Air Cooling vs Watercooling... Which is right for you?

what's up guys js2 cents here we're going to talk about a topic that every single year seems to come up but every summer i also like to do the summer of water cooling but today we're just going to talk about some water cooling topics and that is is water cooling dead with the efficiency of air coolers these days and then the power requirements of cpu sort of coming down over time the question is is it even worth bothering with water anymore with no parts markup and only a 75 build fee redux gaming pcs are the obvious choice for gamers who demand the best without paying extra with as little as a few clicks you'll get a pc optimized for you and the games you play at a price that fits your budget and all redex pcs are backed by two year warranty to see all that redux has to offer and to start configuring your next pc head to the link in the description below alright so first and foremost let's just kind of talk about some of the the basic fundamentals the difference between water cooling and air cooling both of them use air water coolers are still technically air exchangers because they're using air to cool the radiator the radiator is just how we're moving the heat from one place to another and then getting it to the atmosphere air coolers do it in the same way they transfer it through heat pipes which usually now these are vapor chambers which means they have a wick and they have a fluid in there which is designed as it heats up to carry the heat through convection up into uh the heat pipes and into the heat fin array or the heatsink array which then your fan moves air through it to cool it so essentially the anatomy of a water cooler and air cooler are very similar you have your cooling plate which is in this case the pump uh cold plate combo which is what's touching the heat source to pull heat away from it you've got your water pipes which carries the fluid from one area to another you've got your heat pipes which take place in an air cooler to get it from the heat plate to the heat sink you've got your radiator here which has fans attached to it to move air through it to pull the heat out of the system which is exactly what the heatsink fins are doing here uh you have your fan moving through there and then the heatsink fins are absorbing the heat and then moving it to the atmosphere and then the uh method at which the transfer is happening in this case is a pump physically moving water through the system whereas this is happening through the actual heat differential between the cold plate and the fins and the wicking technique of how a vapor chamber works so essentially anatomy wise they're very very similar the difference is water has a much higher thermal capacity than air the reason why i'm even telling you any of this is because back in the past cpus were extremely inefficient they had very large processes versus where we are today they also were very high heat loads or wattage loads we should say now the typical usage of even a high core count cpu is about 95 watts but if we were to go back just five or six years when x 299 was new and we were seeing eight core 16 thread processors we were easily seeing 150 to 200 watts under full load conditions but jay the tdp well tdp and actual heat load are not the same as they're totally different figures you'd have to look into another video or another explanation as to why that is but the realistic heat capacity which we're dealing with here is much higher than the tvp that's just power draw power draw and heat creation or heat itself is not the same figure so water coolers were almost necessary if you wanted to maintain the turbo clocks for as long as possible and have your cpu not start to thermal throttle or is it thermal throttling no it's just working along a sliding scale of frequency to temperature ratio which is all pre-programmed in there thermal throttling is when you go below your advertised speed because it's trying to keep itself from dying because it's getting too hot that's the official difference between thermal throttling and a thermal scale but water because it has a much higher thermal capacity and it's much faster at absorbing that heat through the cold plate made it almost necessary if you were running anything like a threadripper or a high core count xeon or even uh you know x299 like a 5960x type cpu which was the first eight core 16 thread cpu that i ever used and going from a 4790k devil's canyon to x299 is why i ended up putting so many radiators in skunk works because it was so dang hot however 2021 is not exactly the same anymore we've got core counts going up which without the efficiency you're seeing now in cpus we're keeping the same exact tdp about 95 watts only the core counts continue to increase and the core clocks are coming up with it so for that reason is why we're seeing such a close uh delta or temperature delta between aio slash custom loops in air coolers these days because the necessity of carrying away heat has declined over the years or i should say at least stayed the same as the core counts and efficiency of processors increased we're seeing a lot less power needed to run these high-end cpus so some might argue at that point water cooling is dead well that's not always the case let's go ahead and talk about the efficiencies of water cooling in the environment air coolers and water coolers are definitely direct one-to-one ratios between the environment at which they're in what i mean by that if you've got a 22 celsius degree environment your computer is in a room that's 22 celsius and your cpu is running at 70 celsius because of the under load and the air that's going through the radiator if your room increases one celsius so will the temperature of your cpu because the cpu if now this is also theoretically that you're at full speed on the pump your full speed on the fans you've got it's maxed out on its cooling capability as the environment increases so will the temperature of the cooler there's no arguing that the coldest a water cooler could ever possibly get is the exact temperature of ambient and creating that is nearly impossible because there is obviously a rise in temperature of the fluid because it's absorbing heat that's hotter than the environment itself so you'll never get it to be perfectly ambient but that's the best you could ever possibly hope for the difference is the thermal capacity of water air has a lot less thermal capacity the amount of fins that are on your cooler are obviously going to dictate how cool that can get what we have here is a twin tower or a dual tower cpu cooler which is essentially two of these right stacked front to each other where instead of the fins or the heat pipes coming out from the side they come out longitudinal depending on which way or orient it and then you've got two of those pipes so you've got the same amount of pipes essentially but two towers that's creating an environment for air to be dissipated or heat to be dissipated through the transfer of of air going through the cooler that's fine in almost every environment but let's say for instance you're in the pacific northwest and you're experiencing heat that you have never experienced before because you typically have a very cool albeit very humid environment you'll notice your pc temps are usually fine because the hottest you might ever see in the summertime is 80 degrees fahrenheit 85 degrees fahrenheit but now you're dealing with you know 40 degrees celsius yes i know i just switched between fahrenheit and celsius sorry i'm dual language here when it comes to temps you're now noticing your pc temps are probably higher than you've ever seen as well and that's because the environment increased now those that are running water coolers are going to notice that that temperature didn't increase by quite as much and the reason for that is going to be just because of the thermal capacity of the water itself now over time if you're running long gaming sessions or long rendering sessions or whatever you'll notice the temperature start to come up but the drawback to water coolers though is because they're so efficient by pulling as much heat as possible out of the system you're gonna notice your room is probably gonna get warmer too because you are more efficiently taking the heat out of the cpu and into the air whereas those with air coolers might not notice their room get quite as hot when it comes to air coolers versus water cooler so both have their pros and their cons water cooling for the most part though is uh it's more of a niche thing these days it's not nearly as necessary but it's not going away i've seen a lot of people argue in videos saying water cooling is unnecessary it's stupid why does it still exist well it still exists because more people are actually putting aios in their computers these days than they are air coolers because of the fact that they depending on the size of the aio that you get there's a crossover between air coolers and aio sometimes you can get a cheaper 100 or a 240 millimeter aio than say something like a big dark rock pro or a knock to a d16 or something like that where it's going to cost more the drawback is you have more moving parts specifically the part that matters most is the pump itself if the pump fails which is one of the things people hated about aios all-in-one water cooling units versus a open loop which has custom parts that you connect yourself is about the longevity and the life span now aios typically would have a very small cold plate very thin which limits the amount of transfer that you get itself because the cold plate will absorb the temperature from the cpu and then the water will absorb the temperature from the cold plate so you have a bigger thermal mass between the two which takes a little bit longer to get to full temp but once it does you'll notice your overall temps are much lower on a water cooler than most air coolers depending on the situation the pump itself is usually the weak point a lot of these are based off of an asetek design which holds a major patent in the united states so in order to run an aio depending on various loopholes in the patent you'll find most of them are based off an azatec design almost all round ones are asatech where a lot of the square ones are custom one-offs but what you'll notice here with corsair's latest coolers you added a little fill plug and the reason for that is that specifically is designed to deal with the other issue of aios which is um permeation that's right yeah permeation that's where it actually will evaporate through the tubes because even if it's sealed it's never 100 sealed and over time you'll notice you'll start to have some fluid loss and that was a major drawback to water cooling specifically with aios a custom loop you can just open the cap of your reservoir and top it back off and you're good to go but even though it's come pre-filled and pre-bled where all as much of the air as possible can is out of the system you'll have permeation where you start to lose fluid through the tubes and other areas that are not completely non-porous and so you'll start to hear the pump whirring you'll start to hear some trickling it starts to sound like a fish tank and then that's when you know it's time to get rid of your ao but now that we're starting to see companies add these little fill ports at a very strategic spot which would allow you to take it out of your system put this at the highest point of the loop open that cap get a tiny little funnel little squeeze bottle and just kind of cap it off you know top it off get it as high as you can and then you're up and running again the cold plate design improvements and the pump designs have also made aios just that much more efficient but the other thing is like now we're getting giant aios like this is the h170i from corsair this is a 420 millimeter radiator three 140 millimeter fans which means if you want to have the quietest system not just the coolest but the quietest system you scale up to a larger radiator you run bigger fans at lower rpms which means more surface area more airflow without as much noise the difference between air coolers and water coolers for the most part the air cooler is still completely dependent on the case itself to exhaust the hot air at which this is putting into the case whereas aios if they're mounted onto the exhaust or the top of your case are completely independent of the actual case itself well almost independent where as long as you have enough airflow into the case and you balance your pressure right you're going to be a much more efficient air transfer of having the radiator at the very top exhaust exhausting air directly out of your case means you're not going to have as much neighboring heat absorption into components for instance your graphics card isn't going to have a hot cpu cooler right next to it it's kind of the same example of like a blower style cooler where it takes almost all of the air through a cooler of the gpu and exhausted out the back of the case whereas a axial fan which has the three fans or the two fans is exhausting into the case and the case has to take the heat out means that you are more efficiently taking the heat out of your system another positive of water cooling is the fact that depending on your case you can fit anywhere from a 120 240 360 or now 420 radiator inside of your system giving you a ton of thermal capacity directly relating to the cooling of your cpu where with an air cooler this all has to fit right on top of the cpu meaning you're never going to get the amount of volume and heat transfer out of an air cooler that you can out of water and a radiator now it's getting close the technology especially the addition of vapor chambers has made that much less of a spread than it used to be however if we continue to see cpu scaling up more and more and more eventually air coolers are going to have to evolve in some way to get even larger and probably stand even farther away and be more like spread out like an air or a water cooler is um but you know obviously air coolers have their place they are simple the only moving part in it is the fan and as long as you keep your case clean and you don't have a ton of dust accumulation on your fan it will probably never fail on you before you upgrade or you're probably going to change your fan anyway to something that's uh rgb if it's not or you can always upgrade your fan to a higher rpm which gives you a little bit more cooling capacity of your air cooler sure you can do that with radiators as well but in my opinion one of the benefits of water cooling is the noise trade-off for the the heat transfer the downside of what of of air coolers though is their size and what you'll often find is bigger air coolers like this be quiet dark rock pro here versus this noctua is let's say you've got this one this is the one you bought at the time you built your system and you want to upgrade your cpu and you had yourself like a ryzen 5 1700 which is not a bad cpu but it's older and the core counts have definitely gone up since you get that if you want to put in something like a 5950x this little guy right here would barely get the job done and you might find yourself not maintaining turbo clocks or or even just getting a little bit too warm and starting to deal with some sort of thermal throttling because of the fact that this cooler was not designed for that level of heat load whereas water coolers give you a lot of head room in how much heat they're able to handle so then you're buying yourself another water or air cooler something like the dark rock pro which is designed to handle that type of heat load but now you're going to start having issues where does it fit on your motherboard is there going to be issues with your ram not clearing because of how big the cooler is is it going to interfere with the vrms that are now getting bigger and bigger on motherboards because of the fact that they again the big power draw or the big the amount of power draw capable of 5950x is under load and the amount of heat that that vrm is going to generate delivering all of the you know 1.45 volts to 16 cores is going to create through the vrm those heat sinks are getting bigger and taller and thicker which now i've seen more often than not big coolers start to interfere with those which means you have to do some serious research to figure out if the big giant cooler you're getting is going to actually clear any of that and then the bracket systems themselves sometimes being almost impossible to reach depending on how old the cooler is or how well they thought about thought it out we're trying to get it mounted down especially on intel like a mainstream platform not necessarily like 20 um 2011 or something like that but when it comes to mounting it down sometimes it's kind of cumbersome to get it installed there's trade-offs there's pros there's cons to all of it is it dead is it pointless for many of you you would say yes what you do with your air cooler is enough to get the job done and that's perfectly fine and many people like myself are gonna almost always run water cooling because i love the way it looks i like the heat efficiency of it i like the fact that i can have way more cooling than i actually need and it's it's just some it's way of life for me i take the risk of it leaking all the time but i also really like to when i'm doing something requires full load look over at my motherboard and see what the temperatures are and i like seeing 45 degrees on a 59 oh what do i have 5900x in my system yeah i know i got a smaller one next nick's got a bigger cpu than me i got cpu envy but that's okay i built it for him so it's still mine but i digress they're not dead they both have their place and this is where you guys have to sound off in the comments below are you using water cooler is it if you're using water cooling as a aio or a custom loop if you are which what are you using and what's your cpu and what are your temps like or are you using a high core count cpu with an air cooler if so what cpu what air cooler and what are your temps like it'd be fun to kind of compare and contrast some of the results down there oh and more importantly how hot is your environment that's a big one we live in a hot environment that's another reason why water cooling has always been something i've used thanks for watching guys and as always we'll see in the next one

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 369,766

Rating: 4.9194875 out of 5

Keywords: air vs water, air vs aio, aio vs air, air cooler vs watercooling, aio, cpu cooler, best cpu cooler, best cooler for cpu, watercooling vs aircooling

Id: RQ3c0kspOb8

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021