Has anyone else given up on AIO's

malccy said:
Bank Transfer is fine but will accept PayPal at a push. :) The assassin should cool your 7700 no problem and with a quiet fan curve too.
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:cry:
Which "Assassin" are you using? I ask because Thermalright has a bunch of different 'Assassin' cooler models.
Assassin Spirit 120 in many versions
Burst Assassin 120 single tower in 7 versions
Peerless Assassin 90 SE twin tower
Peerless Assassin 120 twin tower in 8 models
Peerless Assassin 140 twin tower, black & white models
Peerless Assassin 90 twin tower
 
doyll said:
:cry:
Which "Assassin" are you using? I ask because Thermalright has a bunch of different 'Assassin' cooler models.
Assassin Spirit 120 in many versions
Burst Assassin 120 single tower in 7 versions
Peerless Assassin 90 SE twin tower
Peerless Assassin 120 twin tower in 8 models
Peerless Assassin 140 twin tower, black & white models
Peerless Assassin 90 twin tower
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he meens the single tower 1 fan model for under £20 done some reading it will cool a i7-14700k so .... went for the burst assassin in one of its many forms the 7700 runs cool and is low power so should be fine for that
 
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I've never had an issue with AIO coolers (neither reliability or noise).
Got my first AIO in 2012 for an Intel 3770k and that was still running fine until around 2022 when I finally dismantled that PC, this was a 120mm single fan radiator. Got a a 240mm AIO for my next CPU, an 8770k which is still running fine and well today. My main PC is now a Ryzen 5900x with a 360mm AIO - the paste did dry out on that one, which I just replaced over the weekend... but IIRC I had sourced my own paste for that one (and obviously picked one that didn't last very long).
Can't say I've ever noticed the pump noise on any of these unless I put my head in the case.. however I keep my PCs under the desk and not on the desk, so that might make a difference.

I know there isn't a huge difference between what an air cool and AIO can do if you aren't overclocking, however I think the build looks cleaner and is easier to work with (eg. if I need to change parts or check connectors)
 
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A lot of AIO failures are down to poor installation layouts. This is not helped by the manufacturers posting pics of installs which are poorly installed.
The following video is quite an eye opener:

 
I built my first PC in the early 80's and yet it wasn't until around 2020 that I bought my first AIO. An Arctic freezer II 420mm.
I now have the III variant in my main PC, same size.

With a 253w Intel CPU I'm not sure how effective an air cooler would be compared to an AIO. I assumed that it would typically have some limitations.

The physical size of them also is something that I do not like to see. In the past having memory fitting issues, although memory like Corsairs LP range helped. As does offset fans etc.

I still can have some apprehension about having a liquid cooler, even though it has been great, but as long as the CPU that I use needs the cooling it does then it will remain my choice.
 
After ditching custom water 2-3 years ago and switching to the excellent Thermalright Peerless Assassin SE120 I have now bought my first ever AIO, a Thermalright Frozen Edge 240. There was nothing wrong with the Peerless Assassin as it kept my cpu nice and cool. It was a problem of my own making that led to the switch.

A few years ago I built my own case which has a pair of 200mm intake fans and a pair of 200mm exhaust fans. The motherboard sits horizontally in the case and with the gpu mounted normally the M2 drive underneath it was getting cooked and was throttling. My solution to this was to make a shroud that wrapped around both sides and the bottom of the gpu. I also mounted the gpu horizontally and higher up in the case using a pci-e 4.0 riser so that it was in a sort of tunnel and the hot air only had one way to go, straight down the tunnel to the rear exhaust fan. This worked very well and dropped the temps of my M2 drive massively which dropped even further now I was able to fit a large heatsink to it. Chasing ever better temps I repasted and fitted new thermal pads to the gpu and as it has a metal backplate doing nothing I fitted extra thermal pads to the rear of the card at the underside of the memory and vrm chips. This worked nicely and the backplate was now aiding in cooling the card.

Now I had a new problem as the airflow across the card wasn't removing the heat from the backplate very well and I had a new hotspot of 103 degrees C. Back to the drawing board!! I removed the tunnel and still using the riser mounted my card higher in the case but with the back a little lower than the front to force the air to go over the card better. I went a step further and got a big aluminium heatsink to cover the whole of the gpu backplate but while I was at it added more thermal pads to the rear of the card, especially the back of the gpu die. The big heatsink is stuck on with thermal tape and once again the temps dropped.

Now I had yet another new problem. I started playing a new game, Fishing Barents Sea which for some reason absolutely hammers the card (No Man's Sky was more graphically pleasing and didn't do this) and was really heating the card up. The heatsink on the rear of the card was getting really hot, hot enough to burn your finger!! This extra heat was flooding the case and the Peerless Assassin which was now only seperated from the hot air coming off the card by a inch was picking up the heat and the fans were ramping up loudly. One solution was to move the motherboard so that the cooler would be further away from the gpu. This would only give me a couple of inches extra and I didn't think it would make a big enough difference so I bit the bullet and bought a AIO. For the grand price of £43 I got a Thermalright Frozen Edge 240mm as I don't have space for a 360mm where I wanted to fit it. It's a nice weighty bit of kit and as a bonus most of Thermalright's coolers and AIO's use the same mounting system so it was a quick and easy swap. It's a quality cooler with a very nice "brushed" finish on the block/pump and a discrete band of ARGB around the top edge. The fans are Thermalright's TL-B12 with no ARGB. I fitted it to the end panel of my case so there is now a good nine inches or so between the gpu and AIO fans. On first boot I went into the bios and set the pump to run at a silent 60% but will increase in 10% steps if temps pass 70 degrees C. The fans are set to the silent profile in the bios. I went to play a game for a couple of hours and I was back to having a silent pc again. The pump remained silent and the fans didn't ramp up at all. While gaming I had Afterburner running so when I had finished I checked the temps and saw a massive drop, the gpu core was back down to 55℃, the memory 64℃ and a hotpot of 83℃ and more importantly the cpu was down to 56℃ from the previous 82℃ so it shows just how much the cooler trying to cool itself with hot air coming off the gpu was being crippled. My next case will put the gpu in it's own compartment to avoid these issues altogether.

Don't rule out a cheap AIO/cooler just because it seems too cheap to be any good. Most of Thermalrights AIO's/coolers will give ones costing two or three times their price a damn good run for the money and in many cases even beat them. The money saved can then be spent on better components.
 
The AIO in my son's computer is a 120mm x 45mm double thick radiator, sold by OCUK (one of their own 'OCUK branded' models) and I checked the date I bought it not so long ago, 2015. Still going strong.
I've had various AIO's probably about 7 or 8 now only one that failed was a NZXT 280mm one and got a replacement from NZXT which was a later version.
I built a PC for my cousin couple of years ago to his spec had a BeQuiet Air Cooler in cant remember model and it was too noisy for my liking under load.
 
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Vimes said:
With a 253w Intel CPU I'm not sure how effective an air cooler would be compared to an AIO. I assumed that it would typically have some limitations.
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14700K generally is below 253 watt some exceptions like R23 Cinebench MT aside, fairly reasonably priced air coolers like the Peerless Assassin, even the £20-30 ones in the case of the Assassin, will mostly keep a 14700K in check BUT under heavy multi-threaded loads you will need the fans ramped up or you will hit 100C and get thermal throttling albeit the performance loss is actually pretty low 0.5-3% kind of range generally with the better coolers. Bit of an odd setup with mine as for most tasks I have the case and CPU fans using the data points from silent mode and there is very little noise, but then a steep ramp at the end of the curve to accommodate synthetic benchmarks and the odd really heavy MT app - and then you really do hear it. Quite a lot of the 14700Ks will undervolt well with a big reduction in power/heat but unfortunately one of the cores on mine doesn't have much headroom in it for undervolting. An AIO will still provide more effective cooling though especially under things like synthetic benchmarks.

The 14900K is another story though, you'll really struggle without a decent AIO - especially anything MT heavy the effectiveness of air cooling drops right off.
 
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Rroff said:
14700K generally is below 253 watt some exceptions like R23 Cinebench MT aside, fairly reasonably priced air coolers like the Peerless Assassin, even the £20-30 ones in the case of the Assassin, will mostly keep a 14700K in check BUT under heavy multi-threaded loads you will need the fans ramped up or you will hit 100C and get thermal throttling albeit the performance loss is actually pretty low 0.5-3% kind of range generally with the better coolers. Bit of an odd setup with mine as for most tasks I have the case and CPU fans using the data points from silent mode and there is very little noise, but then a steep ramp at the end of the curve to accommodate synthetic benchmarks and the odd really heavy MT app - and then you really do hear it. Quite a lot of the 14700Ks will undervolt well with a big reduction in power/heat but unfortunately one of the cores on mine doesn't have much headroom in it for undervolting. An AIO will still provide more effective cooling though especially under things like synthetic benchmarks.

The 14900K is another story though, you'll really struggle without a decent AIO - especially anything MT heavy the effectiveness of air cooling drops right off.
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When I first moved to a AIO it wasn't to cool either the AL or RL CPU's that I had / have. It was to cool the 9900k in my Z390 board....


IMG20210711090348.jpg


The 9900k was.........................toasty....

Very silent cooling, comparative with lots of capacity in the size of the reservoir to cope with spikes of heat etc. Sustained load usage was also pretty decent over that of my Noctua cooler.
Even though my usage has changed over the years, at that time I used to do quite a lot of encoding that required multi core usage for a number of hours at a time. The AIO was very much welcomed.

For some they might not care about the aesthetics, of having a large air cooler. It didn't overly bother me, well not too much. But it is the absence of no longer having such a sized air cooler, that I now appreciate even more.
As I have aged, perhaps that is an influence, I am more sensitive to the noise from the PC. The AIO is decent in that respect, as is no longer having mechanical drives.

bottom line.......................it's whatever you want that meets your needs. For me, for now, it remains to be an AIO.
 
Personally, I prefer the simplicity and lower points-of-failure of air-cooled systems, and have been running air-cooling for as long as I can remember.

I don't plan on changing that approach any time soon.

In terms of brands, my preference is for Noctua solutions. I think their commitment to quality is undeniable.

My current main system incorportates a Noctua NH-D15. My next system will incorporate a Noctua NH-D15 G2.

Still, I recognise that different folks have different preferences.
 
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