Air for me. Water has never appealed. A full custom loop, yeah it may work a bit better (jury's out for me on that one) people may prefer the look, but it seems too faffy for me. Horses/courses though.
Consistent noise for me, no fan ramp up and down, of course superior cooling ability of liquid is a benefit.
Yes, air coolers can't keep my GPU as cool as water even if on max fans, also allows me to crank silly volts through both CPU and GPU that air couldn't contain.
Yeh, custom water cooling is much better than anything air can offer. Cooler, quieter, no change during the year, etc. AIO's are fairly comparable to air. Custom water costs massively more however!
Yeah, my bad, i had AIOs on the brain for some reason . I have never seen the point of AIOs for that reason. Been a long week. Ignore me. I'm ok with air for what I need, it'd have to be full water if i went that route - AIO, nah.
Dunno about quieter I have a ton of fans on my rads and even on low mode it's not good, I should rebuild it really, my pump is over 10 yrs old so a lot of the gear lasts once you have done the initial bit.
It can be tailored in that direction with minimal performance less. Especially compared to GPU coolers...
Mine is pretty quiet, has the fan curve set so i keep the coolant to below 40C and the fans about 1200rpm under prolonged load. For GPU overclocking it removes temperature constraints pretty much entirely. I've yet to see my GPU hit 50C, even after an 8hour sesh.
Yeh it used to be good to be fair but I bought a new case and had limited time so didn't wire in my aquaero controller, I should pull my finger out and get it back to former glory that was almost 2 years ago
If you are not happy with your hardware and buy everything that comes out (serial fiddler) avoid water. If you bought a rig that has the beans to do the distance and you're happy to stick with it go water. Is air vs water worth it? of course. Not on my CPU if I am being honest. For the most part a 120mm AIO did the trick. However, due to it being 14 core when they were all loaded up the AIO could not cope. I would also imagine air coolers would struggle with it. However that is surmountable. The GPU though? I get the absolute most out of mine, all the time, every time, with no extra noise above ambient. I have some BeQuiet! fans running at around 6v. Any lower and they either stall out (not PWM) or don't do anything. My rig is very quiet, easily below the ambient living noises of where I live (pigeons, seagulls etc). However, my Titan XP runs at 2100mhz. All day, every day, rain or shine, summer or winter. I don't have to worry about it at all, nor do I even bother checking the temps any more. I have also noticed that when liquid cooling a GPU down to the 50s, possibly early 60s in summer, that I've never had one fail. Leave them on air? I've had two failures, and both cards used to run in the 80s which I still don't think is good for the components. And this is coming from a guy who too is autistic and did not take a drop within 2 metres of his PC until he was 43. It took me a loooong time to overcome that fear. However, when I looked at it scientifically and logically the bottom line is you are using non conductive coolant. What I am looking forward to is the water free liquid coolants like cars use now. But I digress... It's well worth doing.
My OC 1080Ti has never exceeded 40°C, even when folding at 100% usage, and is as close to silent as my old ears will ever notice. That's the benefit of water.
