Is watercooling more quiet than CPU coolers?

hugobosslives said:
total depends on the setup

something like a noctua d15 will be quieter than that h100i

but a proper watercooling custom loop will be cooler (and with the correct fans quieter)
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I have the corsair AF 120mm quiet edition fans, but the noctua for me looks sketchty, h100i looks more reliable for me for some reason haha
 
lawrence281 said:
I'd want cooling, ive checked the watercooling bundles but unsure what to get, I need a 240mm rad is all i know
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Any of the bundles should suffice, Unless you are looking for near silent system in which case I would consider picking the parts yourself and doing some research on Rad fin density (fpi) and different fan/rad characteristics. If you are looking at quiet vs performance there is nearly always a trade off. You basically have three sources of noise with watercooling - Pump, fans, rads to consider.

The main thing to consider is making sure you have the means to control fan/pump RPM's.
 
lawrence281 said:
I have the corsair AF 120mm quiet edition fans, but the noctua for me looks sketchty, h100i looks more reliable for me for some reason haha
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If you want reliability air is the way to go.

When watercooling there's a pump that can fail, numerous connectors that can leak, waterblocks that can crack, deposit build up etc..
 
Look at some reviews, usually as others have said pump noise is louder than the fans themselves most of the time. I switched out an old swiftech triple radiator cooler for a NHD15 and it is much quieter, i don't care about it being around 3c hotter. The extra noise can be ridiculous just for a bit better cooling.

If you want silence don't get one of those AIO's just get watercooling parts seperate, and decouple the pump properly to make it quiet. I gave up with that stuff, too much hassle and not really worth it to me.

The newer Swiftech h220x is supposed to be the quietest AIO, yet it is around 6 decibels (or 8?) louder than the NHD15.. it was a review somewhere on youtube.
 
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When it comes to performance rigs, if you want silence, hands-down watercooling will be quieter. However be prepared to pay many magnitudes more for it, for the same amount of thermal performance. You will still be using fans at the end of the day, it's all about how hard you have to drive them.

In idle mode my rig runs essentially passive - fans aren't even required to be running unless the system is stressed. The only noise from the water cooling comes from the pump and that's decoupled via a shoggy sandwich. The PSU in fact is noisier, because unfortunately I don't have a model that switches off its fan in low usage.

Removing GPU fan noise is the real benefit for silence though, as even the "quiet" cards (and I've had many) are nowhere near as good when compared to a watercooled GPU.
 
Also don't expect any magic from 'silent' edition fans of any make, they aren't built in a special way to make them silent they're just slower, so whilst they will be quieter you will lose cooling performance.

People want both and unfortunately it doesn't exist, at least not to cool down a high performance system, you could probably have a slow speed silent fan setup that keeps things cool but you'd have to turn all the overclocks down.

TL;DR = silent fans running at fast speeds don't exist.
 
If you're on a budget probably not. If you can afford a D5 pump and a decent set of fans then the WC loop will probably will be quieter and a lot more efficient.
 
I agree with flying hellfish I though cpu only watercooling was nice and quiet since getting my gpu under water the loudest thing is the hard drives(I do have a lot of rads though so fans are only ~700rpm).
 
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