![]() ![]() Quality matters in a liquid-cooling setup: You don’t want to buy cheap parts to save a few bucks and end up dousing your pricey PC components in brightly hued coolant. (The price is converted from euros, so the 360 in the name may be coincidental.) For example, EKWaterBlocks’ top-tier H3O 360 HFX water cooling kit costs a whopping $360. While most traditional upper-end CPU coolers cost somewhere between $50 and $100, building a liquid-cooling setup can cost far more. One big downside of water cooling is its comparatively high cost, especially if you’re looking to build a custom setup. You can’t discount the cool factor of a case full of colorful, liquid-filled tubes! Water cooling cons Liquid cooling takes a lot of homework, several parts, and careful planning. Liquid cooling requires much less space, and it looks a lot niftier to boot. A huge heat-sink/fan combination might perform well enough, but the best CPU coolers eat up a ton of real estate inside your case. Water cooling is much quieter than stuffing your case full of fans. Sure, you’ll have to pay for them, but you’ll still spend far less cash upgrading or building a nice air-cooling setup than you will on a typical water-cooling loop.Įven if you don’t tax your rig enough to need a bigger cooling boost, a cheap self-contained water cooling loop-more on those later-can help lower your PC’s sound output. You can certainly purchase bigger, better, more efficient fans if you want a quieter rig, or even fans that light up if you’re into that sort of thing. Even if you want to go with an aftermarket cooler for your CPU or GPU, you’re going to be paying far less than you would for a liquid cooling setup. So, the big question remains: Why air? It’s cheap, for one thing. Noctua Aftermarket coolers like the Noctua NH-D14 can handle overclocked CPUs, albeit loudly. Those, combined with case fans, make up the Holy Trifecta of air cooling within a typical desktop PC. Graphics cards and computer processors pretty much always ship with powerful stock fans-you know, the ones that sound like a plane taking off when they roar into action. If your system’s chassis is of the non-bargain-bin variety, odds are high that its manufacturer has already installed exactly what you need-namely, an intake fan in the front that pushes outside air over your hard drives and an exhaust fan that shoots hot air flying out of the rear of the chassis. One of the great joys of using fans to cool your system is that, in a lot of circumstances, you really don’t have to do anything to create a decent cooling setup. Air cooling A stock Intel CPU cooler, as installed in a PC: Not too big, but not too impressive. The trickier bit is making the decision to use one or the other. Defining air cooling and liquid cooling is the easy part.
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