Why you shouldn't water cool your PC

so you're building a brand-new PC and it's time to choose a cooler for your CPU there are so many options out there but before you even really get into the weeds you've got to make one choice do you cool your PC with a large air cooler or with an all-in-one liquid cooler now if we can trust the marketing a iOS are the clear choice water transfers heat so much better than air right but is that the entire story maybe actually I don't know alex has been working on this in isolation and I don't know the test results so I'm just as eager to find out as you guys are massive thanks to world of tanks for sponsoring this video World of Tanks is the free to play epic online multiplayer game that features authentic tanks from the mid 20th century use invite code tank tastic at the link below to get some great bonuses [Music] now before you run out and buy a new CPU cooler you need to first figure out if your CPU is gonna get any benefit from additional cooling now in the old days inadequate cooling was a recipe for instant catastrophic failure because the modern protection or throttling mechanisms that prevent them from exceeding that generally accepted maximum of a hundred degrees Celsius didn't exist yet but just because both Intel and AMD seemed to agree that their processors will last at least through their warranty period at that temperature doesn't mean having it there is a great idea the hotter in integrated circuit runs the more power it will consume and the shorter its lifespan will be and furthermore when your CPU does approach its limit you can experience greatly reduced performance that throttling mechanism that I alluded to before so if your only goal is not sacrificing performance then temperatures that don't exceed 90 degrees it's honestly a good spot to start with 65 to 75 under full load being the conventional wisdom target as well as contributing to a quieter computing experience overall so finally getting to our PC then in here we've got an RT X 27 T and an Intel Core i7 9700 K but since any decent cooler can keep the stock 95 watt 9700 K at bay provided you don't live in the Sahara of course we cranked it up to a blistering 5 gigahertz on all eight cores at a voltage of one point three three volts bringing it up to a hundred and sixty watts now we definitely need something a bit more robust or do we this overclock was actually achieved using just a Noctua NF u 12s a mid range air cooler coming in at just $60 and with just one fan it was able to keep us at a max of 84 degrees now that is a little toasty and with our fan at full blast it was a little loud at least by Noctua standards at 45 decibels so well now it's time to go water cooling then right maybe but not until we've adjusted our test setup the thing is 43 decibels is clearly audible and bordering on annoying to have right next to your head but for context the average office is 50 decibels so because noise is just as important as cooling performance we had to create an environment where we could properly evaluate both okay so why don't you show me what you've done here yes welcome to my room of quietness this used to be an office you know yes but now it's uncomfortably silent so we know this is kind of ghetto but it works via the same principles as our recent server room sound deadening video basically if you take a bunch of loosely packed permeable mass and you put it all around where you're trying to block the sound you don't get any standing waves it ends up absorbing a lot of the sound that's trying to come in and preventing any reflections and bouncing so basically because we can easily control the HVAC this room has its own dedicated thermostat and because we've got all these beanbags set up we're able to achieve what was it 20 success Abel's a 26 decibel noise floor in here that means that we can comfortably measure devices like this computer that are not much above 30 now this computer has been modified from our original configuration a little bit so it's running four of naktu as nf a 12 X 25 FLX fans with their ultra-low noise adapter coming off the power supply so these are at just 900 rpm that power supply is a prime fanless titanium from see sonic unit so it's not making any noise the graphics card there's not much we can do your systems gonna have a graphics card in it but it does have a silent mode it does have doesn't fans are off it has a switch on it perfect thank you ROG Strix so what this means then is that our only variable is our CPU cooler now some of you have probably noticed that the spot were remanded the radiators is in the top because we've got case fans in the front here and that was for a reason so on the one hand yes drawing in fresh air for your radiator is going to give it an advantage versus drawing in warmed up air and exhausting it out the top of the system however what we found was that the disadvantage from an acoustic standpoint of having it right there in the front of the case was much greater than the advantage it gained from having access to fresh air flow especially because you guys got to consider this is not exactly a little tiny mid tower chassis we've got three intake fans so the ambient temperature inside the case so to keep things as real-world as possible we're using the blender classroom test so that takes about 17 minutes and that's enough time to heat up most a iOS and we were having issues where the whole room was heating up two to three degrees and given that's more than the variation between all of our coolers we had to have HVAC on and the door open and then run in at about 16 minutes turn the HVAC off measure the acoustics and boom so with that out of the way we're ready for the results that we are are you excited I actually am which one of these do you think is the best cooling purely cooling am I supposed to play devil's advocate or am I actually guess actually guess I would guess that it's gonna be the triple 120 millimeter read from a sheer mass and surface area perspective not even in second this guy here really yep which one do you think so hold on we're talking raw performance at a given noise level just raw performance straight-up raw performance yep this beats this 78 degrees 81 wow that's not even that close no okay guess what guess what sound level they're both at then okay this one right here was at 36 okay 36 decibels okay I would say this with only two fans is gonna have to be a little louder 3834 really it's quieter too yeah and and the worst part is that this right here yeah it performs the 360 and isn't the 360 the one that comes with their new redesigned cold plate yep so the ASA Tech one it's only a two degree difference but also like 79 81 so so it's quieter as well yeah and this right here garbage 86 degrees this guy fared pretty well so ok well now let's talk price to performance then so we know this is our least expensive offering this was like our mid tier air cooler yeah this is probably more like 80 bucks right 70 bucks the one that I really don't understand is how this performs so well I guess this is really a testament to how well heat pipes perform then and also just Noctua like they they just kill it they know they're shiz but if you think about it like yes water transfers heat very quickly but heat pipes are also fluid heat transfer so this is actually phase change cooling on a certain level so then one point of clarification though do you think this is unique to Corsair the iOS like are they just bad no I think they're pretty good they're just like the largest company for a iOS and they all use basically the same design so it's the most representative right because that's what people are probably gonna buy I'm gonna get you to take these two away since they're done so things don't look great for our water coolers but there is more to the story than performance noise levels and price to performance let's run through some more pros and cons so one big problem an additional problem for water coolers is actually the pump not only does that add additional noise and cost it also adds a point of failure and a nasty one too since not only are pumps more likely to fail than a fan but when they do it's more catastrophic for your cooling and it's harder to detect now if your CPU fan dies then you can probably see that it isn't spinning and then slap a case fan on there until a new one arrives with a pump you better hope that you have your software monitoring enabled and then when it does bite the bullet you pretty much just need to pony up for an entire new unit an unattractive prospect since a iOS like I said extra components tend to be more expensive than heat sinks with similar performance but that doesn't mean that a iOS don't have some advantages because it's full of water na io has greater thermal mass than a heat sink that means that even though after a long load its performance might not be as impressive during short bursts like while your CPU is tur bowling up that extra heat can be absorbed then dissipated later without such stark swings in temperatures also if you regularly move your PC like to land parties in search transportation is arguably much safer with an AI oh I mean we are talking for this guy 12 points of contact versus just 2 for this big bulky air coolers have a lot of weight hanging directly off of your CPU socket which in some extreme cases can actually lead to motherboards bending or even breaking now this isn't as much of an issue with brands that have good mounting hardware which is one of the reasons that we so strongly recommend not to a but even with not to a mounting if I needed to entrust my PC to an airline or a parcel carrier I would equip it with an AI oh another good point for a iOS is the coolness factor not not coolness for your CPU or even for your motherboards vrm which can benefit from incidental airflow that bleeds away from the heatsink but I mean coolness for showing off your PC now naturally this comes down to personal preference some people really like the look of big air coolers yeah Thank You Ellis but most of the time it's easier to get a clue overall look to your build with water now one thing we haven't mentioned yet is custom liquid cooling with a top-of-the-line block from ek or alpha cool a huge radiator and a d5 pump you can get measurably better performance than what is possible even with the beefiest of air coolers the thing is at that point it isn't really a fair comparison anymore since a custom water cooling setup is only for very advanced users requires regular maintenance and is incredibly expensive like just the CPU block alone can cost more than our Nhu 12a that's not to say custom water cooling isn't awesome and that we don't love it for ourselves it's just not the kind of thing that we're comfortable recommending to people who well enjoy using their computer as opposed to tinkering with their computer World of Tanks is a free-to-play multiplayer online game that allows you to master the art of armored combat it features over 500 more machines from the mid 20th centuries including legendary Sherman's Churchill's Tigers and more it's got dozens of mats that feature historic locations all around the globe and a hundred and eighty million players worldwide you can play on your own or join team clashes and climb the leaderboard and you can roll out today using invite code tank tastic you'll get 81 27 tank 500 gold and seven days of premium access so click the link below and play now so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join nope you know what's funny is I remember back when these one 120-millimeter ASA tech units first launched like 10 years ago or whatever it was the initial reviews for the ASA tech Elsie Elsie go find reviews for it overwhelmingly negative but then when the Corsair h50 turned up which was literally exactly the same product with a different fan on it the reviews get positive and I'm not accusing III know the people of course are very well I know for a fact they didn't pay off anybody but like it's just funny how a brand can like the brand name and brand loyalty might subliminally influence people like what the ASA tech wants people be like yeah it's not great and of course I would be like yeah it's like it didn't perform as good but like here's all these other benefits I don't know it's a funny thing [Music]

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 5,485,900

Rating: 4.8740945 out of 5

Keywords: AIO, water cooling, gaming, air cooling, CPU, pc parts, intel, ryzen, noctua, corsair

Id: 23vjWtUpItk

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/y1i]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[u/XorFish]

http://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_Heatsinks

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This isn't that new. Good air cooler usually perform similar to the best AIOs but are quiter when idle. (Notice how the kraken X61 doesn't go below 18~17 dBA@1m)

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/jforce321]

I hate how they always use noctua to compare this kind of stuff. They should use something from a company like scythe to really show the performance to cost benefits of going air cooling.

[u/FrozenOil]

Surely the results here are the fans right?

Would be interesting to see Noctua fans on the AIO.

[u/mer_mer]

People here are claiming this is a well known result, but this really seems to be an outlier. If you look at what more established testing sites find, AIO coolers generally beat air coolers, both on overall performance and for a fixed noise level:

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPUCooling/772

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2801&page=6

https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3457-corsair-h115i-rgb-platinum-cooler-review-asetek-vs-coolit

[u/Mech0z]

The new 120mm fans are just miles better than anything else on the market. If they had tried the aio with noctua fans it would fare alot better

In many testings the new fans have the same noise levels as other fans while running 500rpm higher

[u/fntd]

I was always wondering why every article or video I’ve read about overclocking suggested that you need an AIO for good OCs while I was able to get my 8700k to 5Ghz without any noise or temperature problems. Good to see that a proper air cooler is just as viable as an AIO since I prefer the aesthetics.

[u/sterob]

I would love closed loop if it wasn't for the risk of leaking or pump failing that all ended up with dead pc.