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Date 2005-10-14
Author: Niko Lupala
Editor: Amber Lupala
Air or Watercooling?
It seems like the market makes it harder and harder for the average consumer to make choices. You have 20-30 different video cards, you have 10 different brands of memory which all claim to be the best, and then in the end you have around 100 different air coolers for your socket type. You finally make your decisions and find out that maybe watercooling or a Vapochill might be something for you, I mean this is really a mess for the average consumer that just wants to put together a new setup for him/herself.
I think that it’s safe to say that a Vapochill is out of the normal consumers budget so we can skip it as the a price is over 500$. However for those who have the money and the skill to use the Vapochill I definitely recommend it.
Tip of the day!!
But what is the difference between air and watercooling then? Does water and electricity go together? The questions are pretty much endless and we are going to try to answer some of them to give you an idea on what to go for and the pros and cons of each.
Basically watercooling is something that is not needed for a normal user. Watercooling is used when you overclock your computer or want an extremely quiet computer.
Watercooling on the other hand takes quite a bit of maintenance and check ups. Water should be changed about twice a year to prevent alga and other junk from growing in the system. You also need to check from time to time that the tubing clips are tight and that the tubing is in place otherwise you might get a leak like I had this summer. I had a problem with the silicon tubing expanding during the hot summer heat which ended up leaking out over a liter of water in my case. Luckily it only killed my sound card and didn’t ruin anything else. With watercooling you always take a chance so if you are a normal consumer I would not really recommend it as taking that chance is not worth it.
Air cooling on the other hand is pretty safe compared to water since the only thing that can go wrong is the fan dying but you realize it when the noise dies so you have time to save the cpu. With water it might be to late when you realize the accident has happened
You cannot get as quiet of a computer with air though which is a small setback since more and more people want a quiet computer. This can be fixed though by buying something from Zalman or Arctic cooling for example which are experts on quiet air coolers, otherwise there are 5V adapters that lower the fan speed and by that way give you a quieter computer This however comes with a minor setback since lowering the fan speed gives you a bit warmer computer. This can also be fixed though with buying some case fans and mounting them but of course those also cost more to get. For a decent air cooler you pay around 40$ and for a decent water setup you pay over 150$ so there is quite a bit of difference even though you might have to buy some more fans for the air.
I have gone through most types of cooling in my days, to start with I had a Fop38 with a Delta 60 mm fan which ran at 7000 rpm and was around 45 decibel loud. After that I toned it down a bit and ran some generic air cooling for awhile until I started with watercooling.
Now I have ran several different watercooling setups and came to the conclusion that I am going back to a good old air cooler soon again. It is so much easier to have aircooling since the case weighs A LOT with water and you always take a risk when using it and when moving it.
But what air cooler should you go for then? I said Zalman or Arctic Cooling before but those guys release quite a bit of coolers also so there is some to choose from.
Here are some examples of very popular and good air coolers.
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