Liquid Cooling vs Air Cooling: A TechSpot Comparison

[Guest]

I switched to water cooling a few years ago but kept having pumps fail so switched to a Corsair H60 and absolutely love it. The closed loop system is "install it and forget it" while the standard water cooled systems require a lot of maintenance. Also the closed loop systems make a lot neater installation.

 

[Steve]

Water cooling uses fans to. So I'm not following why you would use fan failure, as an excuse to switch from air cooling.

Not only that don't forget that you also have to worry about pump failure which can be even harder to detect sometimes. If you are spending $50 per fan you must be getting some insanely good ones, strange that they die.

 

[ET3D]

How does using a cooler like the Hydro H75 affect the cooling in the rest of the system?

 

[treetops]

Water cooling uses fans to. So I'm not following why you would use fan failure, as an excuse to switch from air cooling.

With water cooling you need less fans? Well that was my understanding. I was buying 250mm fans. They aren't cheap. Well I looked it up I guess they arent that much, I was hoping with a water system id only need a back fan.

 

[Steve]

How does using a cooler like the Hydro H75 affect the cooling in the rest of the system?

For the most part it doesn’t at all. The only components that can suffer are the motherboards power circuitry but depending on where and how you mount the radiator this can be avoided. Case cooling might also take care of that problem for you.

With water cooling you need less fans? Well that was my understanding. I was buying 250mm fans. They aren't cheap. Well I looked it up I guess they arent that much, I was hoping with a water system id only need a back fan.

It should only replace the fan that would be dedicated to cooling the CPU since that is all this is doing. You still need plenty of air-flow to cool the other internal components such as GPU(s). Plus depending on the radiator setup you might need to force cool air in so that the radiator doesn’t get hot.

 

[Mugsy]

Because I'm sure someone out there is wondering, I'm using a Seidon 120M with my i7 4770K. I got it dirt cheap for just $29 after mail-in rebate. It's not listed as being compatible with Socket-1150 cpu's which is why it was going for so cheap, but I knew even the most basic water-cooler would out-perform the stock fan. And it does. Both cooler AND quieter than air-cooling.

I added a second fan for push/pull cooling and my idle temps are roughly 36'C. Under light-gaming and graphics benchmark stress, I see temps around 45'C. I wouldn't try to throttle the cpu up to 4.2GHz, but it handles a minimal overclock to 3.9GHz without breaking a sweat.

Don't think I'll ever air-cool again.

 

[Mugsy]

How does using a cooler like the Hydro H75 affect the cooling in the rest of the system?

For the most part it doesn’t at all. The only components that can suffer are the motherboards power circuitry but depending on where and how you mount the radiator this can be avoided.

A slight caveat.

By venting your CPU heat outside the case using a water-cooled radiator vs an air cooler, other components in your case (like your air-cooled video card) won't be trying to keep your card cool using warm air.

 

[Guest]

That someone is me. Thanks for confirming that an i5 2500K OC'ed to 4.5Ghz at 1.38V will run cooler with the Seidon 120v water cooler than my CNPS 9900 air-cooler. Cheers

 

[pedro125]

This is a great blog article but it is a mistake the way percentages are used with temperature.

Iit is valid to use percentages for temperature rise relative to ambient. To do this the experimenter needs to measure room temperature, or even better the temperature of the intake air.

For example, if system 1 is tested in a warm room at 30C and produces a CPU temperature of 80C that is a 50C rise. If system 2 is tested in a cool room at 20C and produces CPU temperature of 80C that is a 60C rise with a 20% greater temperature rise.

Thanks for the fine article. I am probably going to use the Corsair water cooler for my mini-itx compute server!