Do I need to water cool?

121

121

121

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I'm not going to overclock anything.

I've ordered these parts for PC gaming,

Palit GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GamingPro 8GB

Aorus B360 Gaming WIFI motherboard

i9-9900K

Corsair CX850M

LG 98LS95D 4K 98" LCD

HP Reverb G2

Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro RAM

Can I use a fan, or will it overheat?
 
Water cooling is never a necessity, it's just an option.

Air cooling will be absolutely plenty. Of course it's recommended you get a half decent air cooler for the CPU (one as cheap as £25 will do the job but investing more may be worthwhile). That model of GPU will run hot but there is no inherent need to stick a water cooling block on it.
 
Yes you will be fine using just a fan based CPU cooler, and not watercooled. The benefits of watercooling are it being much quieter and cooler temps.

I use an AIO and have been for the past few months, was a little fiddly to install but I much prefer it over the AMD cooler I had prior.
 
This will be my first PC build.

I have an Antec Dark Fleet Series DF500 RGB lying around, but I've read reviews that it's not good and a pain to install components inside it.

Space isn't an issue, so I would prefer a large, spacious case.

I've seen nice ones that are open air with glass in the front.

I'm not sure if having an open case will affect the cooling.

The dual Chromax fan will obscure the RAM sticks, so I might not need the Corsair ones with LEDs.
 
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121 said:
This will be my first PC build.

I've seen nice ones that are open air with glass in the front.
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The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Once you have glass and can see inside the game changes and you then have to think about how everything will look and not just how it will all perform. Closed case with 3 fans at front and exhaust at the back and an ok tower cooler is all that you would need. Once you add a window everything changes

Others have mentioned AIO's. I have been using a 360 AIO for 4 years and not touched it at all. Not leaked , still working and still quiet but ofc YMMV. This adds onto my previous point, if you want a windowed case then a decent AIO can look very good and IMHO looks better than a tower cooler but that is just personal preference


To answer your original question then no you absolutely do not need to watercool. The benefits to watercooling can be , lower temps , looks cool , maybe quieter system but thats it and it can cost a small fortune as I am finding out.

One more point. If you go for glass and can see inside then do you want a large case? Open empty spaces in a PC do not look good and idealy you want to fill all the available space with the components you use.
 
Good air coolers are more than sufficent, also I'm running mine passive. My 610E is running at 39 degrees now that's been doing number crunching 100% cpu usage.

Pumps can fail, and water could leak.
 
Need, no. As has been said, unless you're going to go all in and do it properly (a real WC setup), why bother if an air cooler can deliver similar levels of performance(to an AIO) and have less things that can go wrong or fail, unless you really care about how pretty the setup looks (i get it, i'm just not that guy).
 
hornetstinger said:
Good air coolers are more than sufficent, also I'm running mine passive. My 610E is running at 39 degrees now that's been doing number crunching 100% cpu usage.

Pumps can fail, and water could leak.
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Fans can also break on air cooling. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but both have advantages and disadvantages.
 
hornetstinger said:
Failed fans on WC probably worse though, as a big air tower cooler would be able to work passively far longer and safer temps than WC without fan blowing through the radiator.
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Failed pump would be worse than just 1 fan failing on an AIO or WC loop, almost never a single fan so you would get a warning. The Specific Heat Capacity of water is v high 4200 J/Kg iirc and it takes a lot more energy to heat up 1kg of water than 1kg of Steel/aluminium, is why water is thermodynamically perfect for watercooling and heating our houses without even considering it is the cheapest resource on Earth after Air. As long as the pump keep circulating the water then the radiator would also keep working like a passive heat sink and temps would rise slowly due to the water being able to absorb a huge amount of energy. If the pump fails then the small amount of water trapped close to the heatsinks would absorb all the heat expelled very quickly and the system would shut down due to thermal threshholds.

We are going well off the guys main topic though. No you do not have to watercool but you can for certain reasons.
 
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