Is Water-cooling really Quiet or is it a lie.!? baited question to get answers

henrik-t

henrik-t

henrik-t

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Is Water-cooling really Quiet or is it a lie.!? baited question to get answers


SO my delima is, is water cooling really quiet or is it same or higher than some air configs.

my specs now are, cooling and fan wise :
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2x Nocuta 12 fans
2x fractal 120 fans on a fan controller running 5 volts

trippel fan after market fans on the gfx, arctic cooling.

corsair 750 power-supply " to be replaced"

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My question is,


how quiet are a water config really, whit a Pump running, water running in the loop, and x amount of fans on the radiators, running on x speeds to cool it all + same powersupply.!??

seems to me its gonna be more noisy, so thats why i never bought into getting all the parts needed to test it out.


ivd really like for "only" ppl whit experiences in water cooling and not the h100 corsair testers :p sorry , try to answer this question, so i wont get more misinformation than i already got.

thanks in advanced to the ppl replying to my tread.
 
i just changed to water cooling. i can tell you that i hear no noise at all from the pump or the water in the loop. for the fans it all depends on what fans you are using, i have some £2 which are not the best but the noise of one of the old hd i have is much louder than those fans..
 
Water cooling (custom loop) is very silent and I mean very silent if you water cooling the CPU and any GPU(s) you have.

It's advised to put the fans on a fan controller so you can keep the fans quite.

And try and mount the pump with some sort of anti vibration cushion as it will stop any vibrations from the pump to the case.
 
Provided you use a product like the Aquaero 5 it can be super duper quiet. After experiencing how much control you have over noise with the AE5 - I wouldn't build a watercooling system without one tbh! be that the AE5 LT or the ones with the screens.
 
Shrot answer is yes it can be.

It is completely dependant on what set up you run. If you run a rad like the Black Ice SR-1's or XSPC RX rads that are really low FPI and have enough rad space that you can run your fans on a fan controller at 600-800rpm. If you can isolate the pump from the case through either sound proof foam or even suspending the pump from touching the case. Then your build can be very quiet, especially compared to really noisey graphics card coolers.

If you only cool CPU and GPU then you would still need to airflow over the motherboard heat sinks but even that can be reduced speed fans as you don't need anything like the airflow needed if cpu/gpu is on air. If you wanted to go to extremes you could watercooler HDDs, ram and motherboard also and as long as you have enough radiator area you could keep all fans very low rpm and very quiet.

Another advantage of having a fan controller for the rad fans I have found that while watching a movie or browsing here I can run on just 2 fans on the rads at 600rpm, temperatures increase doing this (abient 15-20C cpu sits around mid 20C's gpu mid 30C's) then if I am going something like gaming I can turn all my fans on at 600rpm which keep temps down to about 30-33C on cpu and never seen above 44C on gpu. And even with all fans on my HDDs spinning is the noisest part of my pc (7200rpm samsung f3 and 2 5400 seagate baracuda's)

Alternativley if you ran a very high fpi rad with full speed 38mm fans then it would be so very noisey.
 
A I wrote right now i gor 2x noctua 12 for cpu cooling prob some of the quiets fans in the world, running on aound 500-600rpm
the gfx have the aftermarket trippel accelreo extreame fans on it, running aout 25% load at full load and cant be heard, and lastly the 2 case fans are somewhat quiet, controlled by a controller, running on lowest settings, my HDD are mounted on a bungee mods made of paracord.(parachute cord)

so if shell out 300-400 pounds on gear, and seems like ill just end up whit same noise, as ill have to get higher "better air pushing fans" than the nocuta ones, plus Pump, im very sensitive ,then im even looking into this as quiet as my system allready is
so what i forgot to put in the questions was,
will its Ever be better then what i got !?
 
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You've missed the entire point to water cooling. The radiators are mounted right by the incoming airflow, or even outside the case. Your heatsinks are in the middle of the case, recirculating air as well as drawing some in from outside. So the heatsinks are in a warmer place than the radiators. Further, the radiators tend to have a considerably greater surface area, and so will dissipate the same heat at a lower airflow than air cooling.

Between bigger surface area & better positioning, it's not surprising that water cooling can dramatically outperform air. It's a better approach.

This does not however mean that water is always better. For lower power set ups, where you can use passive heat sinks and one or two slow fans, air cooling is the better choice. For higher power, hotter set ups, water is the better choice. The middle ground is harder to call, it depends on the hardware and the noise/temperature balance being sought.

Finally, it's very possible to incompetently set up water cooling, and end up with poor temperatures and all the noise from fans, plus the (usually small) noise from a pump. Here's an example of a badly planned and badly executed water cooled computer. That's user error though, and air cooled computers are similarly vulnerable to that.
 
Air cooling can be inaudible - water cooling can be inaudible - both can be noisy.
You have 8 fans in your quiet build.
I usually have 1 in my water cooled quiet build.
But currently due to swapping out my EK blocks it's on air and there are three fans total.

Both run 'silently' but my loop runs with cooler temps.
 
I went watercooled because the crappy intel heatsinks drove me potty when it used to spin up, I even tried some other air coolers, but didn't get me where I wanted, so water was the answer for me. I'm now in the market for some quieter fans to sort out my push pull config.
 
If done properly, watercooling is silent.

Air cooling can also be silent, but you get hotter temps with high end hardware. Air cooling also has to be done properly to get the same levels of silence at good temps.
 
Water is naturally far more efficient at cooling than air because it's a much better conductor of heat. Everything will be better because a lot less energy is wasted. It will make less noise, use less power and the difference between idle and load temps will be smaller. The only down side is it requires more maintenance, money and you need to know what your doing or it could all go horribly wrong :P
 
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Water cooling is really quiet but if you have a noisy system due to fan noise ramping up then changing to water cooling may get rid of this however allow other noises that was covered by the fan noise to be heard. I know after i switched over my hard drives are the loudest part of my system.
 
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