Air is better than water
Unless you need extra gpu cooling. Which I don’t so I’m a hurricane boy weeeeeeeeeeee
Yes this correct. I always use air cooling for my self and clients computer builds. With water cooling, you are asking for trouble.
It’s definitely easier, simpler and cheaper.
Water cooling can be quieter, though. Some big radiators and you can cool a gaming PC with hardly any airflow.
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.
it’s more of a hobbit than anything.
Bilbo Fannings
The fellowship of the rig
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.
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.
Didn’t Linus tech tips do a video on this and find that water cooling doesn’t make much if any difference.
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.
*NH-D15 🤓
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.
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.
Welcome to brown town population cool
Noctua master race
I love the sound of jet engines during morning boot-up.
I didn’t know they even made a three-phase computer fan. That’s nuts.
NH-D15 supremacy
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.
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!
It can cause your motherboard to warp. Believe it or not, water cooling can be too extreme at very concentrated points. Just look into how most metal based architecture needs to account for hot/cold shifts causing the whole structure to shift around. Same happens to motherboards but on a far smaller scale
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.
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.
Where there is a will, there is a way
Got to love that condensation that will happen in the PC
At last instance…
Kind of beautiful
Cries in SFFPCs
Hard to tame a 5800X3D in a 8L case
I slapped an arctic 240mm in my Hyte Revolt 3. Had to… Change things up a bit though
I think it depends on the use case. Personally, I simply don’t jive with the idea of conductive liquids swirling inside my expensive PC.
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.
No coolant is non-conductive after it leaks. It will mix with dust that has built up on the surfaces of the components and become conductive.
The main reason for distilled water is to prevent corrosion and deposits forming inside the loop.
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.
But yeah, air cooling ftw
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.
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
I agree with you in most cases.
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.
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.
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.
just admitting you dont know how cooling works. thats cool.
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.
I like not having to worry about a leak destroying all my expensive hardware.
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.
