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Comment by iasay | Hacker News Reader

You can use a fan to cool a computer or you can introduce a Rube Goldberg machine to cool a computer with a fan.

Bar some extreme cooling requirements liquid cooling is about showing off.

In this case, water cooling is not so much about cooling, but more about noise reduction.

One could go really fancy with glass panels, solid tubes, colored liquids and such - yeah, that's where you start showing off (or geeking out, it doesn't always have to be negative). But an open loop can be done in much simpler manner while still providing benefits of better performance and, consequentially, considerably lower noise levels.

Hide the loop in a good noise-oriented case. For instance, I like my Fractal Design Define C [0] with thick steel walls with additional layer of noise-dampening foam. Use soft tubing and some quick-disconnect fittings for the ease of maintenance. As a result you get relatively simple to maintain yet effective cooling setup.

[0] https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/define/define-...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alphacool-Quick-Release-Connector-Kit...

I’ve built the same thing. Fractal Define case with Be Quiet Dark Rock, Be Quiet PSU and 120mm slow fans and it was inaudible under full load of a Ryzen 3700X.

Without water cooling.

Ryzen 3700x is only 65W, of course you wouldn't need to water cool it.

I have Dark Rock Pro 4 installed on top of a 120+ TDP CPU. The fans surely speed up under extensive load, and, although they are fairly quiet, I wouldn't call them inaudible. The post is about CPUs which could in fact utilize the efficiency water-cooled setups offer.

Or overall less noise, especially in smaller cases where you can't fit an extremely large (read: large fan) direct attached air cooler. Larger fans mean more cooling per dB.

Also, water coolers have a lot more thermal mass (because, water), which means that the fan noise that remains can be less annoying as it doesn't ramp up and down as fast with CPU usage, assuming you're driving your fan curve from water temp and not CPU temp.

So it's not fair to say they're just about "showing off" IMHO. There's actual quality of life benefits if you care about noise.

I’ve built several air cooled and water cooled PCs. The benefits are over spoken by a mile. You can run CPUs at far higher temperatures with no net noise increase. And it costs a lot less and has less maintenance.

The larger Be Quiet coolers are far quieter than the best water cooling solutions out there and the only maintenance is vacuuming out the crap once a year.

Edit: also as a friend found the air coolers don’t pee all over your RTX2060 and blow it and the power supply up.

Arguing over everyone’s favorite equipment without a particular application and set of goals in mind is silly. It’s like a formula one driver and a truck driver arguing over which vehicle is best. There’s no “benefits” to one over the other. They have different characteristics which make them suitable for different applications.

I have a PC on my desk with a GPU which already comes with the largest air cooler that will fit on it. I wanted to make to it quieter. Water cooling accomplished that.

I have servers in a closet where I don’t care about noise and I don’t want to maintain them. I use air coolers there.

Use the right tool to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.

Isn't liquid cooling much higher performance? I've seen some liquid cooled PCs with parts below 40 C under load and very quiet fans. I wonder if we could take it even further by placing the radiators out of the air conditioned room or even outside the house.

I was running my air cooled parts at 60oC without the complexity. If you use large fans it makes the same noise. And approximately the same energy is burned off.

Ultimately I moved to M1 because it did the same workload with less watts.

Either way you’re paying money for compute. Do you want to spend that on compute or heat as a side effect?

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