps molecules separated is mediated by photon exchange.
Counterpoint: at the boundary layers, right where the air touches the fins, the main mechanism for heat exchange is conduction. Ultimately, convection is just conduction, where the medium undergoing heat conduction is a moving fluid, which massively amplifies the rate of heat exchange.
Air is kinda shit at taking in heat through radiation, but fine at doing so via conduction and convection.
The metal atoms in the fins don’t move into the air. They stay on the fins. The fins’ atoms have to transfer their kinetic energy via photon exchange to the atoms in the air.
The whole point for AIO water loops is that you have more flexibility in radiator placement. For advanced systems you can beat static copper tubes pretty easily by moving more water.
The one where he complained about the cost of running a pump and tubing out to a fucking swimming pool? Like, yes, this is going to cost more than a very good gaming PC.
AIO Liquid Coolers suck, good performance but they’ll eventually get worse as water evaporate and they don’t all offer proper ways to refill, a custom loop is far superior, but then custom loops are such big effort and cost.
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