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liquid or air cooling?

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  • Water Cooling
  • CPUs
  • Cooling
  • AMD
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August 25, 2014 4:14:50 PM

im looking many different options for my gaming pc build, and ive heard that amd cpu's have much more performance than intel. so ive looked at some amd cpu's and if i were to get a amd fx-8320 @ 4.5ghz, should i get liquid cooling instead of air cooling. if so is liquid cooling really reliable? also my graphics card will be msi twin frozr gtx 780

More about : liquid air cooling

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August 25, 2014 4:23:27 PM

I only get closed loop liquid cooling sets if my case has an open window. I get them purely for aesthetics. If I have a windowless case, I always go air. It's a lot of personal preference, but I go air as they cool just as well as the closed loops, and are generally quieter.
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August 25, 2014 4:27:32 PM

Noctua NH-D14>All AIO loops
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August 25, 2014 4:27:58 PM

so the noctua nh d14 would be able to cool the cpu well at 4.5 ghz then?
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August 25, 2014 4:36:11 PM

I'd highly recommend the D14 even over the D15. The D14 is the battle-proven best air cooler out there. If you have a side window panel and hate the fugly Noctua colors, then I'd recommend the Phanteks PH-TC14PE which is basically a D14 but with slightly worse temps (Maybe 1-2 degree differences) but comes in a wide variety of colors
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August 25, 2014 4:41:34 PM

my case will be a cfi boreallight, but i might switch to a nzxt source 530. would either of those cases support the Phanteks PH-TC14PE?
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August 25, 2014 4:48:03 PM

InsanelyEpic said:
my case will be a cfi boreallight, but i might switch to a nzxt source 530. would either of those cases support the Phanteks PH-TC14PE


I'm not sure about your current case, but the NZXT will definitely support it (It supports up to 183mm while he Phanteks is 171mm)
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August 25, 2014 5:46:25 PM

There are more factors than simply which is better. In many ways its personal preference. The Air coolers are great at cooling at base clock speeds and mild overclocks but if you want to push it much further water cooling is the way to go. A 240mm radiator AIO will in most cases beat out all air cooling methods besides the top of the line which can cost all as much as the AIO watercooling loops. One the other hand a single 120mm radiator AIO will most likely only match or even underperform the competing Air cooling methods. The other factor is noise. The watercooling systems are in general much quieter than the air cooling methods simply due to the ability to run the fans at a slower speed to disperse the same amount of heat. And of course looks some people just dont like the look of a bulky air cooler in their case and some people prefer it to tubing so its really up to you. I hope this information helps you to make your decision.
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August 25, 2014 8:34:12 PM

RaixNS said:
There are more factors than simply which is better. In many ways its personal preference. The Air coolers are great at cooling at base clock speeds and mild overclocks but if you want to push it much further water cooling is the way to go. A 240mm radiator AIO will in most cases beat out all air cooling methods besides the top of the line which can cost all as much as the AIO watercooling loops. One the other hand a single 120mm radiator AIO will most likely only match or even underperform the competing Air cooling methods. The other factor is noise. The watercooling systems are in general much quieter than the air cooling methods simply due to the ability to run the fans at a slower speed to disperse the same amount of heat. And of course looks some people just dont like the look of a bulky air cooler in their case and some people prefer it to tubing so its really up to you. I hope this information helps you to make your decision.


Actually, the big air coolers generally cost less than the big AIO loops. The liquid coolers are also extremely loud (Read up on the Corsair H100i) unless you buy aftermarket fans, which would cost another $30 while the NH-D14 is extremely quiet. AIO loops also usually get outperformed by big air coolers like the NH-D14 and PH-TC14PE.

Prices of coolers:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683...

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683...

NH-D14 noise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMWXBfpKU8

Corsair H100i noise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTf0Vq1j4Ec

NH-D14 beating H100i:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Cases-and-Cooling/Noctua-N...
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August 26, 2014 2:40:29 AM

InsanelyEpic said:
im looking many different options for my gaming pc build, and ive heard that amd cpu's have much more performance than intel. so ive looked at some amd cpu's and if i were to get a amd fx-8320 @ 4.5ghz, should i get liquid cooling instead of air cooling. if so is liquid cooling really reliable? also my graphics card will be msi twin frozr gtx 780


Everything you have heard is wrong.

First off, the arrangement of execution resources in Vishera is very bad for real-time workloads like gaming compared to the arrangement of execution resources in Haswell CPUs. An i5-4590 on it's stock heatink will match or exceed the performance of the FX-8320@4.5ghz in any game while dissipating a fraction of the power. The FX-8320@4.5ghz will not out-perform the stock clocked i5-4590 in any game. If you observe the actual cost to implement these 2 solutions (with the overclocked AM3+ system requiring a PSU that is at least ~150W larger, and a relatively large HSF ~$50 minimum), you'll come to realize that the FX is not actually any less expensive to implement either, making it very hard to rationalize for a gaming rig.

Core count and ghz are not measures of compute performance. A haswell core is "bigger" in terms of execution resources than an entire piledriver module (2 cores). The Haswell i5, is a few modern BIG cores with execution resources arranged for the shortest possible pipeline length and superb cache performance. The PileDriver design offers twice as many cores, each with less than half the execution resources, and a less refined pipeline and cache access system. The result: Haswell works better for real-time workloads, whose performance does not scale proportionally with inter-core parallelism.

In a compute intensive benchmark, the FX-8320@4.5ghz would beat a stock clocked i5 in many metrics, but that's only when all 8 cores are heavily saturated. Gaming workloads can't scale like that because the workload must adhere to a timeline. The timeline creates a sort of throttle on various tasks that are being performed.

Then there's the E3-1231V3, a CPU that at just 80W offers the parallel workload performance of a 200-220W FX-83XX/9XXX clocked at 4.7GHZ, and more performance per core in lightly threaded workloads than any AMD chip can muster at any sort of daily-usable overclock. It's a $250 chip, but you can spend more than that trying to get an FX chip to match it and still not be there.

Bottom line, Haswell offers more gaming performance for your money with less complication and lower power dissipation at almost every price point right now. In fact, at current pricing, there are very few cases where an AMD build is the more rational choice unless the goal is to have enterprise features at bargain basement prices (ECC/IOMMU) or if the user is simply after the novelty of running the odd duck platform.

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Secondly, what most people call "air" coolers, often are actually liquid coolers. An HSF with heatpipes is a liquid cooler. The difference between a liquid cooler with a pump/radiator and a heatpipe liquid cooler, is the way the liquid is pumped. In the heatpipe cooler, the liquid is "pumped" by a thermally induced phase change cycle. In the AIO CLC, the liquid is pumped by a motor driven impeller. Both systems use a copper to liquid heat exchange at the CPU and are VERY effective. decibel for decibel and size for size, heatpipe coolers are very comparable in performance to AIO CLCs.

If you pull the loud fans off an AIO CLC and install them on a heatpipe cooler of similar size that ships with quiet fans, the heatpipe cooler will suddenly perform nearly on par with the AIOCLC.

There are some tradeoffs to each type of cooler, but if given the choice based on my experience with both I would go with a large heatpipe cooler as I believe they offer more cooling for the money and typically come configured with less noisy fans.
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August 26, 2014 7:57:28 AM

+1 to what Mdocod said.
I had an 8350 and when I swapped it out for an i5 I noticed a drastic boost in response time for my games. in some cases I saw as much as 100% increase.
The Xeon that Mdocod mentioned is really the best bargain currently as far as I am concerned. Its basically an i7 without the integrated graphics. For $250ish its hard to find another chip that offers the same performance for the money.
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