Air is better than water
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.
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.
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.
Didn’t Linus tech tips do a video on this and find that water cooling doesn’t make much if any difference.
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.
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 🤓
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.
That is why you have dust filters
It’ll take dust over water any day of the week and weekends too.
My GPU had a shitty blower cooler, switching to water-cooling made my system so much more quiet!
I don’t understand why they sell GPUs for up to $2000, and they still come with the same crappy fans we had on $150 cards.
Want watercooling? Have fun invalidating your warranty.
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.
Did you consider this earth shattering idea of replacing shitty stock fans with actually good fans? Or mounting atop good fans?
Blower style coolers on gpus can be quite good just depends on the card. I’ve had good blower cards and bad blower cards also in certain cases it may be beneficial to get a blower card over a normal card for temps alone as they stuck air up and blow it out towards the back
Water cooling feels unnecessary and expensive. Like most of my hobbies. I don’t get this particular one, but I can appreciate why people might.
The problem with Noctua is that you need a lot of space…
Because a water pump, water block on both the CPU and GPU and tons of tubes, don’t take up much space?
Imagine having a big Noctua on every component…
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.
DIY Perks on YouTube did a beautiful machine with a Noctua cooler on a GPU. All with a nautical theme.
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…
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).
Welcome to brown town population cool
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 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.
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 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
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
Just bought one of those brown monsters for a new build, can’t wait to try it
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 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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
