Why don't you custom water-cool your PC?

[StaticVapour]

Afraid of leaks and in general it needs maintenance. Changing fluids in cars is enough maintenance for me, so I'm not gonna spend my free time babying it and flushing the loop and changing fluids every so often it needs to (2 years am I right)

 

[Slizzo]

I've an open loop already. While cost was a factor, I'm an enthusiast, so I ran one in my system.

I still have soft tube though, so it's not like it is hard to maintain, or that it was hard to put together. Just a simple CPU/GPU loop, with 2 360mm radiators and a 140ml pump/res combo.

 

[Valent117]

it already took me 3 months to mount my ssds at the back of my case lul

 

[lemoncarbonate]

Too expensive, time consuming maintenance, and risk.
Jay2Cents already showed and told us how troublesome maintaining a liquid cooled PC could be.

For aesthetic, I prefer to allocate my budget for better hardware color coordination, case, or even faster hardware, and spend some spare money for desk, chair, peripherals, decoration, and my other hobbies.

I dust and clean my PC ever 2 months, keeping its looks in prime condition at all time.

 

[Black Hades]

Long story short,

1. I only use a mild OC
2. Noctua NH-D9L.

 

[Master Tom]

Water Cooliong is definately worth it.
You can run the CPU permanently on Turbo Boost. No Base Clock anymore.
Many Mainboards are doing that by default and the CPU is thermal throttleing under full load.
If you want the Base Clock on such boards, you have to set it manually in the UEFI.
The CPU is significantly slower then.

 

[John Naylor]

Came back to see how things progressed ....

- Outside of AIOs, never encountered a leak. Of course that depends on product selection ... by cheap, get poor results.
- As for time consuming, it's a hobby, it's fun. Can drop it off I do it for free
- Don't understand case size comment. We use same cases; we don't use midget cases with air or water.
- Worried about noise ?, then you definitely want water cooling, this thread is custom water cooling not AIOs
- Benefits not worth it ? Performance is close, depending on how you measure performance.

If you are testing w/ syynthetic benchmarks, you can certainly hit higher numbers. But while that's good for bragging rights, doesn't really give ya anything else. It's kinda like tuning ya car to run under extreme conditions .. like towing a 8,000 lb trailer or going up and over a mountain range at 13,000 feet. It's not something you are going to be doing everyday. Testing with RoG Real Bench will give you stability assurance and aloo temperatures 7 - 10C lower. After using RoG Real Bench, your PC is not likely every to experience that level of loading ever again.

 

[x86x64]

My CPU Ryzen 3600X

Cooler History:
1st Stock AMD Cooler
2nd Cooler Master Liquid Lite 240 - pump failed after 6 months .. warranty replacement .. try 2
3rd Cooler Master Liquid Lite 240 - fail again ..after 3 months .. leak ..
4th Noctua NH-D15 .. perfect .. no leak .. no pump noise

 

[TheUn4seen]

I used a full loop with a 240mm rad up to, I think, the 965BE which needed overclocking to be even semi-useful. Nowadays it seems to be not worth the hassle in most cases. Overclocking is now fun for the tiny niche, higher end parts mostly have very little headroom, especially the GPUs - you can gain at most 2-3% with a lot of additional power consumption, heat and noise. With CPUs you'd be hard pressed to gain much more than just maxing out the turbo, maybe increasing ring frequency a bit. That's nothing a reasonable air cooler can't handle, and I personally find pump noise to be far more annoying and distracting than a fan - especially now, when everything can be semi-passive.

 

[rtwjunkie]

The option “Because I don’t need to” isn’t up there. That would be my poll answer.

You can run the CPU permanently on Turbo Boost. No Base Clock anymore.

I already do that with air cooling. No throttling or extreme temps.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

I really feel this more of "what myth about water cooling is stopping you from doing it?"

Half these answers say maintenance yet people can't even explain on what maintenance they're talking about.
Maintenance is one a variable with what's in your loop. If you use, colored dies, glycol additives, biocide, mixed metals, soft/ hard tubing, jet plates. all these can add or make things easier.

I've bought two AIO's a long time ago. The first was a corsair H60 was nice for quietness just not enough for the overclocking a 4.0ghz phenom II x6 1090T

Got a Coolermaster Esigberg 240L after that. All copper and distilled water with flexible tubes, and expandable. My 1090T could hit 4.4ghz on 5 cores had a stubborn core that hated anything past 4.3ghz. My Ccythe Mugen 2 was better but louder.
The only maintenance I ever did on the Eisberg was because the pump/reservoir/block would sometimes fail to run because of bad wiring. The block did overheat a few times backing out the cold plate screws and the locktite oozed out of them. It wasn't like a waterfall of water, or anything, just a few drips over a week or two lowering the amount of water in the reservoir.

With case size shrinking and being more focused on airflow now it's easier to do air cooling. Let's not for get "fan stop" has help get noise down too.

I think people including, "influencers" try to do too much in their water cooling builds, just a simple loop is quite pleasing to have. I personally don't like nickel plating on blocks feels like adding a thermal barrier to me. No dies, all, copper soft tubing and distilled water.

 

[olymind1]

I don't put water near my computer. Period. I rather buy a bulky sub 50€ heatsink with near silent fan(s).

 

[Rabit]

My Old Noctua d14 keeping my Ryzen 3600 below 65C @ 4.565Ghz I not see any reason to go for loop

I will consider water loop only when I will need cool down Overclocked top tier AMD Threadripper or intel CPUs

 

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

We're wondering what's holding you back from getting into watercooling, custom-watercooling, specifically.

Money mostly. It's way too expensive. And I dont want to deal with the maintenance. Ill stick with AiO's.

 

[Liquid Cool]

As a prior advocate for Liquid Cool'ing from 2002-2010....I usually tell people to stay away. There are numerous reasons....but primarily cost/benefits comes up first in the discussion . I actually prefer cheap budget solutions nowadays and consider the thousands of dollars(and thousands of hours) spent experimenting on liquid cooling in the early days of the hobby to be a complete waste of time/money.

I now have tinnitus...so I ticked the box that says "worried about noise", but that only edges out price and benefits not worth it by a very small margin.

Now...with all of that said...I'm still pissed off that I had to sell off my collection of solid silver Danger Den waterblocks....

$%^&%^&T%^#,

Liquid Cool

 

[A Computer Guy]

Was considering it again with a 2nd PC but the cost of it was something I wanted to avoid in the recent economy. I'm not too interested in AIO's anymore as I prefer the piece of mind and fun of being able to properly service the custom loop.

 

[sremick]

I've never done water cooling, but I recently looked into this again.

Water cooling seems only necessary if you're overclocking, as air-cooling is sufficient for anything running at stock speeds (and can be made virtually silent with the right heatsinks and fans). To avoid issues and get the best benefit, you need to go with a high-quality custom loop. Once I ran the numbers, the money I'd spend on all the loop components I could instead spend on a faster CPU or GPU and get a better performance boost at stock speeds than I'd get from the overclocked water-cooled components. And the faster ones wouldn't need water cooling at that point since they're running at stock.

Heck, you can even OC a bit using air cooling and still be fine and almost silent.

The numbers simply don't make sense unless you're already buying the fastest CPU and GPU available today where stepping up to something faster isn't an option. Otherwise take the money you were going to spend on a reliable water loop and just upgrade your CPU/GPU and stick with air.

This doesn't even factor in the debate over "reliability" other than it seems most of the pro-water people say it's perfectly reliable if you don't buy crap. Which means spending a lot more, which skews the cost/value calculation. Maintenance is a given.