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.
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.
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.
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 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
Small form factor computers are a lot easier with water cooling. That way the GPU can be put right next to the motherboard, and the CPU radiator moved away from that area.
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.
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.
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