Quote:
Originally Posted by soundman98
i'm very similar. though the small advantage that water cooling has is minimizing fan noise. in a quieter setting, it can be preferable to move and/or consolidate the heat to a radiator and a few fans instead of multiple fans to blow on the heatsinks, and multiple fans to direct airflow through the case
i'm not convinced that there's any thermal advantage until one goes into overclocking though.
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My air-cooled Dell XPS desktop has only one large case exhaust fan in the rear and temps under load are always in the green. Clever air ducting there.
The 850W PS has a fan but it's silent.
It also helped lower CPU temp and fan noise when I upgraded to an Nvidia FE card with a ducted fan that dumps hot air out the back of the case instead of inside of it like most other cards do. Apparently there's a tradeoff if the card is OC'd and needs max cooling but I haven't needed to boost default setting for what I do. I can barely hear the card fan under high load, it's far enough away from the desk that it isn't bad.
About my thermal paste comment earlier, it was worth -4ºC at idle, pretty good for an easy job. Others might do better with conductive paste but fearing fire, I went with non-conductive.
The air cooled XPS runs cooler, quieter and better than my former Alienware Aurora with its bunch of fans and water cooling that sounded like a Dyson under load. The case lights were cool though, but I don't really miss them as much as my nephews.