I once had a PC with watercooling. It died because I was drinking with a friend and wanted to show it off. So I removed the sidepanel and my drunken self tipped the beer bottle which promptly spilled over the running mainboard. Welp, it was some form of water that killed my PC I guess.
Okay but what is there to know that isn’t there to know via basic physics and chemistry?
Any cooling works by allowing heat to gather in a source like say a heat sink combined with a way to conduct the heat to somewhere. Either into the surrounding air or liquids.
Then you need something to move the hot conducting matter away to replace it with cold conducting matter. A fan happens to be convenient for moving the hot air that gathered around and inside the heat sink.
A preferable (1000x) source would be an actual expert, Gamers Nexus. He reviews cooling solutions and thermal pastes probably more than anyone else, and he benchmarks many models.
The entire computer is throttled into a power consumption you can sink through air coolers. So, unless you are overclocking something, it should always be enough. That will hold until companies start to design the components specifically for water cooling.
But the people claiming it can be quieter or thinner are quite right.
Water cooling is just air cooling that moves the fan. If you have a crappy radiator, you aren’t going to get great cooling. Water is a great way to move heat, which is why we use it for cars, heating, and power production.
I wouldn’t cite LTT for much, but IIRC, that was only true to a point. The NHD-15 is great, but a lot of cases can’t fit one. Same with many other high end air coolers. It might also cool to the same temperature, but is also running the fans harder to get there.
IMO, if you aren’t using at least a 360mm radiator there’s not a lot of point water cooling.
The point of water cooling is that you can transfer the heat from the heat producing component out to a large surface area by physically moving the hot liquid. 2x 360mm radiators give you a ton of cooling capacity. 1x 240mm? You can do almost as well for much less money with a really nice air cooler.
I’d also offer that it allows you to dump all the heat outside the case and avoid warming other components (assuming you put the radiator on an exhaust fan). This is a benefit with any size of radiator.
Server hardware with their 15000rpm fans will do that. We have a customer specializing in GPU intensive number crunching. They have little storage cupboards accessible from the hallway for every two person office. Their workstations sit there and the cables go through the wall to the desks.
The biggest bottleneck on both of them these days is getting the heat away from the cpu and into the cooler fast enough. Unless you’re de-lidding your cpu, using a peltier or some other lower than ambient powered cooling theres probably a negligible amount in it.
Yes thank you. I went through a water cooling phase, what a pain in the ass. Worrying about the pump, algae, topping off reservoir, leaks ruining your motherboard. The concept is nice, but the reality is high fucking maintenance for no added value.
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