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Water cooling > Air cool any-day man. They actually perform in-cases better than the regular Air Cooler. They also give a nice Clean Look. If you had a water cooling brick with 3 top notch fans on it then it would beat any air cooler.
I know about water cooling .... I'm typing from a box with a custom water loop w/ 5 x 140mm rads, 15 fans running dead silent, twin water cooled 780 GFX cards (26% OC), water cooled 4770k CPU (4.6 Ghz) and water cooled MoBo driven by two tandem water pumps thru rigid acrylic tubing. CPU temps top out at 74C and the GPUs at 39C under full load stress testing
But this here is a totally different subject ..... what we are talking about here is AIOs with a single 120mm / 140mm radiator ..... or a refurbished unit (bad idea)
-No 120/140mm AIO approaches the thermal performance of the better air coolers, at any fan speed.
-No 120/140mm AIO approaches the acoustic performance of the better air coolers, at any fan speed.
The simple fact is that there is no 120/140mm AIO water cooler that can touch the likes of air coolers like the Phanteks PH-TC14-PE, Noctua DH-14 and 15 or Cryorig R1 .... not even close.
There is no 240/280 mm unit made which beats the Cryorig R1 or even the Phanteks PH-TC14-PE at comparable fans speeds and noise levels. The Corsair H110 ties the Noctua DH-14 and trails the Phanteks by a little bit.
Give a listen here ... that's just too loud
http://martinsliquidlab.org/2013/03/12/swiftech-h220-vs...
Yes, you can swap the fans out of a H100i for slow speed ones so now your investment is $140 and you have got a unit that performs comparable to a $30 Hyper 212. The success of the AIOs is based upon extreme fan speeds. As you can see here .....
http://martinsliquidlab.org/2012/04/12/alphacool-nexxxo...
At 2200 rpm, the UT60-360 gets 326 watts of cooling from 2200 rpm fans. Drop that to 1,000 rpm and it gets just 151 watts of cooling.... the same thing happens when you take Noctua 1300 rpm fans and put them on in place of the 2700 rpm Corsair fans.
There is just one AIO that I would ever consider buying - The Swiftech H220-X
1. H220-X is copper, not aluminum like the H100i and its ilk (aluminum is a bad thing in water cooling world)
2. H220-X tops every other AIO and air cooler on the market
3. H220-X beats all those guys while being less than 1/4 as loud as the H100i
4. The loop in the H220-X can be opened up and the cooler used to push water thru auxillary rads, GFX card water blocks, RAM water blocks, MoBo water blocks, etc.
5. It has a reservoir and coolant level monitor.
6. It costs the same as the H100i with the Noctua fans.
Outside of custom water cooling, DICE, LN2, phase change, etc..... The H220-X is the pinnacle in CPU cooling today and the thing that comes closest to it ? Not the Glacier 240L, not the NZXT X60/61 .... but two air coolers from Cryorig and Noctua.
http://www.hitechlegion.com/reviews/cooling/liquid/4087...
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In terms of performance, well….we could simply leave it at the fact that the H220X is simply the best performing out-of-the-box cooler you can buy today. Period. It slightly betters its predecessor, the H220, as well as the Glacer 240L that is equipped with far more powerful and louder fans.
The NZXT X60/61 comes close in terms of performance, but at the expense of far more noise and far less compatibility. 240mm CLCs can’t touch the H220X in all out performance, and at tolerable noise levels the H220X flat out embarrasses them. The Cryorig R1 and Noctua NH-D15 come closest in matching the H220X in terms of performance and noise, but fall short... What more can you say? We put the best out of the box solutions up against the H220X, and the H220X walked away a clear winner and did so with absolutely astonishing performance to noise. With all of this performance the H220X never topped 40 dB at full speed.