Air is better than water
Not necessarily, but one, it’s a lot cheaper, two, air leaks are not a problem.
Yes, this is the best argument in favor of air cooling. Air cooling has less points of failure.
With water cooling there’s tons of potential problems that “haha wind go brrrr cooling” just doesn’t produce: Water block gummed up with mold? Take a performance hit. Pump dead? Sucks to be you. Leak in the system? Enjoy replacing your motherboard.
Main issue you might encounter in air cooling is just “fan died, replace fan”. (Obviously not counting thermal interface materials since they are required for both cooling solutions)
Air cooling has less points of failure.
One of the main reasons why brand name workstations and servers are still air cooled… and will probably be for a very long time.
There are some data centers that are water cooled though. I know OVH uses water cooling for some of its servers, and also seems to be developing immersion cooling.
It’s definitely easier, simpler and cheaper.
Water cooling can be quieter, though. Some big radiators and you can cool a gaming PC with hardly any airflow.
Yep, it’s the GPU fans that are the real noisy ones. I can tolerate a noctua CPU cooler but GPU’s are like jet engines under load.
I use a PowerEdge T620 as my daily driver, let me assure you the CPU fans at full speed can be heard clearly through 3 closed doors :P
Remember kids, if you’re ever feeling useless, you’ll always be more useful than a 120mm AIO.
Eeeehhh it’s about on par
Didn’t Linus tech tips do a video on this and find that water cooling doesn’t make much if any difference.
The entire computer is throttled into a power consumption you can sink through air coolers. So, unless you are overclocking something, it should always be enough. That will hold until companies start to design the components specifically for water cooling.
But the people claiming it can be quieter or thinner are quite right.
I wouldn’t cite LTT for much, but IIRC, that was only true to a point. The NHD-15 is great, but a lot of cases can’t fit one. Same with many other high end air coolers. It might also cool to the same temperature, but is also running the fans harder to get there.
