Redpill me on watercooling.
How efficient is it compared to aircooling? Is it safe? Is it expensive? Why is it so niche?
I don't want my new workstation to look like a pile of garbage but unfortunately that's how it is with tower coolers.
Redpill me on watercooling.
How efficient is it compared to aircooling? Is it safe? Is it expensive? Why is it so niche?
I don't want my new workstation to look like a pile of garbage but unfortunately that's how it is with tower coolers.
>I don't want my new workstation to look like a pile of garbage but unfortunately that's how it is with tower coolers.
Well, dont buy a ugly tower cooler then. If you don't plan on overclocking there really isn't any benefit in watercooling for most people. More of a pain really.
>How efficient is it compared to aircooling?
You can get much lower temps with water, especially with custom setups, but as I said pretty much useless unless you oc.
>Is it safe?
Yes, just check for leaks before you turn the system on.
> Is it expensive? Why is it so niche?
Custom water setups is expensive, all in one systems are reasonable. It is niche because of the price and most people dont overclock anyway.
It does look better than air setups as you pointed out tho, if you spend some time and money on it.
Tldr;
If you dont plan to overclock and dont want to spend a big chunk on just looks, its not worth it.
What the water does is it moves the big heatsinks from right next to the components to somewhere else. It is very effective at taking heat and dumping it somewhere else.
The advantage being that you can have radiators that would otherwise not fit in the location that the component is in.
stop making threads for retarded shit that can go in existing threads
I might add; even with just medium sized air coolers, you can get quite good overclocks on modern cpu's. Just make sure airflow in the case is good.
I do plan to overclock and money is not an issue. Is there a place where I can get spoonfed on what to buy and how to set it up or do I have to google it by myself?
Water has some thermal whatsit that makes it take a long time to change temperature.
So it's great for short spikes in temperature compared to air cooling. Like, with an air cooler, the fan might have to pick up 1000rpm to deal with the heat for 5 seconds, but a watercooler wouldn't change fan speed at all.
Google around, you'll learn. I will say, more expensive does not mean equally better cooling performance in water parts for custom setups. Theres VERY deminishing returns in this area, so basicly find something you like the looks of.
just get a corsair h100 and call it a day.
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the redpill on cpu cooling is that if you spend over $100 on cooling you're wasting money
the redpill on gpu and motherboard cooling is if you water cool them you're wasting money
these don't apply if you actually make money from having slightly faster and cooler components
as computer technology advances and trans sisters get smaller everything gets more efficient and you have more power with better thermal properties so things need less cooling, you'd be better off just buying latest generation components
It's snake oil. Overclocking does nothing and stock coolers are sufficient. You can buy an aftermarket cooler if you want less noise but that's the last stop for rational thinking.
Below this post you will see manbabies defending water cooling as not being absolutely retarded just like audiophiles defend $15.000 power leads.
>tfw can't even buy a quiet aircooler for a 1600x in canada without paying over $100
Buy used then.
Makes shit run super cool
Expensive
Takes work to setup a proper rig
Looks good
Ability to overclock to the absolute max.
Pic is my flashy first rig
(Yes I know it's a bit distasteful)
Water can absorb more hear without heating itself up as much as air.
It's actually the reason we have weather.
Pump noise then pump failure
Into the garbage it goes.
^this
Not too long ago there was a major benefit in cpu water cooling, then that died down and gpu water blocks became a fad. Now I see no reason to do either.
>no reason to do either.
The same argument can be made about high end hardware
People buy shit because they want to.
There doesn't need to be a logical reason
>How efficient is it compared to aircooling?
Depends on how you set it up, consider though that a Radiator is just a big heatsink being cooled by fans - exactly the same as air cooling, except the rad can be placed away from the CPU and can potentially be bigger.
>is it safe
If you're willing to pull it down yearly and clean/flush it, a very long time, longer than the parts they'll be cooling - but only with that maintenance, without it - two years tops.
That's assuming everything was done right in the first place...
>is it expensive
If you want something that's actually better than air cooling, yes, very much so.
>why is it niche
Because to set it up right with a systems that's actually better than air cooling, you're gonna pay ~8x the price and still have potential for failure.
>I don't want my new workstation to look like a pile of garbage but unfortunately that's how it is with tower coolers.
radiators are just heatsinks.
ekwb.com
my wife's son would love it
Also I should add that only counts for custom loops.
AIO is trash 100% of the time.
Consider than Noctua/BeQuiet/Phanteks/etc all offer 7 year warranty on their products (essentially how long the fans will last)
Corsair offers 7 years on their PSUs (same, essentially the life of the fan)
Corsair only offers 12 months on their AIO coolers...
Take that as you will.
I have a corsair h80i gt and it is working very well for me a year later. Low temps too, better than my 212 evo with a 4690k at 4.7 GHz... Just saying you may have gotten that bullshit together through research on the net, but what I am saying is I am a actual owner of AIO and I don't regret my purchase and am glad that I didn't waste time with a custom setup.
I know, I know
I was fucking 17 when I made that.
Back when I out LEDs in everything.
My shower was led
My room full of leds
Front door was LED lit
Old truck has LEDs underneath
My desk was led lit
Damn I was a weirdo
It's all for aesthetics, A good air cooler will do the trick, i've had my 3770k overclocked at 4.8 on a Noctua air cooler for the last 3 years.
Just get a giant air cooler. Dark rock pro 3 loocks good if you don't want a noctua d15 / thermaltake macho rev b.
Buy low profile ram though.
I've been water cooling for years now and what little practical effects it had on performance is non existent now outside of noise levels under load and even that is getting close. Water cooling is 100% a hobby, as useful as building ships in a bottle.
Current build I got going in a Nose 804. Would post it but it's a mess of mixed match fittings/hose types. Once I get it cleaned up i'll post it in guts threads.
The 7700k is at 5.2ghz and the 1080 clocks over 2000ghz. Idle temps are not since my fans at idle run at 500ish RPM. they are set to ramp up when the GPU/CPU get above 70 degrees but that never happens outside of benchmarks. Even encoding video won't get temps high enough unless it's for hours upon hours on end.
I'd say it's more akin to building an aquarium in a boat.
>My medium-end coolers works better than a low-end cooler
No shit? Overhyped212 isn't actually a very good cooler...
However the fact the warranty is 12 months for the regular AIOs (apparently it's 3 years for the 'i' variants and 5 years on the H115i) should show you that even Corsair don't put as much faith in them as they do their PSUs for example.
>I should also point out the BeQuiet has lowered their air cooler warranty to 3 years since they brought out their own AIOs and Phanteks is at 5 years, Noctua is still 7 years)
Go Noctua or Phanteks.
BeQuiet dropped their warranty to 3 years.
>1080 clocks over 2000ghz.
Every GTX 1080 bios has the ability to boost to 1,987mhz given the right temperature and power.
It's built into every bios.
2,000mhz is not a good overclock.
>given the right temperature
You played yourself but you do have a point. Pascal is kinda shitty for over clocking. I maintain my clock speeds with no increase of fan speeds. A lot of 1080s cannot maintain boost clock speeds even with 100% fan speed
There are plenty of good looking heatsinks
Anyways. In my humble opinion the advantage of liquid cooling is how quiet you can get it to be while still having reasonable temperatures. I never built a custom loop in order to have the best temps ever, but I have built them to have an overclocked CPU and a GPU in a loop that's below the ambient noise level of my office.
lol'd, thanks user
>waterblock on RAM
That's just ricing
Pascal is an amazing overclocker
It's just boost 3.0 automatically gets you 95% of the way there by itself.
My gtx1080 will boost to 2,012mhz by itself when it's below 30C
1,987 over 30C(water blocked)
The voltage is limited by Nvidia to avoid damaging the chip yes, that's it's major flaw.
We've already seen 3,000mhz 1080ti already
The OC is there with the right voltage.
On another note, by 70yr old father likes using that LED shower because he doesn't see well anymore.
Yes I know
It's for looks (even though it makes thermal contact)
It's a pain in the ass especially when 1 DIM died and I had to remove it.
>The voltage is limited by Nvidia to avoid damaging the chip yes, that's it's major flaw.
And that's why Pascal is a fucking boring overclocker. Pretty much all Pascal cards will reach 2 GHz, but good luck getting above it unless you apply hardware mods to get past the voltage limit or buy KFA2's HoF cards.
this works against it too, because if the water in the system gets heated faster than the coolers can cool it, you cant bring in cool water from anywhere else, but if you open a window you can bring in ambient temperature air
My Pentium d had water cooling as basically a requirement.
Pain in the balls to install though.
You have to find a way to support the Mobo either side while it sits on top and you tighten the screws from the back of the board underneath.
This assumes, if Intel, you put the bracket together properly and everything lines up with your choice of three fixing holes drilled into each leg (it does but it never really feels like it will)
Got it done but never again.
>How efficient is it compared to aircooling?
Not as much as it was before the widespread use of heatpipes. You can have quiet and reasonably efficient air cooling up to 100-150W, so unless you're running a 16-core xeon and/or overclocking, chances are you don't need it.
>Is it safe?
Less safe than air cooling. Reasonably safe if you're not retarded when assembling it. Do not use for stuff running unattended.
>Is it expensive?
Yes.
>Why is it so niche?
Because extremely few people have 200W CPUs.
>I don't want my new workstation to look like a pile of garbage
1. Buy a case without windows.
2. Profit
So just hold the motherboard in place upside down on top of the heatsink while mounting it.
It's not that hard.
I have a NH-D9L. It's small, but for large cooler do they not have you set up the bracket first, then screw the heatsink on at a later time?
...
What you describe would require three hands.
On more careful examination, I have a Dark Rock 3, not a Dark Rock Pro 3.
The difference is the fan protrudes over the heat sink on the DR3 so you can't do that. With the Pro, maybe you can balance the motherboard on top of the cooler I suppose. But you've still got a meccano mounting thing that has a lot of play in it which doesn't help.
if you cant attach a cooler like that according to the instructions you must be mentally or physically subnormal
Placebo
Which case would you recommend for watercooling?
30-50°c difference for cpu/gpu depending on setups. All-in-one watercooler are mostly for looks.
Spent $500 on a loop cause i wanted silence. Looks neat and performance is decent, but lets be real, good air coolers are more quiet.
Still rocking a 780 cause i cbf draining the loop.
Going back to air cooling with new rig
More trouble than it's worth in my opinion, especially now that you can get high quality closed loop cooling solutions.
yeah duh, watercooler won't change fan speed because it doesn't have any fans at all
Only closed loop worth getting is that EK prebuilt one since its pretty much legit WC gear.
AIO's are shit tier. Same performance as a NHD15 but prone to mechanical failure and is louder.
Only acceptable use case is if you're doing a small form factor build
Personally I think one of the great strengths of a custom loop is the addition of the GPU
Even two slot, three fan coolers from expensive brands are more noisy than a good cheap CPU cooler under load
The noise/temps starts looking really good when a GPU block is added to a custom loop
That's harder to do with a CLC in which case you'll often have to get more than one
Its not expensive
£40 pump, £30 reservoir, £20 PETG tube, £30 fittings, £40 CPU water block
I haven't got a GPU block but that would be another £60.
Mine cost £150 without a GPU block, so around $200
It's also much better looking than a stock cooler and most third party coolers.
The other alternative is a AIO cooler
...why not spend 100 less for an all in one retail system?
AIO is the most inaccurate term
Do you get better cooling than a $80 air cooler for that price?
A. no GPU
B. Style points(get that rice son)
You get more overhead. You can get a higher clocked(hotter running) CPU to the same temps and if you rad is big enough you can add your GPU block too
Quieter
It's cool to DIY, I get it.
For pure cost though, you can always go cheaper than 200.
nowadays the "requirement" would be silent systems without putting 50+ celsius heat out constantly
Oh yeah I personally wouldn't recommend liquid cooling to anyone who isn't interested in the hobby element
I'm not the user who posted that image btw
It requires maintenance, it's more costly and so on, so I get it. But if you can be fucked and hardware is something you're interested in, then it has results
Knew 212 evo is like the standard, compare to popular corsair water reviews and most say "few degrees cooler" (doesn't seem worth 4x the price...)
Find another water cooler for $60 on sale, few reviews say it leaked and ruined the video card and motherboard (one almost burnt down house).
Guess lots of people don't install them right or spend the money, sadly with what they cost I could just buy a nicer CPU.
TLDR
There is a reason you always see air, and almost never see water.
Right now I have two i7 towers in an apartment, one with 970s in SLI and one with 3 GTX 670 cards for Cuda neural network training. When it's running it literally heats my entire apartment in winter, and melts me on warm days. I'm considering water cooling so I can literally use the radiator to radiate some of that heat out a window in summer. Anyone done something like this?
When OP says watercooling I'm certain he means a custom liquid cooling loop
Stop referring to CLCs as AIOs and watercooling
Clcs are very much water cooling.
Just because it has a radiator does not mean it's not water cooled. This goes far beyond computers, BTW.
Loops like your pic and are full retard. They are purely for "looks".
Simple advantage to a proper loop is much better temps and much quieter system. All info past 2008ish is bullshit for the most part. Those builds are for show not performance.
Those CLC, AIO, w/e you want to call them aren't the best a water cooled loop can be. Not close at all really but they still out perform air coolers.
Hey, I'm not saying they are as "good", but they ARE liquid cooling.
>69 replies and not a single shitpost in sight
You guys are alright.
In a vague sense. They often don't use the same coolant as custom loops. They favor long term stability so their coolants are often thicker and probably closer to antifreeze. Their pumps are very under powered.
Like saying all air coolers with heat pipes are the same design.
I never said they were the same design.
But an air cooler is an air cooler, regardless of the quality of design.
Which costs even more, put that money toward a better CPU, or save the money and upgrade more often. (Trying to squeeze more years out of a PC, just save the money and upgrade more often)
>But an air cooler is an air cooler, regardless of the quality of design.
Not true at all. There are many types of air coolers. Passive, different fin designs, heat pipes, carbon tubes, etc
Water cooled loops are adaptable. They're not locked to one component.
I agree, there are many types of liquid cooling too.
Listen to the argument you are presenting...
>>But an air cooler is an air cooler, regardless of the quality of design.
You disagree
>Not true at all.
Then for evidence you back up my claim..
> There are many types of air coolers.
I'm interested in having the same terminology here
Just because a CLC is a liquid loop doesn't mean that's what people are on about when they say watercooling
CLCs and custom loops are so different, it's silly and harmful to the debate to use the same term
Which is a good point, it's an investment, something you will probably use on possibly every build for years and year. Always wondered if I got one like 10 years ago if I'd still be using it today and if so, maybe it was silly not to get one. (Heck I still got my q6600 in the bedroom so who knows)
Cost is what it is. If you have top shelf parts and can afford a custom loop that you enjoy taking care of there is no downside to having one.
The biggest argument for me personally is having the same CPU temps and much better GPU temps while having a silent build
Which is why you differentiate.
Just because Lamborghinis are not civics does not mean both are not cars.
It's silly and harmful to try to ambiguously separate based on design.
>people go for watercooling when the legendary NH-D15 exists
Yes. You're trying to put a narrow term to a very broad application. On an enthusiast level the most advance air cooler with heat pipes etc isn't an air cooler. Pretty common distinction used widely among all sorts of hobbies and professions. Saves time and energy. Otherwise when people say air cooled they would have to say they mean an air cooler with heat pipes made out of copper and coated in nickle. You don't include basic finned copper/aluminium.
It's also known as not being an autistic little bitch.
10 years ago probably not. They advanced too quick from then. 5ish years yes. As long as you take care of the components they last a long time. Pumps wear out and water blocks need replacing if a new socket/gpu comes out.
>bro just air cool
>*breaks your motherboard*
I also consider watercooling to be an inaccurate term, that's why I'm willing to accept it for custom loops.
When I mean all liquid coolers I say liquid cooling
Can't fit it on my GPU so well
I got this as a joke. It cost more than the motherboard on my build and is the biggest fucking thing on it.
how well does it work?
how does the motherboard even support it?
Distilled water > Coolant for cooling performance
Distilled water = liquid
Premixed coolant = liquid
See where I'm going with this?
Iwaki RD30 pump from Japan will last decades unlike the D5
Is it as quiet as a D5 with adjustable speed?
It's not price or effort efficient at all. Unless you're doing a custom loop because you explicitly want the looks/pride of doing a custom loop, don't bother.
>On an enthusiast level the most advance air cooler with heat pipes etc isn't an air cooler.
But, as you just said, it is. "the most advanced air cooler isn't an air cooler".
There is nothing narrow about my terms at all, they are broad terms, by design.
>You don't include basic finned copper/aluminium.
But you do.
Distilled water does perform better than those premixed liquids and won't clog the waterblocks over time.
Costs less too
reddit.com
Are you now saying distilled water is not a liquid?
Also runs on 24v, isn't PWM controlled, is fucking huge, and has the wrong fittings for any commercial water cooling component.
>last decades
Pushing it. Their pumps are rated for like 30k+ hours.
>autism
You can put it in a box with acoustic dampening foam and it's as good as 2 D5s.
xtremesystems.org
>An RD-30 puts out almost the same pressure as two D5 strongs do at 24V.
>I think it's a bit louder, D5s even at 24V are fairly quiet. You also lose some redundancy with just one pump, but RD series pumps are ridiculously reliable.
Are you literally retarded or just a colossal fucking idiot?