The only reason I have water cooling is that I bought my pc used and it came with water cooling. I’m too lazy to change it. At least the RGB lights on the motherboard were switched off with a simple toggle in the BIOS.
If it came with it. You may as well use it! Look into overclocking your cpu if you xanAio generally is wat more efficient than air coolers. Although I would never buy one myself. To much hassle
Like i give a fuck what cools best. I want my system to look awesome and the AIO sure looks better imo. At the end of the day: build the PC that makes you happy.
Yes, this is the best argument in favor of air cooling. Air cooling has less points of failure.
With water cooling there’s tons of potential problems that “haha wind go brrrr cooling” just doesn’t produce: Water block gummed up with mold? Take a performance hit. Pump dead? Sucks to be you. Leak in the system? Enjoy replacing your motherboard.
Main issue you might encounter in air cooling is just “fan died, replace fan”. (Obviously not counting thermal interface materials since they are required for both cooling solutions)
There are some data centers that are water cooled though. I know OVH uses water cooling for some of its servers, and also seems to be developing immersion cooling.
Quieter, less point’s of failure, and in many cases taking up less space. I have compressed air for dust. In the consumer sphere and almost any enthusiast sphere, air cooling > > > water cooling
Don’t use compressed air on your fans while they’re plugged into the board! It generates current that feeds into your mobo. Usually nothing bad happens but there can be problems associated with it.
You’re supposed to use distilled water which is not conductive. At least that used to be the case last I saw liquid cooling.
In the end it’s simply not worth it for me. You still need to radiate the heat out, which usually means a big fan, which most air coolers nowadays have anyways.
Liquid coolers are by definition just an extra heat exchange step unless you’re venting heat into the ocean or something like a nuclear plant. Otherwise, the atmosphere is your final heat sink either way.
Unless a liquid cooling radiator is significantly larger than the air cooler that would fit directly on the CPU there’s no point whatsoever.
I’ve been building my own PCs for a looong time, and I’ve been skeptical of using water cooling in any of my machines.
This changed recently for me, when I got my first 4000 series nvidia gpu, that fucker is huge! And it runs hot, spewing all of its heat directly into the middle of the case. I had serious concerns with this gpu + massive cpu air cooler getting in the way of positive airflow through my case.
And this is where water cooling made perfect sense to me: transport the heat away from the cpu, thus clearing a ton of space from the middle of the case, then have a radiator at the top of the case dissipate that cpu heat.
This allows for a ton of air to go through my case, evacuating all of that heat blowing out of the gpu. This also allows for other heat sinks on the mobo and other components to passively cool better
There is a point though as a water cooler can cool an extremely small area better than heatpipes. Look at Zen 4 processors for instance. The CCD is so small and offset that many air coolers don’t properly line the heat pipes with part of the CPU making the most heat. Because of this Noctua even makes and sells an offset bracket to try and move the heatpipes over the CCD. Meanwhile a waterblock should cool the entire area at effectively the same rate as it doesn’t rely on vaporizing the coolant and condensing but just pushing coolant through regardless of heat saturation.
Only a fraction of people should really notice that like overclockers and generally people buy coolers they don’t need.
I think water is rather rare as a coolant these days. Organics (chemical sense not farming sense) like propylene glycol or some kind of glyme aren’t potentially corrosive to metals if spilled, are harder to grow shit in, have lower volatility, and have a higher thermal limit. Maybe also with a little bit of antifouling agent thrown in. My main gripe with them is that if you do spill them, they don’t evaporate and you’re slipping over the floor for the next few days because you missed a spot.
It’s simple for me. Points of failures of air cooling: fans. Failure states: fan fails, system heat protection kicks in and shuts down.
Water cooling? Points of failure: fans, pumps, tubbings, fittings. Failure states: fan fails (best case), worst case? Liquid goes over electronics while they are powered.
yea but whatercooling is a complete new space in the whole building process, when building alone gets boring it opens a whole new door to customization, dedication and „learning“ (its not a really usefull skill), but if its something that pleases you, its just freakin cool, even tho it sucks compared to air cooling its a huge subspace in the custom pc scene. its an enthusiast thing for people who are a bit freaky :) i love it and im always happy when i look at my machine
Eh, how does it suck compared to air cooling? I mean, yeah it’s expensive and requires more maintenance, but it’s way quieter and keeps the components cooler than air cooling.
E: a lot of people who are saying all the stuff that could go wrong sound like they’ve never built a WC system and refuse to acknowledge that many of these issues are likely operator/installer error. Installation absolutely does require more care and effort than an air cooled system. I’m not trying to suggest anyone WC or that it’s better than air, you do you, I don’t care, but WC is trouble free if done correctly with good components.
It has more points of failure, and that failure can be more catastrophic. If your air cooler falls off somehow or the fan dies, CPUs these days are pretty good about shutting themselves off before they melt. If your fittings leak, it can destroy everything.
That’s certainly a risk one takes. FWIW I built mine with custom hard lines and fittings, and after the initial shakedown test, have had zero leaks in 6 years. YMMV, I guess.
I sincerely doubt this as some sort of random or unknown issue. It uses the exact same attach points as a stock cooler or even a good aftermarket cooler. None of those warp the mobo or gpu. Keeping the temperature extremes down should prevent warping, if anything. I’ve been through two WC motherboards and 3 gpus and have experienced zero warping.
The only thing I can offer is either the boards that do warp are cheaply made and unable to support the weight of a good waterblock or the installer is over-enthusiastic about securing it and does so too tightly and thereby causes the damage. My current waterblock has specific instructions regarding installation to prevent over-tightening and damage to the motherboard and components. IOW I suggest it’s an installer problem the vast majority of the time.
you can destroy your graphics card before even putting it in the system when you fuck up the installation of your block? your system can leak and everything dies because of a short? one cirtical component in your loop dies (like the pump) and all of the work starts over again? it doesnt suck, but if youre not into this whole builiding thing, it sucks compared to aircooling because you have almost no advantage beside temps and noise, even those can be worse if you dont know what youre doing. it doesnt suck as a whole thing, but compared to aircooling its not worth the money, the work or even the flex of you dont enjoy the process of putting it together!
A big ass CPU heat sync and fan like that is usually at least as good as most water cooling options. Often times it scores higher on performance tests. It depends on your exact hardware of course.
Every liquid cooling system is pretty much that. Eventually you need to give it to the outside and the outside is usually air. Heck even river cooling for Power plants ends up “air cooling” through the rivers surface.
Nah, not everywhere. Our village has no water meters because, why. Spring water from the mountains is not treated, only monitored for microorganisms and contaminants and fed into our water supply by gravity. Doesn’t really matter if it runs through a computer on its way to the sea or not.
In places like big cities or flat plains where the water needs to be pumped and treated that’s a different thing.
I think that the point is to get a much bigger radiator by moving it to a less cramped location. The point is to make the process more efficient, not to change its nature.
Yes. The advantage is that you can make the surface area of the air cooling part much, much larger. I had a water cooled system that could do web browsing and other basic tasks with zero fan speed (though it was better to leave it on very low speed to avoid hunting behavior).
Also, there’s some benefits to thermal mass. Short term spikes can be absorbed by the water without increasing fan speed.
I once built a home theatre PC that was completely passively cooled. The case was basically the entire heat sink. It got the heat from the CPU through heatpipes. Unfortunately the shitty motherboard died due to unreleased reasons and since then I didn’t have the time or money to revive it.
The cases aren’t even built anymore. No idea why, it was really cool.
The noctua air coolers work so well. As long as you don’t care about the station wagon color scheme I think it’s the best cooler for that price range by a large margin.
I don’t follow. The cooler designs on modern midrange and high end GPUs are way bigger and more elaborate than anything that has ever shipped on a $150 GPU.
There are also great coolers that come on stock cards, you just have to pick one that isn’t shitty. No temp issues with my EVGA or Gigabyte cards that have huge heatsinks and 3 big fans on them.
It’s a fun thing to do. I like my setup (O11 dynamic XL, two 360mm rads, dual pumps, both CPU and GPU blocks), but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone. It’s a lot of effort and expense for a little gain. But it’s a hobby on top of a hobby, and that’s fine if you want to go for it.
Yeah, I’m CPU/GPU cooled for a good while now (4-5y). It’s a lot of efforts and make it harder to upgrade. You gain a bit of silence, but it’s really not worth for most people. Like you said, it’s more of a hobbit than anything.
Yeah, upgrading is definitely a pain and more costly. Redoing the tubes if you went with hard tubing is part of it. If you didn’t go with some generic waterblocks you’re stuck with them fitted to the motherboard and good luck reassembling the fan cooler on the gpu if you kept the 50 small screws that held it all together.
That said, I personally won’t go back to air cooled. The low noise and steady temperature are worth it IMO.
Big air coolers don’t fit because there isn’t enough height off the CPU inside the case. An O11 Dynamic (regular size) doesn’t fit an NH-D15, for example, but it fits water cooling with at least one regular thickness 360mm rad on top just fine. (And also one on the bottom, and a thin one on the side).
EDIT: I wanted a Noctua but with my two big GPUs, there is no space for a Noctua… and depends on which motherboard also includes water cooling tubes already built-in.
Much more space on CPU (at least you see the RAM and other components), yeah, depends on how you built it. The PC can “breath”. When I said “you need a lot of space” I mean on the CPU, if your RAM and 2 GPU is all near there… all the heat gets concentrated.
As I have more GPUs, inside the case it’s full of components and with a Noctua (if it even fills in) would be hard to “breath”. It’s not that difficult to understand…
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