If you're serious about pushing your computer's performance while keeping it as cool as possible,
the long-standing advice has been to opt for water cooling rather than rely on air cooling.
And generally speaking, there's something to this advice. Unless you're comparing a basic,
all-in-one water cooler with a really beefy, high-end air cooler,
putting your CPU or your graphics card for that matter under liquid should yield better results.
But have you ever wondered why this is the case? I mean, what's so special about plain old water?
As it turns out, quite a lot. Every substance has an intrinsic property called heat capacity,
and simply put, this is how much thermal energy it can absorb before it changes temperature.
Turns out that water has a higher heat capacity than most other common substances. Think about it
You've got a large swimming pool that's getting beat on by the sun during a scorching hot day,
and yet you jump in and it's still shockingly cold, even in the late afternoon.
This is because of hydrogen bonding at the molecular level. The oxygen atom in a
water molecule is quite electronegative, meaning that it attracts electrons,
which gives it more of a negative charge than the two attached hydrogen atoms.
So this means that the more positively charged hydrogen atoms of the surrounding water molecules
will stick to the oxygen atoms and prevent the molecules from moving around too much
when heat is applied. And since higher temperatures are a result of more molecular motion,
all of this means that water can resist temperature changes better than the metals
that are commonly used in air coolers. So coming back to what this means for your PC,
strapping a water block to your CPU or your GPU means that your chips will be spitting out heat
into a substance that can hold much more heat than an aluminum heat sink with a fan attached to it.
But that's not even the whole story. There's also the fact that there's a practical limit
to how much heat sink you can strap onto a CPU socket before it becomes too large and too heavy.
So another way that water coolers achieve better performance is by having very large radiators
to dissipate the heat that's been absorbed by the water,
further improving overall cooling capacity. Furthermore, because pumping water from the
CPU to another part of the system is so fast and efficient, many water cooling systems are designed
to take the warm water away where it can get easy access to fresh and cool air.
Other people prefer to mount their fans in such a way that they'll blow the waste heat right out
of the case, ensuring that the hot air from their CPU isn't affecting their other components.
Even aside from raw performance though, water coolers do have other advantages.
Because water cools more efficiently than a metal heat sink alone,
water coolers are generally quieter because the attached fans don't have to work as hard to
dissipate heat. And compared to a beefy tower style air cooler, they also take up less space,
put less torque on your motherboard, eliminate worries about your CPU cooler conflicting with
being able to install your RAM, and are generally more aesthetically pleasing if you want a clean
looking build. However, despite liquid cooling's many advantages, there are some things you should
be wary of before you rush out and buy a water cooler. Although springing a leak in a well
designed loop is rare, it can happen. And while some coolers are filled with distilled water or
other non-conductive fluids, even these substances are liable to pick up ions from the metals inside
the cooler and become conductive over time. So you'll want to make sure that whatever brand you
buy from has a reputation for covering the cost of other damaged components if the worst happens.
Additionally, don't feel compelled to spend extra money on a water cooler if you aren't overclocking.
Although you can still reap the benefits of better aesthetics and reduced noise,
though it should be noted that very high-end air coolers actually can run quieter than water
coolers because they don't require pumps, the more you know. Your CPU is going to function just fine
at stock speeds with the cooler that comes in the box or, worst case scenario, a modest
aftermarket air cooler because long gone are the days when your typical beige box system
sounds like a jet engine when it's being put through its paces. So thanks for watching guys,
like and subscribe, and bye. By what? By a shirt, lttstore.com.