Hi all..Im looking into water cooling vs Air cooling.. What are your opinions? which is better? why? and can you have both? Cheers Mike
Well I suppose it depends on your needs. I have always heard water cooling will give you the biggest drop in temps, but I think Sam will argue towards air cooling. In the end though as long as your air cooling is providing sufficient cooling theres not a big need to switch unless you just want the cool uv-green(or other color) coolant running through your case
Water cooling is capable of removing a lot of heat, but the best it can possibly do is to cool to the temperature of the water. If you use cooled water or a TEC between the CPU and the waterblock, then you can use watercooling to cool to below air temperature. If you are not going for sub-ambient temperatures, water cooling is rather useless.
Hi guys thanks for the replies.. Killerbug can you expand on sub-ambient temperatures? I mean I am building a gaming machine will this benefit me and my machine? What sort of temps will it run at? Cheers mike
So whst your saying is it's pointless? And unless your going for sub-ambient temps then you'll get a cooler machine from fans?
Water cooling is virtualy useless if you are not overclocking. A good fan cooler will get you the same temperatures within a few degrees.
if you're not overclocking it is truly pointless. If you are, it's a cool thing to have, but not at all necessary unless you want to push the absolute extreme. it is fiddly, very expensive, does not offer lower noise than air cooling, and has a very high chance of going wrong, quite catastrophically so.
when i had my Q9550 OCed to 3.995GHz while running 3dmark, i had my fans on my 120.3 rad off. temps never jumped over 42 ICCR. watercoolng can be passive perfectly fine, but to counteract no fans, the pump has to be maxed out, which CAN caus vibration noise badly, unless mounted on a nice 1/2" thick foam.
Only with certain radiators, and well below the maximum cooling threshold. You had about 120W running through a system rated for MUCH more.
"watercoolng can be passive perfectly fine, but to counteract no fans, the pump has to be maxed out, which CAN caus vibration noise badly, unless mounted on a nice 1/2" thick foam" Actualy, it can be done without fans or pumps. However, the cooling threashold must be rather large (the CPU temp must be much warmer than the ambient air temperature). In this model, the slight expansion caused by heating the fluid serves to move the fluid...a bit like an automotive engine without a water pump (in cars, the water pump is not a positive displacement pump, it just mixes the water inside the block...it does not move the fluid.) This would hardly be ideal for overclocking, but it could be usefull for making a truly silent system with some SSD's.
You would have to have some seriously low-end parts to pull this off though, and if you have, what's the point in watercooling at all? I can run the CPU and Chipset in my work PC passively, and they're hardly bottom end old-gen parts (E5200 and X38-DS4), the graphics card isn't passive yet, but only because I'm lazy. I'm pretty sure it could be (HD4830). Get some nice heatsinks and passively running all but the power supply in a PC with the exception of perhaps one case fan just to destagnatise the air would be easily doable in anything up to a midrange system. It's overclocking and high end (i.e. double power connector) graphics cards that ruin it. As long as you stick with a 95W or less CPU (so only the e model Phenom IIs from AMD, any Intel apart from a QX or i7) you should be able to passively cool a Quad as well. I've not tried it, but I don't see why you couldn't do it (Temps might be a bit on the big side though!)
The main advantage of a passive water cooling system would be seen in a colder envornment, or with a chip designed to run hot (some chips, such as graphics chips, run perfectly fine even at temperatures above 50C.)
The temperatures themselves aren't really the issue, it's thermal runaway. Use too weak a heatsink or too slow a fan and the chip runs hot. However, use too weak a pump or radiator for the heat output and the temperatures never stop rising until they reach critical and the PC shuts down. A passive WC system for an overclocked quad core will fail in less than 30 seconds from cold - I've seen it happen.
I think you are missing the point of passive WC cooling...as temperature increases, so does the pumping force created by thermal expansion. This will not work (and should not be tried) with normal WC gear designed for a pump...this is just for systems designed to use thermal expansion as a coolant pump. Of course, a fan would help such a system greatly, but it could work without one if cooling something like a graphics chip (current CPU's don't run hot enough to make much use of such methods)
Isn't this the system employed by the supercomputer arrays? They pre-heat the water to 60ºC or so and it cycles round?
It has been used on a few of them...the water is not pre-heated, it gets heated to about 50-60C by the processors, and this makes the water move towards the radiators. These radiators may or may not have fans (fans allow for much smaller radiators). The water coming out of the radiators is around 25C (sometimes less, depending on many factors), and is pulled back to the water blocks by the vacuum created by the outward movement of the heated water. It seems like it would not work...but it does! In theory, this should work just as well in a PC case for silent cooling of graphics chips...but it would cost a lot, and take a lot of space. This method could also be applied in very specific envirnments, such as if you live on the north pole, and know that outside temperatures will always be below 5c...
