Is Air Cooled Actually Better Than Liquid Cooled? - A/C Computer

hi a couple of months ago we did a video on an innovative and low-cost method for cooling a computer using a window air conditioner and we got a lot of comments below that video and we decided to take people up on some suggestions and want to share some of the results that we obtained after we did some additional testing if you're interested in this process take a look at the original video because i go into more detail about the physics behind the process but to begin with one of the issues that people brought up is the noise factor when you add an air conditioner within the room it does add additional sound pressure and if you've got the computer right next to you and you've got a small room and very nice speakers you might not want the additional noise contamination in the room so you might want not want to do this however if like us you do a lot of video processing or scientific calculations where you're not necessarily sitting right next to the computer or if you wear headphones that isn't going to be a problem because it's not that intrusive another issue that people brought up was the cost of the additional power that's used or the heat that builds up in the room to get an idea of just what the numbers are if you have a standard computer with running within spec this computer will use about 400 watts when you power the cpu the gpu and little fiddly bits on the motherboard and the air conditioner which is a 5000 btu 1500 watt cooling capacity frigidaire air conditioner also consumes about 400 watts and if we're going to be looking at enhancing the performance of the computer overclocking it we're going to be using substantially more power with the computer than we actually use with the air conditioner now if it turns out that the heat buildup in the room is still an issue it certainly wouldn't be inconvenient for you to simply duct the hot air of the air conditioner out a window and in that case thermodynamically there's absolutely no difference between cooling off the entire room with the air conditioner mounted in the window or using and focusing all the cold that comes out of that air conditioner through the computer first the one thing in the room that you want to have operating at a very low temperature because everything else in the room hasn't changed you still are generating heat the lights are generating heat and the computer is generating heat if it turns out that you're in the winter the additional 400 watts added to the inside of the room would just simply counter the additional heat that has to be added to keep the room warm so from a point of view of additional power use it's relatively small and finally if you increase the performance of your computer so that a task that would normally take say an hour takes 40 minutes or 45 minutes you're going to have all of this system on for a shorter period of time again minimizing the differential and the cost of power another question that people had was if it turns out that the way that we operated this thing originally was using a water cooling system we had installed a water cooler with a radiator that was mounted on the top of the computer and they had a simple cooling block that went to the cpu in order to keep the temperature down but because of the obviously the wires and the complexity and the bulk and sometimes the expense of a water cooling unit a lot of people wondered whether or not we could do the same thing with an air cooling unit so i did some research and found out that probably the highest rated air direct air cooling unit out there is the one made by noctura the d15 which is a heat pipe direct radiator that sits on top of the cpu so what we did is we extracted the water cooler and we mounted on the dh-15 and then we did tests at the same power levels and we'll show you what the comparative performance of the unit is because of the smaller profile of the air-cooled unit i had to make some modifications of the ducting that took the cold air coming out of the air conditioner and essentially sent it in through the large radiator area which was the size of this this part of the duct and backed it up compressed the output so that we got a more focused flow of air that just soaked the dh15 with a higher velocity low temperature air coming out of the air conditioner this improved its performance beyond what it would normally have if it was just submerged within the cold air inside of the unit now let me come around here and show you how we did this now the computer that we're using is exactly the same as the one that we used before we linked all the components both the case and all of the individual components in the description below the previous video the only difference we made in this case is we added the noctura air cooler now these come in different sort of models you can get a unit that is black if you like that you can also get a unit that comes with two fans one fan or no fans and the reason that we decided to leave the one fan in is because when we duck to the air through here because of inertia the air tends to focus on this this backside radiator and so by placing the one fan in here between the two it tends to equalize the cooling capacity across both sides of the air cooler and the fan actually acts to obstruct any kind of loss of air flow that we would get as the air is being ducted down through the unit and sends it back through here and out the back of the computer one of the nice things about this particular setup here is that when the air comes out through the back of the computer it goes back into the air conditioner and as i described previously some of the advantages of using this type of a cooling flow are that the powerful fan inside of the air conditioner allows us to place a decent filter in front of the coils so the air that's being blown into the system keeps the inside of the computer at a positive pressure air is always flowing out of it and because that air is filtered it doesn't get dirty even after months of use you won't get any particulates settling on the surfaces inside the computer which is a nice thing the other thing is that the coils in here represent the coldest part of the flow within this cycle of cold air and so they act as what's called a getter they're effectively a dehydrator so that if the water the air temperature drops below the dew point and you could potentially get some condensation the only place it can happen is here because from this point onward the air is always a little bit warmer than it was when it went through the coils so you won't get any condensation on the components inside here now in order to be able to get the air to focus through here i have to mount the duct and because of these modifications i need a little help in order to be able to put this down but i'll show you how this thing is inserted now what what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab the cooling block or the cooling duct and i'm going to place it in here and i'm going to have alex back the air conditioner up so that we can get this to slide in okay i'll put this back here like this and we'll get this that should be good enough okay now start coming forward keep coming keep coming keep coming keep coming keep going keep going looking good so that wasn't too hard and then finally i have a little u-shaped block here that allows me to keep the air from escaping off of the sides of the uh out the sides here before it is forced to go through the cooling radiators so a little screw to keep it on this post here i simply slide this on here like this and tighten this little screw in here so nice and secure it looks pretty decent and when i close this because of the insulation on here the computer tends to keep most of the cold air inside so not only do we benefit by cooling off the cpu but we bathe every other component in here including the gpu and all of the little fiddly bits on the motherboard and keep them at a low temperature which is never a bad thing so when i close the box here i'm going to go ahead and turn on the air conditioner first we get just the fan and then i'm going to turn down the fan speed we don't want it at high speed we want it at a low speed because we get the coldest air and because of this loop of cold air going into the box and the cold air coming back into the computer the temperature of the cold air here will drop down to minus three degrees centigrade that is a big drop and because of the additional flow of air we actually improve the performance of the noctura beyond its its standard baseline cooling so let's go ahead and see what this does when we test it all right if you remember in the last video we took the same computer with a liquid cooler and we were able to reach 4.6 gigahertz at 56 degrees celsius okay so you can see we're at 99 percent here you can see the temperature and the cpu usage just dropped now the temperature will start dropping here but at a max we got up to about 56 celsius today we're going to see how cold we can get let's go ahead okay you can see on the monitor here i have pulled up powermax the benchmarking utility that we used last time and hardware monitor over here like last time you can see that the speed i have it set to 4.6 gigahertz same as last time we're going to be using the cpu sse benchmark set a timeout of 5 minutes and we're going to see if the temperature gets as high as it was last time now keep in mind we're using the air cooler not the liquid cooler so let's start the test five minutes you can see the temperature starting to boost up here [Music] okay we're at 98 of the way through so before it stops so you can see 39 degrees celsius 4.6 gigahertz now no usage temperature dropping so you can see we got to a maximum of 39 degrees celsius last time 56 degrees celsius same speed but just with the liquid cooler instead of the air cooler so if you're going to pick one of them definitely go with the air cooler now what we're gonna do is up the speed to the max that the motherboard will allow and see what temperature we get to okay changing the speed 4.6 to 4.9 okay now we have the hardware monitor now we have the hardware monitor back here and powermax the benchmark make sure we set it at five minutes exactly like last time except now you can see 4.9 gigahertz instead of 4.6 so let's see what temperature it gets to now okay you can see the temperature ramping up 39 that's what we were just at let's see if it gets any hotter oh 40. [Music] all right we've gotten to 90 of the way through the benchmark now before it finishes up you can see it's 41 degrees celsius at 4.9 gigahertz now the reason i didn't go any faster to 5 gigahertz is because it has some issues when you try to increase it anymore where you can't boot there's glitches in the bios when you try to run the benchmark if you do happen to get into windows when you try to run the benchmark it'll crash halfway through different random bugs so there is no way to get any higher than 4.9 gigahertz but you can see it's not because of the temperature we only got to 41 celsius that's nowhere near the maximum temperature of the cpu so really what's limiting us is the cpu core voltage that's the real problem and it is maxed out so there's nothing we can do about that but if any of you have more knowledge about either this motherboard i'll list the parts in the description so you can check them out but if any of you have more knowledge on this motherboard the cpu combination and ways that we could get the speed even faster since we're obviously not limited by the temperature please leave a comment below and let us know and i'll definitely read all of them and if there's anything that works i'll make sure to mention you in the next video so exactly what's happening here if you take a look at some of the youtube video channels that specialize in computer hardware they have done some comparisons between the high-end water cooling and air cooling units and typically the temperature differentials on the cpu are not very large the huge temperature differential we're getting here 39 degrees celsius versus 56 degrees celsius at the same speed settings is a remarkably large differential i made some measurements on these two uh different heat exchange units the radiators through which the cold air or the room temperature air is moving and they're pretty similar the water cooling unit has a surface area of 1.25 square meters the noctura is actually a little smaller at about one square meter the water that is being mechanically pumped with the water cooling unit obviously is able to conduct a lot of heat away from the cpu but there is also water being pumped in the air cooling unit using the heat pipes instead of using a mechanical pump we depend on phase change between the hot and the cold end of the heat pipes to be able to distribute the heat away from the cpu and even though they may not be moving the water as fast as this does there's a lot of heat pipes and the distance that the temperature has to move from the cpu to the radiator fins is much shorter than it is in the water cooling unit so i think the difference that we're seeing here is actually due to the airflow velocity i measured the airflow across this entire unit and stock with these fans at 100 runs about 2.3 meters per second when we place this inside of the computer and turn the fans off and depend on the air conditioner to blow through here we get a velocity of about three meters per second which is actually very similar to the velocity of the air with the stock more powerful air fan with the noctura at about three meters per second however because the noctura has a smaller footprint when we change the ducting in order to send all of that high pressure air from the air conditioner through the noctura the flow velocity rises to 8.2 meters per second it's far faster and i think that explains the large temperature differential that we're seeing so in this kind of an application i'd actually stick with the air cooling unit because it's less expensive it's less complicated and in addition it's easier to install so it's it's a good solution clearly the limitation we have here in trying to pump this up to much higher speeds is not cooling it is as my son mentioned it's the voltages and the bios and what the motherboard is allowing us to do so if anybody is familiar with the particular hardware that we've list down below in the description below the video and can make some suggestions that might allow us to really pump this thing up to what would then be a temperature limitation we'd really appreciate it because we'll go ahead we'll incorporate that into another video and see just how fast we can get this thing to run so in any case we read all of the comments and we appreciate them because it not only helps the algorithms with youtube but it also gives us ideas for other videos it allows you to ask questions that we can address in the comments and it just keeps more interaction between us and our audience in any case i'll wish you a very good evening i'll wish you safe computing and we will see you soon good night [Music] you

Channel: Tech Ingredients

Views: 92,579

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Id: 27Jg0Qa6mts

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021