The whole point for AIO water loops is that you have more flexibility in radiator placement. For advanced systems you can beat static copper tubes pretty easily by moving more water.
If you live somewhere that’s consistently 98-100% humidity: Air cooling is simultaneously liquid cooling.
And wheres that, in the occean?
Florida
They mean 98%-100% relative humidity. 100% relative humidity is the maximum amount of water that the air can hold at a given temperature and pressure as vapour. Once you get to 100% then you can evaporate any more water / was will start condensing out of the air (especially if the temperature drops)
Tennessee
Yeah… they call it that cuz the same principle applies to vehicle engine cooling.
Air cooling is not as effective as water cooling, but just take a look at beetle engines made more than half a century ago, they’re all air cooled and still up and running. It’s all in the design, if it’s good and overengineered, it will pracatically run forever.
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
they had a tendency to overheat in hot conditions, and when stuck in traffic. this is because they need a certain amount of air flowing in order to cool properly.
they also weren’t very good for heat in the winter.
air cooling is a simpler system, and as such has less to go wrong with it. that doesn’t make it better or worse. there are pros and cons to both systems.
Those problems can be easily fixed with aditional fans.
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
Where do people keep getting this from? Cars today tend to last far longer anywhere where winter is a thing.
As for air cooled vs water cooled engines, the power output (and vehicle mass) has to be part of that conversation. Yes air cooling works on on a 25 HP motor, but it doesn’t work so well on modern engines making an order of magnitude more power.
Honestly people give old vehicles (or old anything) way too much credit. It’s survivor bias, only the good stuff lasted this long. The shitty products have all been recycled multiple times by now. I mean think about it, 100,000 miles used to be an old-ass car back in the day, but for anything post 1990 or so that’s just getting started. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the simplicity and repairability of old vehicles
You have clearly never lived with an old air cooled VW engine and dealt with it overheating in traffic.
Or going uphill
If you genuinely think that those old engines are still running on original parts. Then I don’t know what to say, because you wouldn’t understand any of it.
Of course not, but they sure as hell require A LOT less maintenace than our “modern cars”.
They really don’t.
Keep up with services, fluids and treat them with respect. You won’t have a problem.
When was the last time you had to replace a distributor cap on a modern car?
I replaced it on my Vauxhaul Meriva 2006 about 6 months ago, why?
Yeah but VW engines were pretty small, carrying pretty small cars.
Similarly it’s actually easier to fuck up the design of a water cooler than an air cooling system. Notably motherboard warp can happen from an improperly set up water cooling.
Didn’t know this, thanks for the info 👍.
Cars built today will outlast most of the old Beetles. There is a big survivorship bias at work. A percentage of them were built to slightly tighter tolerances and quality than all the others off the same line. A percentage of those will end up in the hands of owners that are meticulous about maintenance, never get in a major accident, and keep it going for decades. The handful you see left are the ones that went through several rounds of small percentage chances. There were a bajillion of those old Beetles made, so a few were bound to get through.
What cars have problems with today are things that rarely have to do with making the wheels go. They get into accidents. Their auto-dimming back windows no longer work. The GPS doesn’t get updates and thinks you’re three counties away. The engine and transmission, however, will probably go to the junkyard in perfect working order, even with shitty maintenance on the part of the owner.
Two problems with the drivelines of modern cars: sensors, which can cause some pretty spectacular mechanical failures; and cost-cutting engineering. Trimming parts to use less material and that kind of thing, but also less investment in QC (looking at you, Kia engine recalls).
There’s truly more to go wrong in modern cars, and the electronics can fail and cause mechanical failures, too, especially in the combustion cycle.
The fact remains that most cars today will go to the junkyard with perfectly good engine and transmissions. Those sensors tend to kill themselves before killing other parts of the car, and then you just replace them.
I beg to differ, I was an owner of a Renault Megane which had a screwed up onboard computer that somehow managed to mangle 3 timing belts and a cylinder head. I spent more reparing it than the ammount I spent to buy the car… all because of a screwed up onboard computer.
And not one mechanic listened to me, I told them the computer was acting up, throwing errors left and right, then silence for a month, then errors again, they said it’s the sensors 😤… I mean, come on, all of the sensors acting up at the same time, then they go in deep sleep for a month, then the same shit again… excuse me, but you’re either dumb or just wanna squeeze money out of me.
And better noise level. Treated myself to a custom loop a couple months ago and never looked back. I mean, it is expensive and can be a lot of work to get going, but fuck aircooling an RTX 3090. Never again (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻)
Air cooling is just radiative cooling with extra steps
nah, radiative cooling means that radiation is the only mechanism for heat exchange in use. I’m pretty sure most modern air coolers use forced convection as one of their heat exchange mechanisms.
Have you seen what Linus did with his pool lmao
Air cooling is just vacuum cooling with extra steps.
I get the joke, but the vacuum is usually before the fans, inside the heat pipes.
And it’s the fluid inside the heat pipe doing the cooling not the vacuum,
Yes and no. Remove the vacuum and the heat pipe no longer works. I mean, it works, but it’s no longer a heat pipe.
Unless you’re in a boat, in which case you’re likely using a water to water heat exchanger.
Well yes. It is. Liquid cooling does have merits. I won’t say it’s better than air cooling in a general sense; at the end of the day, the heat ends up in the air.
With liquid cooling, you can transport it further, use larger radiators… The list goes on.
My key point is that as long as the components get cooled, who cares which you use? Do what you want.
Idk, needs more steps, put a Peltier in it, a heat exchanger with a second loop, and don’t forget the compressor for extra chill.
And also make it so that the end radiator doesn’t radiate heat into the air but into the ground instead, so that it won’t be just air cooling with extra steps.
Bought water cooler when I built it. That was five years ago. No problems so far.
Ground-source water-water heat pumps have entered the chat
And the ability to know where the heat is being dissipated too.
And get more surface area to the air than you could with straight air cooling.
And control the temperature more acurately if desired through a thermostat.
By extension, air cooling is global thermal mass cooling, which, by extension is radiative cooling, which by extension is universal entropy cooling or whatever you’d call that.
THERE IS, AS YET, INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Thanks Multivac!
Surface area of the fin stack matters. An air cooler will always be limited by the space available around the CPU. A water cooling radiator has more flexibility to be placed in around the case.
That said, having less than a 360mm AIO is probably a waste. Also, higher end Intel chips these days are so power hungry that they can’t be physically cooled properly with the surface area available on the package.