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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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