These days, many of us use our computers for a whole host of everyday tasks, from our jobs to social media and video gaming, to even banking and shopping transactions. All the while, no matter which type of computer you’re using, tremendous amounts of heat are generated by the components of your computer in order to carry out these desired tasks. This heat can eventually damage the components inside your computer. In order to effectively manage and prevent any damage from overheating, one option is to liquid-cool your computer. Provided below is a summary of liquid-cooling and its effects, should you choose to use it, on your computer.
Liquid-Cooled vs. Air Cooled
Briefly, a liquid-cooled setup for your computer basically means that the essential, and expensive, parts inside the computer are kept nice and cool via coolant liquid that is encased inside a series of tubes. Also used in this method is a radiator and what are called water blocks. This liquid-cool method is in contrast to the traditional method of cooling found in most computers, which consists of air-cooling. Air-cooling makes use of many fans that constantly work to keep the components from overheating. For example, your typical computer will house a number of fans, ones that cool the computer case, ones that keep cool the graphics card, and still other fans that maintain the temperature of the main processing unit, or CPU. In air-cooling, all of this fanning and cooling of heat is carried out of your computer via a heat sink, which is just a big piece of metal that operates in such a way that when the computer heats up, it heats up the heat sink which creates warm air in the computer allowing the fans to blow all the warm air out of the computer, thus keeping the whole machine cool. In contrast, a liquid-cooled system can be superior because the water is able to move heat around much faster than air can, and also the water can take on much more heat than air.
Pros & Cons Of Liquid Cooling
In many ways the liquid-cooling method of keeping your computer cool is superior to the air-cooled method. However, there are indeed downsides to using the liquid-cooling system. Firstly, as a benefit, liquid-cooling is great at being able to effectively cool off specific parts of your computer, especially if you are interested in overclocking your chips. Another benefit is that liquid-cooling is quiet. So even if you don't need to cut down on heating, using water can at least decrease the noise level, something air-cooling fans are notorious for. Additionally, a fan system takes up a lot of space in your computer, whereas the liquid-cool system of tubes does not. Plus, you can decorate the inside of the computer by using a wide variety of different colored tubes and coolants! On the downside, liquid-cooling is expensive. A fan system can cost up to $100 dollars, however a liquid-cooled one can go for as much as $360 dollars. Another con is that you can’t go cheap. Thus, you pretty much have to go for broke with liquid-cooling, or else suffer the inevitable consequence of having your computer flooded with coolant due to shoddy tubing. This leads to a final con, which is that even if you do buy the top of the line liquid-cooling system, the installation process will be a tricky one, fraught with lots of troubleshooting, rewiring, and an inevitable leak or two. So you will have to test the system outside the computer before you put it inside.
Water-Cooling and Overclocking
Aside from the often complex nature of setting up a liquid-cooling system, there’s another, simpler, option available to you, especially if you’re looking to just cool-off your overclocked chips. This option is to install what is called a sealed or self-contained water-cooling unit. These units are purchased for about $60 dollars, and come fully assembled and sealed up. Such a system gives you all the benefits of a liquid-cooled unit without having to deal with the muss and fuss of tubing, installation, leakage. All that's required on your end is to hook up a water block to your CPU, as well as a fan and radiating unit to the case. There's a chance that, with some models, you may lose certain options for customization often found in the DIY units, but, as mentioned, the trade-off is that you do away with the frustration of self-installation. As a note, however, if you're looking to cool-off more than just one component, such as an overclocked chip, stick with the DIY water-cooling systems.