How long before air-cooling is obsolete?

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quakefiend420

Limp Gawd
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Keeping the ever increasing heat output of today's faster and faster components in check is becoming more and more difficult with standard air cooling, especially in the GPU world...how long before your average mid to high end PC is water-cooled?
 
I thought with today’s high end air-coolers water-cooling is the one becoming obsolete.
 
The real benefit of water cooling is going to be in dedicated solution for tight space constraints. For example, the H50 is great for people who want high-end aircooling performance but don't want over 1lb of weight straining their motherboard sockets.

Also, for GPUs, watercooling is fantastic. Considering high-end GPUs can put out a lot more heat than stock CPUs, (sometimes twice as much), and they have tighter space constraints, if I were going to make my system quieter, I'd go for watercooling on the GPU with a custom kit (rad, pump, coldplate, etc) and then do a high-end aircooler or the H50 on my CPU.
 
I don't think water is ever going to become the norm, because adding stock water cooling is expensive and prone to problems such as bacteria/crap buildup or leakage a.k.a: lawsuits.

It will probably always be a niche market. I have wc and it cost over 300 dollars for the parts I have. I can do insane oc and have a quiet pc but otherwise its not really worth it.
 
Aircooling is not going away for a while. Its limitations are actually becoming a major design requirement for future semiconductors: it's obvious in this relatively new 'performance per watt' philosophy.
 
heatsinks are part of "air cooling" right? If this is categorically correct, then I don't see them ever being obsolete.
 
Pkirk618 said:
heatsinks are part of "air cooling" right? If this is categorically correct, then I don't see them ever being obsolete.
Click to expand...

Correct.

I have become fond of the H50. I wanted to water cool at some point but decided it was not worth the expense/time/hassle, so I just grabbed this. I have now OC'd my q9550 (Stock 2.83) to 3.9 with the H50. It hits 65C while folding 24/7 at times but seems to sit closer to 62C average.
 
watercooling is going to be the one becoming obsolete. operating voltages are becoming lower and lower. People are able to get higher and higher stable clocks on air coolers.
 
ya, after witnessing high end water cooling systems 2-3 years after the fact, i'd have to say no thanks.
 
Technically, the water in a water-cooled system doesn't actually cool the part, it simply moves the heat away. The heat transfers from the CPU/GPU/etc. into the water, the water is pumped around, and the heat transfers out of the water into the radiator. Fans then blow air across the radiator, transferring the heat from the radiator to the surrounding air. Typical HSFs simply transfer heat directly from the CPU to the heatsink to the surrounding air.

However, water can absorb quite a bit of heat. With a large amount of water in a loop, the water can absorb some of the heat if the radiator isn't transferring enough heat out to the atmosphere. The water will get warmer and warmer and eventually not be able to cool the part. Depending on how often you shut down your PC and how inadequate the rad end of your loop is, you might never even notice that it's inadequate. If it's only generating a little bit more heat than the loop can handle and it only runs 6 hours a day, the water could absorb the extra heat while it's running, then it would cool back down during the other 18 hours.

A non-PC example is my Syclone, which has a liquid-intercooled turbo. During normal operation, the intake air passes through the Charge Air Cooler (like a waterblock) where heat is transferred into a loop of coolant. The coolant is pumped around to the Charge Coolant Heat Exchanger (radiator) where the heat is dumped out into the atmosphere. When drag racing, a lot of heat is generated and the little CCHE doesn't do a great job of dumping it. There are limited options for upgrading the CCHE, so some people simply plumb the intercooler system into a large tank of (ice) water. The water can quickly absorb the spike in heat for a run or two down the track, but obviously wouldn't work well for constant use.

Like others have said, I think we may see an increase in H50-style coolers. Moving the heat away from the source can allow you to use a 120mm fan/rad to cool something that can't fit a 120 right on the source. The CoolIT Omni A.L.C. is a similar system for GPUs. It still seems to be semi-custom for hose lengths and mounting options and such, but it may provide some of the benefits of watercooling to those who don't want to bother with a full custom loop. Depending on the cost, I'd love to have a PnP system that allows me to have a single-slot video card cooled by two silent 120mm fans at the top of my case, with minimal hassle when I upgrade.
 
It will be a long time before air cooling is obsolete. In fact, all cooling transfers to the air, unless we somehow hook up our cooling system to the sewers in the future!!

On the other hand, apple has shown that commercial water cooled system are viable -- I.E. MAC Pros, although those things are approaching "workstation" prices these days.
 
I could see Dell (and others) picking up something like the H50 cooler, and using it in there systems. It is a completely 1d10T proof water cooling system and I don't even thing Dell could screw it up.

I wish my T110 server had a H50 in it... damn that thing is loud :mad:
 
The only thing that might happen to air coolers is they might get a boost from TEC's in the future as TDP's continue to rise.
 
Never. Inherently!

Air is the only media that heat in our earth bound electronics can dissipate heat into. It does not matter that water or any other fluid is involved actively or passively, ultimately the heat is dissipated into the atmospheric gases.
 
Last edited:
dekruyter said:
Better question, when will water cooling be dead.

.
Click to expand...

It is already dead for CPUs IMO. It still has life left for GPUs since those tend to output ~200W or more of heat that needs to be cooled in a relatively small space. I expect that to change with AMD Fusion though.
 
dekruyter said:
Better question, when will water cooling be dead.
Click to expand...
Water cooling won't die!
It will be used to cool the major power consumers in high end rigs. Either to make them pretty quiet, and/or to make the cooling solution fit within a limited volume, and/or to make the computer rugged enough to be shipped by regular mail.

Cheers
Olle
 
I'd say air cooling will die in 5-10years time for desktops. These all in one package no maintenance watercooling kits are more efficient and not that more expensive than heatsinks. Over time there will be more and more of them and eventually they will probably be more popular than heatsinks, though not totally wiped out i think they'd lose the mojority.
 
firas said:
I thought with today’s high end air-coolers water-cooling is the one becoming obsolete.
Click to expand...

Well I am going to quote this one as well. I completely agree. I think you might start seeing TEC coolers become integrated in unis eventually, and I think the tech has the ability to mature into something really usefull.
 
dekruyter said:
Better question, when will water cooling be dead.

.
Click to expand...

yep cpus and heat sources will need to bring power/heat down, if youce ever looked inside computers like the dell precisions or rack servers the air cooling stuff is just fine and works very well with low noice under stock speeds/operations (which is what, 98% of users?)

only reason i went h50 is most coolers block my ram slots, but thats a design flaw more than anything, I dont see OEMS using water/liquid of any sort in mainstream computers, just the odd xps/blaclbird type setup as a sales pitch
 
I believe alienware uses a liquid cooling system similar to the H50 for their water-cooled computers.

Full-fledged custom water cooling never has, and probably will never be mainstream, mostly because people don't want to bother with the hassle of setting it up and maintaining it. Custom water cooling is done mostly because people are willing to spend lots of time and money doing it, and it becomes more of a hobby than anything else.

Besides, has anyone looked at the TDP of the HD5870's and HD5850's? They were top of the line for a while, and they, for the most part, didn't put out any more heat than mildly overclocked CPU's (I believe they were 150 and 170 watts).

Water cooling does have an upside in that it allows you to use much larger 120mm and 140mm fans and radiators, so noise level is reduced, compared to the 60 or 70mm fans on graphics cards.

Also, about TEC coolers, they do already have TEC plates that you can mount to, for example, your waterblock, and then put that on top of your graphics card or CPU. Another example of a TEC cooler is the Cooler Master V10, although $100 is out of most people's spending range for a cooler. The downside to TEC, however, is the large electricity usage, and need for a more powerful power supply. The TEC cooler on the V10 consumes 75 watts alone.
 
This question has been asked for a long time. But air cooling has evolved along with cooling demands.

Look at the stock coolers for CPUs today, there nowhere near the size of most aftermarket heatsinks and they still keep the CPUs cool enough to be stable in some really poorly cooled OEM cases. Sure there not good enough for the [H] but they get the job done for HP, Dell, and others and are still very reliable.

The only reason we use the huge ass coolers is because we demand more than most from our computers.

I recently read a review of a liquid metal heatsink that used a magnetic pump w/ no moving parts and it did better than most of the allinone watercooling setups. If this technology matures a little more to make it more afordable it will make a big leap in cooling......hopefully;).
 
TEC is way out of line, since it merely adds about three times as much heat as it transfers.
It takes even more to cool a TEC setup than it takes to cool the original hot part.

Cheers
Olle
 
Thing is, if you can cool the TEC chip effectively, it'll cool the original hot part much better than just a waterblock or heatsink alone. As long as you have a system that can remove the heat from the TEC chip as well as the heat from the CPU or GPU effectively, then a TEC chip will give you better temperatures.
 
Tsumi said:
... As long as you have a system that can remove the heat from the TEC...
Click to expand...
Which is exactly the issue. You need much more cooling with TEC, which again effectively leads to a demand for water cooling with a large radiator.
Mounting a heatsink directly on the TEC just won't do it!

Cheers
Olle
 
How about the Cooler Master V10 then? That thing has a 75 watt TEC chip, and apparently, it cools the CPU very well.
 
I have a couple of questions to narrow this down. Where does the heat go from water cooling? What is the transfer medium in your heat pipes?

You can either think that air cooling will never die, as except for some very rare (and very cumbersome) systems, the air is the final destination of the heat from your computer.

-OR-

Air cooling is already dieing and has been replaced by the goo that fills the heat pipes in your massive tower cooler and the two slot cooler on your GPU.
 
compudocs said:
The only thing that might happen to air coolers is they might get a boost from TEC's in the future as TDP's continue to rise.
Click to expand...

That's not how they work. If you bought a TEC big enough to cool one of the new CPUs then you would have to water cool the hot side.

We are to the point now where you have to use multiple TECs and heat sinks just to get the COP in a decent range for one CPU. TECs put out more heat on the hotside than it takes to cool the CPU to ambient even. You would just be compounding the problem if you use only one TEC at full voltage with a heat sink. The proper way to use a TEC is to use many of them in series. Using more to remove the same amount of heat helps keep their efficiency in a range that is manageable. Then you still have to use more heat sink then you would want to hang off a board.

You can fit four 60mm TECs in the same area as one 120mm rad. So something along the lines of a external water cooler is certainly feasible. If it is engineered properly. The Coolit stuff makes an attempt, and it's better than most but still shy of a good plane-jane water cooler.
 
Unfortunately I'd have to agree with most of the previous posters on this topic. Air cooling is so good now compared to water that it's watercooling that is becoming less useful.

I used to W/C to reduce noise levels. But unless I am going for very high constant overclocks at low noise levels, air is just as good, if not better. And even for GPU cooling, there are 3rd party solutions that help. In fact, if you're not careful W/C can increase noise levels if you increase the number of moving noise producing components like fans and pumps.

I can see WC being a definate advantage if you're building a "high end" rig that will constantly run very high overclocks on your CPU and GPU with reasonable noise. Not talking about benching, but for running a reliable SLI (or Xfire) prime stable rig with powerful components well over 4 Ghz 24/7 365 days a year with low noise levels, WC is superior to air. Otherwise, air is not only more convenient, but can be lower noise.
 
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