- #1
phlegmy
- 120
- 0
hey guys
i'm thinking of building myself a pc next year
and I've been reading a bit about water cooling.
now every search i do tells me how great it is but the
bit of me that spent 4yrs doing a mechanical engineering degree is a bit of a sceptic.
firstly, sure, watercooling can deliver better cooling capacity in the confined space of
a pc chassis. water has better conductivity and heat capacity than air and you can achieve vastly greater mass flow rates with water tthan you could with air!
but where i get worried is where the the heat gets dumped from the system.:
let me explain:
one of the "benefits" I've read about is the reduced need for fans and thus you get a quieter system... but, if your processor is producing a constant amount of heat then you need that constant amount of cooling capacity to keep it at a constant temprature.
now the watercooling system is going to take just as much heat from the cpu as air cooling plus the water also has the extra energy from the pumping, which needs to be dumped in the radiator... and the radiator has to be air cooled.. so now instead of air-cooling the heatsink of the cpu, you're aircooling the heat load of the cpu+the added heat (or enthalpy) of the pump. thus you need more convective cooling in the radiator than you would have needed on the old aircooled heat sink in the first place? so unless your radiator is significantly bigger than your original heatsink you're still going to need a similar or bigger fan.
so really the only reason you'd need it is to keep your system significantly cooler (or at the same temp with higher heat output from the cpu) than would be achieved with air cooling but am i right in saying that you won't reduce your "fan" or convective cooling requirements?
(of course the other reason is that it looks damn impressivE!)
i'm thinking of building myself a pc next year
and I've been reading a bit about water cooling.
now every search i do tells me how great it is but the
bit of me that spent 4yrs doing a mechanical engineering degree is a bit of a sceptic.
firstly, sure, watercooling can deliver better cooling capacity in the confined space of
a pc chassis. water has better conductivity and heat capacity than air and you can achieve vastly greater mass flow rates with water tthan you could with air!
but where i get worried is where the the heat gets dumped from the system.:
let me explain:
one of the "benefits" I've read about is the reduced need for fans and thus you get a quieter system... but, if your processor is producing a constant amount of heat then you need that constant amount of cooling capacity to keep it at a constant temprature.
now the watercooling system is going to take just as much heat from the cpu as air cooling plus the water also has the extra energy from the pumping, which needs to be dumped in the radiator... and the radiator has to be air cooled.. so now instead of air-cooling the heatsink of the cpu, you're aircooling the heat load of the cpu+the added heat (or enthalpy) of the pump. thus you need more convective cooling in the radiator than you would have needed on the old aircooled heat sink in the first place? so unless your radiator is significantly bigger than your original heatsink you're still going to need a similar or bigger fan.
so really the only reason you'd need it is to keep your system significantly cooler (or at the same temp with higher heat output from the cpu) than would be achieved with air cooling but am i right in saying that you won't reduce your "fan" or convective cooling requirements?
(of course the other reason is that it looks damn impressivE!)