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Comment by deadbunny | Hacker News Reader

If the pump fails the CPU will thermal shutdown and be fine once you've replace the cooler/pump.

Also not sure if you're counting AIO coolers in with water cooling but they are very reliable.

In theory. I've heard many unscientific anecdotes of CPUs being killed this way. My understanding is that in a liquid cooling system without flow, or with no cooling system attached at all, delta-temp over delta-t is so high that the thermal cutoff circuits might not react fast enough before other parts of the chip have been damaged - especially if the chip is under load at the moment of failure.

On the other hand, a heatsink provides a decent amount of passive cooling all by itself, so when the fan fails there's a buffer that slows the rate of heating to a safe margin.

That is incorrect, the thermal protection circuits operate well in advance of the actual junction death temperature. Usually 20C or so minimum on mobile and more on Desktop. The CPU will throttle like mad first to save itself and then just reset the computer assuming the BIOS doesn't block the boot in the first place.

My TR4 II 360 OC AIO's pump failed recently; it took about 1 hour of intense Deep Learning training to reach 100 degrees at which point the motherboard shut down. I was dumbfounded about what was happening, then after ruling out Titan RTX, power supply etc. problems I noticed a slow climb of CPU temperature. AIO manufacturer didn't even ask for anything and sent a replacement right away and computer is happily number crunching again.

My be quiet heat sink is giant and came with two fans. And I have the ability to add a third.

If one of the two fans fail i’d guess temps may raise a few degrees and that’s it. I could even manually test it with one fan and light loads to check one fan performance.

Modern CPUs adjust to their level of cooling. They don't 'burn up' even if there is no heat sink at all. What you are saying sounds like it is either fear based hyperbole, rumors from over 20 years ago, or both.

I agree with you that a properly designed CPU shouldn't instantly fry for lack of cooling but is water cooling really worth it? As far as I can tell outside of very esoteric special-purpose equipment it seem very uncommon in the professional world and seems mostly popular with g4m3rs looking to impress their peers with their $10k gaming PC builds.

In my experience air cooling with a sufficiently large heatsink is simple and very reliable. Water cooling is more expensive, trickier and can fail catastrophically.

I use the AIO water cooler on my home system because I can get the system essentially silent (0.5m from my ears) at reasonable temps. They are also a lot less fiddily to deal with (install, ram access, etc...) compared to the huge air cooler you would need for comparable performance IMO.

All in One (AIO) also known as a closed loop cooler for the uninitiated. They're water coolers that come in a single pre-built piece that you just attach like any fan.

Source: Been rocking Corsair AIO coolers for around a decade now. I did have have the pump fail in one of them after around seven years of use.

Is not about cooling performance but noise reduction. You need fewer fans and can use bigger ones (= less RPM) giving you a double whammy of noise reduction.

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