Where should you install your AIO liquid cooler? The best places tested!

hello this is the provoke prawn and in this video I'm here to talk to you about all-in-one radiator placement as in where to position your cooler to get maximum performance now I've built a number of different PCS over the last few years and I've tried out a variety of different positions top mounting front mounting side mounting push-pull setups 360mm radiators 280 240 in all sorts of different positions in different cases and I've had a number of comments recently which suggests that people don't really know what the best thing to do is and they're often criticizing some of the placements for example this side mounting which is one of my favorites because of a misunderstanding about air bubbles and I'll get to that in a little while because I want to talk about that in this video I'm going to show you some of the mounting options that I've done and talk about the various things to keep in mind when thinking about the placement of your radiator the layout of your fans and also the overall performance of your system I'm going to do some benchmarks and show you some thermal tests to talk about the performance and how it's worked but one of the first things I want to talk about is what to avoid so don't bottom mount your radiator whatever you do this is the one thing that people misunderstand from the gamer's Nexus video which you might have seen and if you haven't it's worth looking for but it's talking about the placement of a radiator in such a position that you could potentially damage the pump now for most radiators all in one systems like this the pump is on the Block that attaches to the CPU in this build you can see the radiators on the bottom and the pump is therefore at the top now over time coolant will naturally dissipate from your radiator which means the air bubbles will form and those air bubbles could eventually work their way into the pump head because air rises naturally and obviously in the system that could then mean a problem because the pump will then be running on Air instead of liquid which could theoretically damage and break it and then render it inoperable and obviously it won't be calling your CPU anymore which would be terrible new is for your system and could lead to some problems now this will take a number of years to happen unless you're aggressively using it all the time but it is potentially an issue someone to bear in mind now I front mounted a radiator recently with a push pull set up and did tubes down and I still had people making that same comment saying that I've done it wrong now actually if you look at this logic here the block is still below the top of the radiator so essentially the worst that would happen here if that same sort of logic occurred over time is that the air bubbles would rise to the top of the radiator and just get stuck at the top of the radiator they couldn't travel necessarily into the pump because that isn't the highest point so as long as your CPU block isn't the highest point in the system then it shouldn't be a problem because those bubbles will end up just sort of at the top and this is why Gamers next is recommended tubes down in this sort of logic I didn't personally like this design this view it doesn't look very nice and I have found with sort of side mounting with the tubes up that's still not a problem because the pump is still lower than the top of the radiator and so any air is going to form in the radiator rather than the pump itself and so it shouldn't be an issue it shouldn't do any damage over time I doubt there's going to be significant enough uh in there to cause a problem and I personally have been running my sort of Radiators side mounted for several years without any issues I've got a main rig that I use and that's so the logic that I have set up without any problems now to be thorough what I wanted to do is take that nzx th7 build that I done with Push Pull and change some things so what I was going to do here is set up three different formats and then Benchmark and test it for thermal performance and see how we got on so the first thing I did was run benchmarks obviously with the push-pull setup but then I removed those front fans so we then have a sort of standard intake setup now obviously you could Mount the fans on the front of the radiator instead of on the rear but essentially what we're doing here is pulling air from the front of the case through the radiator and then exhausting out of the top I then ran benchmarks on that and I'll show you these in a minute so you've got a comparison and then I once again went through and I removed the top exhaust fans went through the arduous process of doing this then removing the radiator from the front and reinstalling the original case fans and essentially top mounting this radiator now this is a 280 mil radiator and ideally you'd have a 360mm rad in this case because that's what you can do with it but you know I'm making the most of what we've got here to test in three different positions to show the sort of logic of it and how it can make a difference to your system so obviously I needed to swap the fans around because of the current position they're set to pull air in I'm going to set it to exhaust instead so what we're going to do is pull cold air in through the front of the case with those standard case fans and then exhaust hot air out of the top and the rear what say hot it obviously is going to have some coolness to it but obviously also we're going to get some heat from the CPU and from the GPU as well so there's going to be some differences in the performance here but I wanted to show the different steps for it and obviously be thorough with each of these things now I have tested a number of different radio setups in the past as I've said I've got plenty of different videos with benchmarks in different cases on these sort of placements and this different sort of logic of how things can work and 360 mil obviously would be better performance if you're trying to maximize your system but I wanted to go through and be thorough with each of these and test out each of the Logics so here you can see 280 mil radiator top mounted three intake fans three exhaust fans and then what I wanted to do is Benchmark each of these so gone through and I've benchmarked each so we can get some sort of fair tests on the overall performance of them and then get an idea of what might work for you so in order to do this around Cinema bench R23 Heaven Benchmark and also 3D Mark I did multiple passes and Iran's hardware monitor at the same time so we can get an idea of the sort of temperatures of the system the GPU and the CPU because obviously this isn't all about the CPU cooling you obviously want to keep your GPU cool as well and the other parts in your system too because that's important for the airflow is to keep everything cool so it runs nice and smooth so I'm obviously aggressively testing here now with the push-pull setup you can see we've got a maximum of 78 degrees C on the CPU and the GPU is around 65 degrees 90 degrees on the memory and 77 and the hot spot so reasonable and then when you drop into the standard mounting so we haven't got Push Pull anymore now the CPU temperature has gone up to 82 degrees gpus at 66 degrees on the GPU and 90 on the memory so both things are a little bit warmer which is to be expected because we've now got less fans but then with the top mounting what I found is interesting is the CPU temperatures gone up and the GPU is marginally different as well so obviously you can go back and compare these but essentially I was actually quite surprised that what I would usually default to which is the top mounting is actually a little bit toastier now this isn't necessarily the be-all and end all because it's going to vary from case to Case and obviously different systems different environments you can see the Corsair 5000d airflow here for example 360mm Radiator on top probably preferable now when mounting radiator you also need to think about other things like the placement of your tubes I've already said about tubes down obviously we're top mounting the pump is in the lower point so that's fine but you can see sometimes you might have to think about the positioning of the tube so it doesn't block your RAM and doesn't interfere with exhaust or intake fans so you can see another setup here where the tubes are towards the front and that was pretty decent cooling that's in the Lan cool case I've done videos on all of these and performance was actually really nice there too generally speaking I'd say that actually top mounting is preferable despite the fact that my benchmarks have actually shown it is a little bit warmer or as I said the other logic of side mounting now this is an air case which obviously a lot more fans so I've got the front fans in taking the fans on the radiator in taking the fans on the bottom in taking and then we're just exhausting out the top so I'm pulling cold air over the radiator pulling cold air into the case blowing that onto the GPU I've talked about the logic of fan placement and the sort of where you should position your fans and the direction you should put them in order to maximize airflow and ensure that everything runs cool so we'll link to that video in the description but I usually end up with intake on the front the side panel and the bottom where possible and then exhaust at the top and the rear and I find that overall in a variety of different cases this makes for the best performance but it's not always possible in the NZXT case for example there were no bottom fan options you cannot put fans on the bottom so you are quite limited and in my experience generally if you front mount a radiator you are kind of choking off the rest of the case but actually my tests show that isn't always the case but there are so many variables in this that it obviously is going to fluctuate so it is worth experimenting yourself just don't bottom mount because that's a bad plan hopefully you found these insights useful let me know in the comments if you've got any questions subscribe if you haven't already for more awesome content thanks for watching you've made it right to the end of the video you brilliant Legend you if you've enjoyed it click that subscribe button give me a thumbs up and drop me a comment down below if you've got any questions if you really enjoyed it consider joining the channel and see the benefits of doing so check out these other videos you might well find them interesting or useful and most importantly have a great life

Channel: The Provoked Prawn

Views: 203,157

Keywords: Provoked Prawn, The Provoked Prawn, cpu cooler installation, CPU Cooler mounting, Where to put your AIO, Where to mount AIO, aio mounting orientation, AIO mounting tips

Id: qQcyYHGtArs

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023