Air Or AIO Cooling?

Casterina

Casterina

Casterina

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17 Nov 2011
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I'm using the Alpenföhn Matterhorn Pure cooler with a fan on each side of the heatsink and was wondering would it be a good upgrade to a AIO cooling or stick with what I have?
 
WHat mister Pie said.

Its all about cost/case/ what do you need it to do?

generally AIO sound be cooler at load (There are exceptions, when a really cheap aio etc)


Personally for someone after performance with no more noise a AIO is a nice easy way to upgrade without the hassle of a water cooling loop.
Also they tend not to fit your entire case with heatsink
 
Air all the way. While your Matterhorn is a great cooler, you can gain 5-8c with a top tier cooler and depending on how well your case airflow is optimized can probably gain another 5-10c.

CLCs are noisier, more expensive, don't cool any better (especially at same noise level) are not as dependable (pumps wear and fail) and when they fail it's major expense of buying a new cooling system.

Air coolers only have fans to wear out or fail, and any fan can be rubber-banded onto cooler until replacement arrives. CLC pump fails and there is no cooling at all.

The only AIOs worth looking at are Swiftech and EKWB Predator, and they are not CLCs. We can add and replace components. Add GPU waterblock and additional radiator, change and/or top up coolant, etc.
 
Air all the way for me. Have 2 aio units in my case currently and just find them generally annoying. The price to performance just isnt there. You'll end up spending a fair bit of cash just on replacement fans because of how poor the standard ones are. Then you've got risk of failure and pump noise. Sure if you dont have space around the mobo they are good but you're better off with air or going full custom lo
op
 
Used a Corsair H100 AIO for years and had nothing but delight from it, right up to the moment I changed to custom watercooling... still kept the fans for other uses, though!
Most of those happy with AIOs seem to favour Corsair models.
 
I'm gonna go against the consensus and say aio's have there place a large 240mm or 360mm aio will be able to displace a lot more heat than even the best air coolers. Water transmits heat around 27 times better than air and by the time it hits the rad it going to have massively. More area to dissipate that heat into the air. The rad can also be placed in a location where the hot air is pumped straight out of the case. An air cooler just moves hot sir around inside case and is therefore more reliant on a good airflow setup in the case itself to dissipate heat out of the case. Can argue with the reliability argument though as a pump is just one move component that may fail
 
Granted, waht can transmit heat much better than air, but that water has to be circulated over the waterblock fast enough to remove all the heat CPU is generating .. and few if any of the CLCs have pumps that move the water fast enough to make them enough better than air to be worthwhile, even when new .. and their radiators are not all that great at getting rid of the heat either.

Case airflow should be optimized regardless if CPU is using a water loop or air. After all, air is what is does the cooling in H2O loops in the radiators, same as fin packs do on air coolers.
 
I like a big, quality air cooler. Cheaper and more reliable than an AIO, and works just as well. AIO is just a cheap watercooling shortcut that has the added benefit of potentially destroying everything with a leak, whilst costing more than a quality air cooler. A decent load controlled fan on an air cooler and you won't hear it 95 percent of the time, especially as it doesn't need a pump.

AIO's are just more stuff to go wrong for minimal benefit.
 
AIO here, been using a H100i all this time and it's been a delight.

Had a big air cooler before and honestly, it's just a huge hassle and adds a ton of weight to the mobo.
 
I've used my k2 on four different motherboards since I bought it. Not once has it caused any stress or bending of the boards.
 
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