Air Vs All in ones

inflames

inflames

inflames

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Going to be building a new PC soon, iv got a good idea what i am going to do. But not sure on the cooling side, if to go for good old air cooling or a all in one liquid cooling system. My only concern really is with the all in one, is leakage. Iv read and seen a few horror stories about them writing of CPU's and motherboards. So what do you all think?
 
Go for a decent air cooler, I was recommended the Noctua DH14 recently on here and it's almost completely silent even under full load but still keeps things nice and cool. The old corsair AIO I had a while ago was pretty rubbish in comparison.
 
CLCs usually work fine for the first 3-4 years. After that they tend to have pump failures, some people have have pump failures within a few months and in 1st year of use. When pump goes, there is no CPU cooling at all until a new cooler is purchased and mounted. New coolers are not cheap.

Only thing that can go wrong in an air cooler is the fan and that rarely happens with top tier coolers. Even if a fan does fail, system still has some cooling and any fan will do until replacement arrives .. fans are not expensive.

Sure, they perform, but make a lot of noise doing it. Top air performs about the same at much lower noise levels, and at same noise levels can be significantly better. The thing in is most users do not supply their air coolers with air that is within 3-5c of room temp .. most are 10-20c warmer at cooler intake and some even higher than that. Supply air coolers with same temp air as a radiator as intake is using and they are better and quieter than CLCs.

CLCs also cost more than top air coolers, so any way you try and slice it air coolers end up on the top.
 
Unless your going for a custom/proper WCing setup, don't bother. Get a high end air cooler.

The pumps and rads don't tend to be very good in the AIOs and you can't bleed the trapped air from them, which makes a big difference to cooling efficiency.
 
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Cool i have been leaning towards air coolers, been looking at either the cooler master 212 evo or a Cryorig H7. But then started looking at the all in ones, i liked the idea of them and some look pretty cool.
 
Just got one of the new EK Predators which is fantastic, but some of the air coolers are great and will pretty much perform just as good and in many cases better than most AIO's.
 
inflames said:
Cool i have been leaning towards air coolers, been looking at either the cooler master 212 evo or a Cryorig H7. But then started looking at the all in ones, i liked the idea of them and some look pretty cool.
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212 is generally not a good value anymore. H7 is good, but being small has limited cooling ability. It's fine for stock CPUs, but not for much overclocking.

I really like Cryorig coolers, all of them do a very good job withinrespective pier groups.

I usually use bigger coolers than needed for the wattage I'm cooling because bigger means more cooling ability means fans can run at lower speeds than smaller coolers with less cooling ability.

But like I said before, without knowing what case, motherboard and RAM you plan to use we don't know what coolers will fit.

I've heard good things about Alpenfohn Olymp, but have not had a chance to use / test one yet. It is not too tall, but has a very big footprint / shadow .. 150 mm wide x 151 mm deep and 165 mm tall. That is 75 mm center CPU toward PCIe socket and about 78 mm center CPU to front of fan .. 52 mm center CPU to front of cooler without fan.
 
VKleita said:
Rumours exist James is on commission :D
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Yeah, how else could he afford a predator that costs three times what a good air cooler costs for about the same performance & noise levels .. definitely more than twice as much for same performance & noise levels. :D
 
HA HA ! :D

but seriously, if your not expecting to maybe make any changes to your pc for the next 4 years, maybe a Air cooler is the way forward.

Then again if you want it.... Personally I think AIO's looks far nicer. But ... is looks that important?

Only the end user can decide that.
 
Pretty much what others have said. If you can fit a high-end air cooler in your case, and you are happy with the aesthetics, then it will offer similar performance to a good all in one for a lower price and less worry.

NH-D15 is the king of air cooling at the moment, with the EK Predator the king of all in ones. I personally am happy with air cooling on CPU, but am considering water for a GPU to reduce noise levels in my case.
 
Bantu said:
Pretty much what others have said. If you can fit a high-end air cooler in your case, and you are happy with the aesthetics, then it will offer similar performance to a good all in one for a lower price and less worry.

NH-D15 is the king of air cooling at the moment, with the EK Predator the king of all in ones. I personally am happy with air cooling on CPU, but am considering water for a GPU to reduce noise levels in my case.
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I agree with first part, but not the second.

D15 is not better, it just has 2-300rpm higher speed fans, so move a little more air and cool a couple degrees better .. but makes more noise too.

NH-D15 is also very limiting because of it's width blocking PCIe socket/s. NH-D15S solves this, but with single fan is 1-2c warmer.

But still the D15 / D15S are no better than at last half a dozen other top tier coolers, including the old tried and true NH-D14. Put the same fans on both D15 and D14 and you will se the D14 is definitley as good if not a little better. And they usually cost less too.

T
 
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