Enthusiast of Enthusiast DIY
As I noted last week, enthusiast activity in the PC community can be quite diverse despite the ability to categorize it fairly simply. Be there's niche, and then there's niche.
For PC builders the one area of greatest congruence is cooling. That is to say, it is the area the two sides spend the most time contemplating what to buy. The performance crowd looks for two things: most cooling, least noise. The style crowd looks for... most cooling, least noise. Many in the style crowd will compromise on noise a little to get LEDs or colored blades, but usually don't look to compromise too much on cooling performance. Th performance crowd will compromise a little on noise, but not much on cooling.
The reason is simple; no matter what you use your PC for you need to keep it as cool as possible. As with everything that "as possible" part is dictated by affordability and tolerance. The tolerance aspect is the most difficult to prejudge. Every person is different, so how much noise they think is loud is not always the same. But again, this is an area of congruence between the two crowds - the desire to have a PC that is as quiet as possible. The only thing that makes noise in a PC, ostensibly, are fans; whether the CPU cooling fan, the GPU cooling fans, the case fans, or the fan on the power supply (PSU).
That is how water cooling was born. The idea is that for a bit of investment you can stabilize the temps in cooled components at a low level and do so with less noise than running numerous powerful/noisy fans. If your system is a low powered system there is even the possibility to run a water cooled system that is entirely silent, the radiator passively cooled meaning there are no fans.
Water cooling requires a water block on the relevant components. The water block is a piece of metal, usually copper, with a chamber in which the water flows through. The metal block makes contact with the component, a thin layer of thermal grease in between, absorbing the heat. The moving water passes the heat from the block through the tubing to the radiator which essentially vents the heat. A passive radiator vents via the natural ambient movement of air across the radiator's fins. An active one uses fans to aide the heat transfer.
The problem, however, is that water blocks can be expensive, but also can be limited in application. A cheap block for a CPU is only around $40, but can easily pass $100 if you're talking about a good one. Luckily they are more or less universal, much in the way many fan-based CPU coolers are. Furthermore come companies like Cooler Master and Corsair now make their own closed loop systems. Closed loops are self contained systems where you install and forget mostly. These are decent entry to mid-level options if all you want is to cool your CPU and nothing else.
For the GPU the price generally starts around $100, but the applicability of each block is specific to one type of GPU. In other words a water block on an AMD Radeon HD 6900 series card will only work on a Radeon 6950 or 6970. Whereas you can take the CPU water block with you to a new system even after a parts upgrade, you can't do that with GPU water blocks.
When it comes to any other component, the availability of a block is sketchy. There are some "universal" blocks for VRAM, the North Bridge, and South Bridge of the motherboard, but these aren't nearly as universal as they appear. Full-coverage blocks for motherboards - blocks that cover the three components I mentioned earlier - are mostly relegated to the top three or four performance/gamer motherboards like the Asus Crosshair series. There are blocks for Ram sticks, but Ram doesn't get very hot in the first place. There are at least a couple I know of for HDDs, but these are nothing too impressive. There were water cooled PSUs, but that seems to have faded out as no new ones have shown up in quite a while.
Dealing with routing tubing for even just a simple CPU and GPU water cooling setup can be a pain. The costs can also rise relatively quickly if you get really immersed in top style and top performance. But, because of the part compatibility issue you essentially get pigeonholed into a specific set of PC components if you hope to water cool anything other than just the CPU.
That dilemma is how submerged oil cooling was born. I'll get into that topic a bit more tomorrow as I lay out one of my semi-abandoned projects from last year.
For PC builders the one area of greatest congruence is cooling. That is to say, it is the area the two sides spend the most time contemplating what to buy. The performance crowd looks for two things: most cooling, least noise. The style crowd looks for... most cooling, least noise. Many in the style crowd will compromise on noise a little to get LEDs or colored blades, but usually don't look to compromise too much on cooling performance. Th performance crowd will compromise a little on noise, but not much on cooling.
The reason is simple; no matter what you use your PC for you need to keep it as cool as possible. As with everything that "as possible" part is dictated by affordability and tolerance. The tolerance aspect is the most difficult to prejudge. Every person is different, so how much noise they think is loud is not always the same. But again, this is an area of congruence between the two crowds - the desire to have a PC that is as quiet as possible. The only thing that makes noise in a PC, ostensibly, are fans; whether the CPU cooling fan, the GPU cooling fans, the case fans, or the fan on the power supply (PSU).
That is how water cooling was born. The idea is that for a bit of investment you can stabilize the temps in cooled components at a low level and do so with less noise than running numerous powerful/noisy fans. If your system is a low powered system there is even the possibility to run a water cooled system that is entirely silent, the radiator passively cooled meaning there are no fans.
Water cooling requires a water block on the relevant components. The water block is a piece of metal, usually copper, with a chamber in which the water flows through. The metal block makes contact with the component, a thin layer of thermal grease in between, absorbing the heat. The moving water passes the heat from the block through the tubing to the radiator which essentially vents the heat. A passive radiator vents via the natural ambient movement of air across the radiator's fins. An active one uses fans to aide the heat transfer.
The problem, however, is that water blocks can be expensive, but also can be limited in application. A cheap block for a CPU is only around $40, but can easily pass $100 if you're talking about a good one. Luckily they are more or less universal, much in the way many fan-based CPU coolers are. Furthermore come companies like Cooler Master and Corsair now make their own closed loop systems. Closed loops are self contained systems where you install and forget mostly. These are decent entry to mid-level options if all you want is to cool your CPU and nothing else.
For the GPU the price generally starts around $100, but the applicability of each block is specific to one type of GPU. In other words a water block on an AMD Radeon HD 6900 series card will only work on a Radeon 6950 or 6970. Whereas you can take the CPU water block with you to a new system even after a parts upgrade, you can't do that with GPU water blocks.
When it comes to any other component, the availability of a block is sketchy. There are some "universal" blocks for VRAM, the North Bridge, and South Bridge of the motherboard, but these aren't nearly as universal as they appear. Full-coverage blocks for motherboards - blocks that cover the three components I mentioned earlier - are mostly relegated to the top three or four performance/gamer motherboards like the Asus Crosshair series. There are blocks for Ram sticks, but Ram doesn't get very hot in the first place. There are at least a couple I know of for HDDs, but these are nothing too impressive. There were water cooled PSUs, but that seems to have faded out as no new ones have shown up in quite a while.
Dealing with routing tubing for even just a simple CPU and GPU water cooling setup can be a pain. The costs can also rise relatively quickly if you get really immersed in top style and top performance. But, because of the part compatibility issue you essentially get pigeonholed into a specific set of PC components if you hope to water cool anything other than just the CPU.
That dilemma is how submerged oil cooling was born. I'll get into that topic a bit more tomorrow as I lay out one of my semi-abandoned projects from last year.
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