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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

> Cooling $100 Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280

99% of programmers don't need a machine with liquid cooling. Even if they are targeting high performance hardware, development work can be run from a more modest machine.

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He appears to be trying to build a fairly silent machine as well, so the liquid cooling will help.

Does he need that much power, though? I certainly wouldn't, but for what he is doing I can see it. He's running 12 containers in VirtualBox. Avoiding VirtualBox would help a lot, but depending on what he's doing, he may not be able to (and on Mac, I think you have no choice -- he may not realise that he'll get tons better performance without it). On top of that he's doing Closure (presumably with power hungry development toys) and lots of video conferencing. I often pair program remotely with video conferencing and it can eat half of your CPU(s). Mumble and Tmux is a much better way to go, but again setting up and getting used to the tooling is not trivial.

$2K and building your own machine vs doing some pretty serious work trying to lighten the development environment -- I can see an argument for it, even if it's not the way I would choose to go.

All-in-one watercooling systems are not more silent. The pump is audible and the lack of radiator surface means you'll hear the fans when they ramp up.

My motherboard has a liquid cooling setting for managing fans. I can rarely hear the pump and fans are very silent. It's an AIO system from corsair with 2 fans (I'm outside & can't remember the name now).

Is it anecdotal evidence time? I have NOCTUA CPU coolers in multiple Fractal R4/R5 cases and all 4 of these machines run at 100% CPU for weeks on end and you also can't hear anything. I considered going the water cooling route, but from what I could gather from various reviewers, is that like the parent you replied to, the pump makes noise as well as the fans when going overtime (not to mention a lot more expensive and time-consuming to install). Maybe it has something to do with the case? What case do you have? Did you do anything extra to silence it?

I have a mid-range Cooler Master case, don't have the model name in mind but I don't remember it having anything specific for sound isolation.

When it comes to these things, I can't find anything but anecdotal evidence. Even the most respected reviewers usually have a sample size of one.

Yep I have the NZXT Kraken X61 and I can only hear the pump when I put my ear very very close to the tower.

>He appears to be trying to build a fairly silent machine as well, so the liquid cooling will help.

One fan is a lot quieter than 2-3 fans + pump.

Given enough money and a big enough radiator (Not to be confused with a heatsink) you can skip the fans. That said, such a radiator is about as big and expensive as a car radiator.

Something like Watercool MO-RA3. This can dissipate about 500W heat fanless. (4x that with full fans) Of course the room might get hot after hours of constant use.

Combine with fanless (or watercooled) PSUs and very quiet pumps for maximum silence.

I'm always concerned about VRM, RAM, and other circuitry surrounding the CPU in watercooled setups. A good fan will provide some airflow across all of these.

You should check out the new Calyos case

http://www.calyos-tm.com/calyos-fanless-pc-workstation/

For desktop hardware with mid-range GPUs liquid cooling doesn't really make sense. Good air coolers and airflow which is not "in your face" bad will already be inaudible at 1m.

It's counterintuitive, but AIO liquid cooling is often louder than a comparable fan cooler.

It takes a lot of static pressure to force air through a radiator, and such radiators are definitionally mounted near some kind of air intake/outlet so there is usually very little noise dampening available. Also, AIOs usually have the cheapest parts available (pumps/fans) and are lower quality than you would get from a (much more expensive) custom setup.

This. The stock cooler (that is included in the price of the Ryzen) is good enough for most stuff. Even if you want to "splurge" on a cooler, you can buy a monster cooler for ~40 bucks that is barely audible and can cool even an overclocked i7-7700K without any issues.

Liquid cooling is almost at the same price, doesn't make the build more expensive and Ryzen is great for overclocking - I think more than 1% of programmers - especially those who made decision to get Ryzen - will benefit from liquid cooling.

Totally. For me the main benefit is that it makes for a far more clean build. High performance air coolers make for a very crowded solution.

It also means the machine runs quieter.

He also didn't need to blow $500 on an SSD when he could have gotten a $100 SSD and a $100 hybrid drive and double his storage space.

I would rather have 1 fast HD than deal with which mounts go which speed.

The nvme ssd drives are several times faster than the best sata ssd (sometimes 10x). Although I'm not sure you would be able to tell much difference. But loading up large virtual machines frequently might be a use case where a difference would be noted.

There are quite a few benchmarks and real world comparisons on YouTube that seem to indicate significant improvement in some workloads.

I'm not saying it isn't faster, I'm merely pointing out that it was a pretty serious investment in comparison to the other points of the build, and attempting to defend the idea that liquid cooling isn't insane if you're going all-out with other aspects, too.

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