{"id":96705,"date":"2016-07-07T15:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T13:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=96705"},"modified":"2016-07-07T15:01:53","modified_gmt":"2016-07-07T13:01:53","slug":"liquid-cooling-versus-air-cooling-for-your-gaming-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/hardware\/96705-liquid-cooling-versus-air-cooling-for-your-gaming-pc","title":{"rendered":"Liquid-cooling versus air-cooling for your gaming PC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many PC gamers build their own gaming rigs, as it is usually cheaper to purchase individual components and install them yourself.<\/p>\n

For this reason, we are often faced with a decision to make – should\u00a0we use air-cooling or liquid-cooling to keep our processors cool?<\/p>\n

We have compared performance data of various air and liquid-cooling products to make that\u00a0decision easier.<\/p>\n

Although gamers can also choose to use liquid-cooling on their GPUs, we will only be comparing performance of CPU coolers.<\/p>\n

\n

Liquid-Cooling<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Liquid-cooling involves the use of liquid to dissipate heat from and cool electronics.<\/p>\n

PC liquid-cooling setups generally consists of some combination of a cooling block, radiator, pump and reservoir.<\/p>\n

A liquid-cooling loop allows for quieter operation and supposedly better temperatures.<\/p>\n

However, liquid-cooling is usually more expensive than air-cooling, and with some setups,\u00a0the extra cost may not be justified.<\/p>\n

\"XSPC<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Air-Cooling<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Air-cooling is the most common form of PC cooling, as it is the default CPU and GPU cooling option, with most cases being set up to provide a constant and directional airflow.<\/p>\n

Although most processors come equipped with a stock air cooler (consisting of a heatsink and fan), this can be replaced with a more powerful aftermarket product in order to greatly improve temperatures.<\/p>\n

Because surface area plays a central role in heat dissipation, these aftermarket coolers are generally quite large and can be outfitted with different fans depending on the user’s needs.<\/p>\n

Air-cooling is traditionally the cheaper option, as it is cheaper to buy a heatsink and fan as opposed to an all-in-one liquid-cooling loop.<\/p>\n

\"Intel's<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Comparison<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Although liquid-cooling is more expensive and offers quieter, cooler performance than air-cooling, is the performance difference big enough to justify its expense?<\/p>\n

To find out, we collated various noise and cooling tests performed on a variety of coolers which directly measure the difference in performance between air and liquid-cooling.<\/p>\n

Check out an eight-cooler performance comparison below, courtesy of Reddit user Pianowned<\/a><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
4.2GHz OC Processor @ Full Fan Speed<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
\n
CPU Cooler<\/div>\n<\/th>\n
\n
Temperature (Celcius)<\/div>\n<\/th>\n
\n
Noise Level (dB)<\/div>\n<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Liquid-cooling<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cooler Master Glacer 240L<\/strong><\/td>\n44.5<\/td>\n56<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Corsair H105<\/strong><\/td>\n45.25<\/td>\n58<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cooler Master Eisberg Prestige 240L<\/strong><\/td>\n47.25<\/td>\n47<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Corsair H75<\/strong><\/td>\n54.5<\/td>\n41<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Performer<\/strong><\/td>\n55.5<\/td>\n41<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cooler Master Seidon 120V Plus<\/strong><\/td>\n55.75<\/td>\n43<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Air-cooling<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Thermalright Silver Arrow IB-E<\/strong><\/td>\n52.25<\/td>\n38<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cooler Master Hyper 612 V2<\/strong><\/td>\n56.25<\/td>\n37<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"Cooling<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Results<\/strong><\/h3>\n

According to the above data, although air-cooling is less effective at reducing temperature, it maintains a lower noise level under heavy load than most liquid-cooling loops.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Obviously, coolers of either variety will be more effective at cooling or reducing noise depending on design.<\/p>\n

For now, if you are building a gaming PC and are not partial to any particular form of cooling, feel free to use either liquid-cooling or air-cooling depending on \u00a0your budget and needs, as neither offers a distinctly large advantage over the other.<\/p>\n

\n

More gaming news<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The biggest games missing from E3 2016<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Games you can play this week \u2014 blocks and barricades<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Xbox Scorpio will be more powerful than PlayStation Neo<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Should you use air-cooling or liquid-cooling to keep your processor cool?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":232,"featured_media":32859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_enabled":true,"_sma_x_custom_text":"","_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,7],"tags":[19857,10519,6638,2664,19865,1085,19855,19861,15397,19859,19863,17536],"class_list":["post-96705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-hardware","tag-air","tag-comparison","tag-cooling","tag-gaming","tag-graph","tag-hardware-2","tag-liquid","tag-noise","tag-pc","tag-table","tag-temperature","tag-versus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96705"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98088,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96705\/revisions\/98088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}