Cooling method questions

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alidan

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Ok, im looking at a possible new build and want to be as lazy as i possibly can with the maintenance of it.

im on a stock phenom II 955 black, no oc, and it idle temp is about 37-41 with idle being close to 20% use (as close to idle as my pc gets) and for some reason it gets up to 50~c doing nothing too... im pretty sure i have to clean the fan or replace thermal paste, but im lazy as hell and want to put this off for as long as i can.

my new build if things pan out will be for rendering video and likely be pushed to 60-100% use most of the time.

now here is where my question comes in, is air cooling good enough or could i go with a custom water loop? i honestly never want to deal with taking anything apart unless it catastrophically screws up. water would allow for a more silent pc which is a plus due to audio work, but the whole needing to disassemble parts every 6 months to clean... that sounds nightmarish and is something i want to avoid at all costs if possible.

anyone have experiance with water cooling and not taking the thing apart yearly? if it was every 2 years that would be fine, but yearly or twice yearly is just to much work for something that could go very wrong very fast.
 
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TheConsiderateIlliterate

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Honestly, if you're that lazy I wouldn't bother with watercooling. The path of least resistance in my opinion is to take less than 60 seconds, open up your case and see what you can reach with the canned compressed air. If you choose to do this, do this outside so all the dust doesn't cycle through your case.

Edit: Also look into case fans to help prevent dust from getting into your case in the first place.
 
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NBSN

NBSN

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It really depends on what sort of setup you have or prefer...and your case size. I use a Phanteks air cooling setup that is huge and takes up a ton of space in my case. It is very very easy to snap the fans off of the heatsink and clean the fans themselves. But cleaning the heatsink parts is pretty annoying while still in the case. And I could not clean it as much as I would have liked when I did a cleaning about a month ago (I had it installed for roughly 9 months at the time). I have done some light cleaning before then, but the fans and heatsink were coated in dust. My temps were still just fine, with my CPU hardly ever going into the mid 40 Celsius area regardless of the dust buildup.

With all of that being said, I am strongly considering a water cooling setup next time because the larger air cooling setups restrict access to much of the components such as RAM slots...and it was a huge pain to do the initial install. An air cooling setup like what I have will keep the CPU just as cool as quality liquid cooling setup...and although I do not overclock right now, if/when I decide to overclock it will be just fine with temps and cooling.

You mention wanting a more silent PC due to audio work, which I could understand. My PC is pretty silent (except for a single case fan I need to fix), and I would assume that you may want to use noise cancelling headphones in some instances anyway. Remember that liquid cooling still uses fans to move cool the radiator setup, so you still end up with spinning fans. Sure having to clean the system is annoying, but regardless of what you choose to use, you will still need to do some cleaning every six months to just keep everything in tip top shape. A light cleaning that is a good time to also check the components visually for any possible issues that may arise.
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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Water cooling also introduces pump noise. But generally the fans spin slower and make less noise. Radiators will still collect dust so there really is no perfect solution. Air filters on all intakes can help a lot, but then you have to clean those periodically.

Without overclocking any cheap tower cooler will do. Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212 is a popular choice, though it is quite large. But will run nearly completely silent on a CPU that isn't overclocked.

Xigmatek Gaia, Thermaltake Frio, even the lowly Coolermaster Hyper TX3 is enough when not overclocking.
 
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alidan

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my brother just put together a waterloop for his computer, while i think its stupid because of his reason, it looks cool, i have to admit, a 290X never going above 50c no matter the load and the cpu under a prime 95 and an i beleive 20% overclock never exceeding 45c is something i can envy.

if this plan goes through, i will have an unlimited budget for the computer, well... nothing a case and cooler could break at the very least.

for air cooling, if i go this route, i have a 280X and a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO from my little brother that i can put into it to deal with heat

as for the water cooling noise... i have a bgear 120mm going at 100+cfm... i find that level of noise acceptable, but my cpu fan has 6000+rpm when it gets hot... so that gets a bit noisy and cant see that as acceptable.

granted that would be out of the computer, but a 3 fan radiator and a pump even at the highest settings is damn near silent for how cool it gets everything, i could probably set things lower, or set up the radiator to be in a tub of water that i can add ice to for added cooling. i could make the whole thing fanless by doing that.

my mic is a blue yeti and adjusting the gain i can basically cancel out the sound of my pc, which will be good for normal use, but if i want to record voice i would rather not rely on that to cancel out sound...

if its just removing water every 6 months and running a cleaner through it for a while i can do that, thats not to much effort, but the part where i say its to much is if every 6 months i need to do a complete strip down and disassembly of the parts, if i do go water, i would go water for everything, and i am barely comfortable doing that with a gpu, much less a bi yearly strip down...

air cooling can work, but the problem i am facing right now, every part in my computer is running at about 38c as a minimum, and this is in my bedroom. i don't turn my pc off, and it heats everything up during the night, if the plan works i will be rendering FAR more often, likely during the night, and i hope you can see where issues pop up.

im trying to see what the least painful water setup could be like, and if thats even an option on the table.
 
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