Why do people pay so much extra for liquid-cooled computers when fans seem to do the same thing?
In: 3
1. Flexing. It’s fancy, it’s expensive, and PC building is a hobby for a lot of people, not just the act of buying any old tool. Kinda like people who tinker with custom cars.
2. Larger maximum heat transfer. At the end of the day, both air and watercooling will have to mash air through a radiator to get rid of heat. However an air cooler has to be right on top of the CPU, so it has to fit between the case sides, the RAM and the gigantic GPU. A watercooler can have a half-meter (well, 480mm) radiator spanning the entire top or front because it is not limited by rigid, short copper heat pipes for transferring heat from the CPU to the radiator fins.
3. Flexible placement. It kinda ties into the previous point and only really comes into play with Mini ITX and other small for factor PCs, but [you are *not* fitting a 120mm tower cooler into this flat fuck](https://youtu.be/0vIL0MG-NwY). You can however finagle a 120mm water cooler and a very small form factor GPU in there.
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