Just how important is cooling nowadays?

J

jamsomito

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It seems like as the technology improves, there's less need for taking extra measures just for cooling. I mean think about it:

1. Northbridge was removed entirely for intel systems because it's now in the CPU
2. Southbridge rarely needs more than a thin heat spreader
3. RAM doesn't need more than a small heatspreader, even when overclocking
4. CPU's have come a long ways with respect to TDP as manufacturing sizes have shrunk drastically (remember the toaster someone made out of old AMD chips?)
5. mainstream GPU's are even pretty good, especially the latest generation nVidia ones. Yes, the enthusiast cards still put out some heat, and AMD moreso than nVidia. But that's the direction we're heading there too.

I just remember the days when getting your case airflow to be flawless was crucial to keeping a system running 24/7. Nowadays you can just buy run-of-the-mill components and you'll have a system that runs at decent temps. No more water cooling every component on a mobo, special components to eject heat from the case, special case configurations to get cooling where it's needed.

Arguably the latter is becoming more standard, so perhaps that has something to do with it. But it just doesn't seem to be as big a deal today as it did 5 or 10 years ago.

Discuss.
 
Agreed. I never went crazy after market before with GPU cooling. The only thing I've done is replace my stock R290 HS/FAN with an aftermarket one to reduce noise. I was pretty [H]ard with CPU cooling before, starting with the Celly 300A @ 450.

Jump to the Intel core i7-920. Since that CPU, I have found that I have enough CPU power for everything I do without need to overclock. I don't do any heavy video/music/multimedia work. I do transcode some shows, edit together some video clips for home movies, but nothing fancy. The only other thing I do that requires heavy CPU cycles is gaming. I have a 3770k now, but that's only because I spilled water in my tower when I had the i7-920 in there (sad sad day).

I used to also need nice airflow to cool 10k RPM HDD's, but now I run SSDs so there's no airflow need for those.

I'm liking it these days where I don't need to hide my tower under my desk. Also, I was never into REAL liquid cooling. The closest thing I have is the Corsair H100i, but I don't consider that a REAL liquid cooling system.
 
Yeah, I'm pretty surprised that Corsair and now Swiftech are designing new AiO water cooling systems, and that they all seem to be designed for use with CPUs, and that anyone is buying them. If there's a CPU that a $20 Hyper 212 can't cool I don't know what it is, yet people are apparently paying $60-80 for added pump noise and fill/bleed issues.

I've been running a completely overkill water cooling loop system since 2007, and am certain that switching to air tomorrow would result in no noticeable change in how my PC runs, with the possible (but still unlikely) exception of increased noise.

The days of 80mm fans are long gone, huge heatpipes have been the norm for what seems like a decade, CPU TDP is falling through the floor, and [H] says their OC'd GTX960 is running at 51C max and runs fine at 50% fan speed.

Are volt mods even a thing anymore?

Seems like the only reason to use water these days is to manage space in ITX cases where a Hyper 212 doesn't fit, or maybe to help deal with a tight stack of GPUs.

I'm honestly surprised I'm not seeing more TECs out there. There was a fairly well known company back in like 2006 that was marketing air cooled TECs that seemed pretty neat at the time, but back then CPU power requirements were such that the TECs needed to be very high powered and the heatsinks needed to be huge. This company was only using small TECs to get a few degrees closer to ambient, but enthusiasts at XS were using 200w TECs under water blocks to reach ambient or sub-ambient temps; seems like you could do the same thing a hell of a lot easier and cheaper with today's TDP numbers. Maybe I need to get back over to XS and see if this is happening - I haven't been over there in ages.
 
If you're on a mainstream Intel CPU, your cooling needs have gone down. If you're on the enthusiast Intel CPUs, your cooling needs have either remained the same or gone up.

Mid-range nVidia dies have always performed cool (GTX 460, 560, 680, 770, 980). High end nVidia dies have always sucked lots of power, especially when overclocked (480, 580, 780, Titan). I don't see this changing anytime soon. Why wouldn't AMD and nVidia push their cards to the maximum PCI-E spec for their top end cards (250-300 watts), especially when the large dies are capable of it.

Motherboard VRMs still need proper cooling in overclocking situations.

Yes, volt mods are still a thing, reserved mainly for LN2 though.

TECs are notoriously inefficient. The huge power requirements deter many people. There's a reason the CoolerMaster V10 never really took off.

So it just depends. If you're running everything stock, cooling isn't that important. If you're overclocking, cooling is very important.
 
Tsumi said:
If you're on a mainstream Intel CPU, your cooling needs have gone down. If you're on the enthusiast Intel CPUs, your cooling needs have either remained the same or gone up.

So it just depends. If you're running everything stock, cooling isn't that important. If you're overclocking, cooling is very important.
Click to expand...

Sigh... reading this made me realize... I am no longer an enthusiast... I am mainstream, and have been for a while... Is there some where I hand in my [H] card?
 
jamsomito said:
1. Northbridge was removed entirely for intel systems because it's now in the CPU
2. Southbridge rarely needs more than a thin heat spreader
3. RAM doesn't need more than a small heatspreader, even when overclocking
4. CPU's have come a long ways with respect to TDP as manufacturing sizes have shrunk drastically (remember the toaster someone made out of old AMD chips?)
5. mainstream GPU's are even pretty good, especially the latest generation nVidia ones.
Click to expand...
I would add

6. SSDs have saved us from fast-spinning, loud enthusiast hard disks that required proper cooling
7. Most people either have done away with HDDs entirely (switching to SSDs or NAS) or run a single, slow-spinning, quiet "green" drive
8. PSUs have upped their efficiency, gone semi-passive and a lot of cases give them direct access to fresh air
9. Graphics cards come with excellent factory cooling
10. Mainboards come with excellent fan control right in the BIOS
11. Fans are made with PCs in mind, gone are the days where you'd get fans designed for industry applications

Things have really gotten convenient.

Man, I remember the good ol' days of modding CPU coolers to fit on VGA cards, because they put tiny 40x10mm fans on GPUs like the Radeon 9700 Pro, that was already sucking triple digit watts.

I remember importing the first tower heatsink, the Scythe NCU-1000, from Japan for 250 Euros (probably about 400 dollars in today's money).

I remember getting first generation passive PSUs that had large heatsinks stick out the back of the case and that would predictably shut down if taxed on hot summer days.

I remember sticking hard disks in foam-padded wooden boxes that were bigger than many Mini-ITX cases these days.

I remember going water cooling in 2001, with a 230V aquarium pump, a radiator from the automobile industry and two 100$ handmade waterblocks (same for GPU and CPU), using off-the-shelf tubing and enough tape to cover Australia if necessary.
I built the rig specifically so I could sleep in the same room while Torrenting .... erm, I mean, compiling the Linux kernel ... but I never dared to leave this Frankstein monster unattended.

Those were the days I guess. Everything is objectively better now that I'm sitting on the couch with an Ultrabook on my lap, watching my 5-year-old play with an iPad, while the wife is streaming something to the NUC HTPC from our pre-assembled NAS in the hallway closet.
Yet, I sometimes miss the days of tinkering.
 
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What more needs to be said?
 
MikeRotch said:
Sigh... reading this made me realize... I am no longer an enthusiast... I am mainstream, and have been for a while... Is there some where I hand in my [H] card?
Click to expand...

A computer enthusiast is someone who enjoys working with computers, not someone who has top of the line hardware ;)

I definitely wouldn't call anyone who buys Falcon Northwest computers and has no self-built computers enthusiasts, would you?

evilsofa said:
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What more needs to be said?
Click to expand...

Keep in mind their system power draw dropped by 70 watts. The X58 chipset was a particularly power hungry chipset (40 watts on the northbridge if I recall correctly).
 
Tsumi said:
Keep in mind their system power draw dropped by 70 watts. The X58 chipset was a particularly power hungry chipset (40 watts on the northbridge if I recall correctly).
Click to expand...

Only takes my point farther. That particular time, the year 2010, was a high point (THE high point?) in power consumption and heat generation for both CPUs and GPUs. The year after, both Intel and Nvidia began their power usage reduction campaigns with Sandy Bridge and Fermi.
 
evilsofa said:
Only takes my point farther. That particular time, the year 2010, was a high point (THE high point?) in power consumption and heat generation for both CPUs and GPUs. The year after, both Intel and Nvidia began their power usage reduction campaigns with Sandy Bridge and Fermi.
Click to expand...

[H]OCP went from the enthusiast to the mainstream platform. If they had remained on the enthusiast platform with the 6-core processors, while idle power consumption may have dropped, load would have remained the same or gone higher.

The only place you're seeing consistent decreases in power consumption is mainstream CPUs. One generation of drops (for nVidia) does not constitute a pattern. The GTX 980 has approximately the same level of power consumption as the 680, and the 680 had a slightly higher power consumption than the 560.
 
This really kinda bums me up. Figuring heat flow through the case and getting proper cooling is what I enjoy most about building a computer. I just bought parts for a custom water cooling loop a while ago. Yes, it lowered my temps, but really my system was running just as good before hand - it didn't give me any extra OC headroom at all. Sure it looks great, but that's about it really. Granted, I'm on a 2500k right now, but I feel even the newest 4770k or whatever we're on would be similar.

I remember my old Athlon XP 2800+ Barton ran HOTT, even with an all-copper, massive heatsink on the thing. I suppose heat sink technology has improved quite a bit over the years too and can more effectively remove heat from the chip.
 
I've seen posts where the 5960x can use up to 400W if you run prime (so they suggest you don't) but I think normal usage can get up to 300W.

I like AIOs because they are quiet and dump heat outside the case.

But I totally agree, in 95% percent of the cases it's really easy to adequately cool components anymore. I used a $30 heatsink on my 3770k for a while, could easily get up to 4.4. AIO let me get up to 4.6, only an extra 5%.
 
Much of the R&D in semiconductors over the past several years has been focused on reducing power consumption. Mobile is a huge market relative to desktop PCs. People go through phones, tablets, and other smart devices much faster than they replace their desktop PCs. Even enthusiasts aren't going through CPU upgrades as quickly any more.

I'm still sitting on my i7-920 build from 2009. Meanwhile, I've gone through multiple phones, several tablets, and I'm moving on to a new laptop soon.

The push to reduce power consumption has paid off in reduced heat output for mainstream chips.

But the push for higher core counts is pushing those heat outputs back up again. An 8-core CPU is going to produce roughly twice the heat of an equivalent voltage/clock 4-core CPU. A 6-core i7 is going to consume 250W+ when overclocked. That's a huge amount of heat to remove.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of users don't actually need more cores. Gamers especially are better off on a higher clocked quad core. Even those of us who have apps that are heavily multi threaded (compiling, simulations, etc.) are still single-thread limited for most of the time.
 
I for one am glad I'm not making my own solid copper heat sinks or water blocks and over volting Delta fans that can hoover on my desk surface. Or using car heater cores for rads and making bong's and using pond pumps. Nor do I have to play with jumpers or hold boards up to a carbon arc lamp to read traces so I know where to place a cap or some other wiz-bang component on a $800 XT motherboard to get 2 more mhz out of it.

I still concern my self with water cooling, case air flow, bios hacks ie my 980 classy. But the air cooler will have to go to make it fun. In the old days overclocking was a dark art. Now it's as common as corrupt politicians. And the aftermarket support is fantastic! And way over priced for a load of china made junk.

The P4C ruined me. 1ghz Oc's or better on water or air were very fun. I ran my Q6600 into the ground on water for years at 4ghz. Bios hacks and other mods had it running SLI for gaming or a very solid folder in the day. Making hardware do things others are paying a lot more for is the base of the enthusiast movement.

A enthusiast will always try to stomp the snot out of there rig. Or they go main stream.
 
psyshack said:
I for one am glad I'm not making my own solid copper heat sinks or water blocks and over volting Delta fans that can hoover on my desk surface. Or using car heater cores for rads and making bong's and using pond pumps. Nor do I have to play with jumpers or hold boards up to a carbon arc lamp to read traces so I know where to place a cap or some other wiz-bang component on a $800 XT motherboard to get 2 more mhz out of it.

I still concern my self with water cooling, case air flow, bios hacks ie my 980 classy. But the air cooler will have to go to make it fun. In the old days overclocking was a dark art. Now it's as common as corrupt politicians. And the aftermarket support is fantastic! And way over priced for a load of china made junk.

The P4C ruined me. 1ghz Oc's or better on water or air were very fun. I ran my Q6600 into the ground on water for years at 4ghz. Bios hacks and other mods had it running SLI for gaming or a very solid folder in the day. Making hardware do things others are paying a lot more for is the base of the enthusiast movement.

A enthusiast will always try to stomp the snot out of there rig. Or they go main stream.
Click to expand...

I went towards 'mainstream' effortless builds years ago for the same reason I tend to use Ubuntu instead of Arch linux.

I just don't have the time to waste.
 
Well, I'm rocking a first gen i7, so cooling to me is still important. Hyper 212+ couldn't get me anything near 4.0Ghz at the temps I wanted. H80i was a big improvement but no beans. The H-240X on the other hand lets me sit at 4.3 Ghz with temps that compare to the Hyper212+ and H80i at 3.8Ghz, and this cooler is actually completely silent compared to the ones I've dealt with in the past.

Really, if you're overclocking and care about getting the most performance out of your gear while keeping noise to a minimum, having good cooling gear is still pretty damn important. Is it probably the smallest performance boost you can net for the money? Sure, but once you have all your components at about the same level, the only big boosts left you're going to get is from overclocking. And silence is golden. My overclocked PC is quieter than any other PC I've even heard (haven't seen many other enthusiasts PC's IRL...as in never).
 
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