Why do people pay so much extra for liquid-cooled computers when fans seem to do the same thing?
In: 3
Those talking about liquid’s heat capacity are wrong, at the end of the day you have to use a radiator and fans to get the heat into the outside air.
But you can use a bigger radiator with slower moving fans for quiet operation or high speed fans for peak performance
A heatsink is really only as good as its surface area. A traditional tower cooler really maxes out around the size of an [NH-D15](https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15) with two big towers and a pair of 140mm fans. That’s about as large and heavy of a standard heatsink as you can mount in most cases, but its *biggg*
The little all in one liquid coolers are significantly smaller on the motherboard since its just a pump and the contact area, and feed into a separate radiator that can be mounted elsewhere. They seem to come up to 360mm (3x120mm fans in a line) and will perform inline with a big air cooler like the NH-D15 being about as loud and about as cool
Big custom liquid cooling loops are a different story though since you can mount multiple radiators. The CPU feeding a 120x360mm radiator might be about equivalent but having the CPU and GPU hooked up to 2 120x480mm radiators(8 total fans) will give significantly better cooling and/or than just 2 on the CPU and 3 on the GPU trying their bestest in their limited space
Latest Answers