Why do people pay so much extra for liquid-cooled computers when fans seem to do the same thing?
In: 3
How effective a cooling system is comes down to a few factors, those being heat transfer and thermal mass.
Liquid cooling improves both of these in a few ways, I’ll go through the process step by step:
First, heat needs to be taken from the processor into the cooler, by constantly moving liquid past the CPU it maintains a constant difference in temperature that helps a lot.
Next, thermal mass; this is how well the cooler can handle spikes in heat output, because water has a very high thermal mass it takes more to energy to overload it.
Finally, we want to move that heat to the air, this is mostly down to surface area and by pumping the liquid you can get many times the surface area over even the most effective tower coolers.
TL:DR, combination of cycling material, thermal mass, and surface area.
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