If yo are shopping for a workstation, custom gaming, or for an enthusiast PC, you are probably at least considering investing in the water cooling. But is water cooling really worth the extra pennies? Is water cooling really better than the air cooling? Let us go over some of the major advantages of air cooling vs water cooling and find out which solution is best for you.
So what is water cooling?
Water cooling is using a liquid powered cooler – similar to a car radiator – this takes advantage of the awesome thermal properties of water in dissipating the heat from the processor and very often the video cards as well. The Water cooled solutions can be maintenance free, simple, closed loop radiators like the LiquiCool 8 all the way up to some insanely complicated set which has custom piping and tubes.
Is water cooling necessary?
Ten years ago, I would have said yes, water cooling is a necessity on all high-performance desktops. Components are much less efficient than they are now and therefore generated significantly more heat, often resulting in instability or even shortening the life of the components. But with the latest hardware innovations of the past few years likeSkylake and Intel Broadwell-E or NVIDIA’s GTX 10 series graphics, improved efficiency has resulted in less power consumption and heat generation.
When is air cooling a better option?
Advanced air cool solutions have come a long way to closing the gap with water cooling, at least for most mainstream users. For most of the normal consumers working under normal operating conditions ( by which we mean not overly stressing the CPU, normal environment, not overclocking, etc.), air cooling is the best option.