I’ve seen shit like gaming chairs, headsets, and even gaming PCs turning out to be absolute horseshit compared to even shit used in offices.
I’m curious to know your thoughts on this. My theory is that the focus on gaming was so extreme the others that actually IMPROVE gaming like less bottlenecks get fucked over.
I wouldn’t bother with water cooling, except if you want to do it as a project. A good air cooler (e.g., Noctua) will almost always outperform water cooling. Except if you are doing some overkill custom water cooling, which will be really expensive.
I second this. I built a water cooled PC a few years ago (custom loop) and while I haven’t had any issues so far, part of maintaining a water cooled PC involves removing the radiators, washing them out with a cleaning liquid, putting the radiators back in, then running another cleaning solution through the loop for about several hours, then running water though it to rinse for several hours, then finally putting in the new fluid. It’s a time consuming process that will be more difficult if your build is set up in a way that’s hard to drain or remove the radiators from (like mine unfortunately). This maintenance is supposed be done at least once a year. It’s been longer than that since I’ve last done it, so I’m in a situation where I can either bite the bullet and perform the pain in the ass PC surgery or have a sword of Damocles hang over my machine.
There’s also the upfront pain in the ass in building the system. In my case the place I planned to put my pump is more awkward to reach and drain than I anticipated and there’s no room in the case for it anywhere else. There’s also installing the waterblock on your GPU. This requires removing the stock cooler and attaching the waterblock. The brand of waterblock I ordered didn’t have instructions on how to install so I had to find the instruction manual for a different brand of waterblock for the same GPU and wing it when the instructions didn’t apply. If you can figure out the instructions, you better hope one of the tiny delicate screws you need to remove doesn’t lose its threads while you’re unscrewing it and become stuck. This happened to me and I spent hours trying different ways to get the screw out, all of which were a pain in the ass and several of which could damage the chip with an easy to make fuckup. Did I mention that doing this delicate task that can easily fuck up your several hundred dollar hardware voids the warranty (a warranty sticker breaks when you remove the stock cooler)?
The only benefits you get from all this is the cool factor and maybe less fan noise.
Hold on, how come air coolers outperform water coolers?
The reason why I opted for water cooling is for longer sessions, something I doubt air coolers can maintain, also it’s quieter and the aesthetics more than make up for the lack of RGB.
One more thing, electricity is expensive here in the Philippines so I’d go water cooling since it draws less power.
In most cases, yes. It is counterintuitive, but unless you create a big custom water loop it does. For example, interesting video here: video, where you can see comparison of AIOs and air coolers. It is usually quieter as well.
You can certainly create a custom loop that will be more performant and quieter, but it will be lots of work and much more expensive. So unless you want to do it for the fun of it, I wouldn’t do it. Plus, you have to maintain water cooling.
Regarding the electricity I don’t really have any numbers, but I would assume that water cooling would be worse, you still need to operate fans same as with air cooling, but you also need pump. But overall, that is such a small amount of power compared to the rest of the system that I wouldn’t worry about it that much. If you really want to save some power look into things like undervolting you can usually lower your power consumption without sacrificing performance.
Noted but I am still skeptical in terms of air-coolers being able to keep the CPU and GPU cool for longer hours, especially since I would do more things other than gaming at ultra-high settings like 3d animation.
How does undervolting work btw?
Water cooling doesn’t really have any advantages in that. Basically air cooling and water cooling works almost the same way, both in the end use radiator/fins with fans to transfer heat of the case. With water cooling one advantage you have is, that the system has some water in it, meaning that it takes some time for it to heat up (usually something like 30 min) which can be advantageous for shorter tasks. But after the water is heated up, it is only matter of how much heat can the system dissipate. And for that there is basically no difference in how air coolers work and water coolers work, they both will transfer heat at some rate. So basically except for shorter loads (where water cooling has some advantages) there is no difference in long duration cooling performance of the two.
The only advantage I can think of is if you have a GPU with really shitty cooling, then adding water cooling to it may help you, but typically that is not really an issue. Modern GPUs overclock themselves anyway and will try to push themselves to the highest temperature they deem safe. So in the worst case scenario, you might lose a few percent of your GPU’s performance. Plus, you probably want to restrict your GPU power draw anyway if you care about power consumption.
Undervolting is when you run your hardware below its default voltage. Basically it is the same as overclocking but in the opposite direction. Quite often, you can lower voltage of your CPU without losing any performance. It really depends on your chip, it can be able to run on lower voltage, or it can be unstable, the only way to know is to try it. But if it works, you can save some power. But it is quite involved process, and it can turn out you won’t save anything. Modern CPUs are pretty good at doing it by themselves.
But overall, you probably won’t save that much in the grand scheme of things. Probably the most significant thing you could do is lowering the power target for your GPU. This will lower the performance of your GPU, but it can save quite a bit of power. With modern GPUs and CPUs, it is not unusual to draw 500W while gaming. Most of that is GPU, so if you lower your power target to like 50% you will probably lose about ~20% performance but save like 150W of power (those are just numbers I think make sense, no sources). It really depends on if you want to get into it, it will take a lot of time, and it might not be worth it for you.
Noted. My preference is mostly on aesthetics and not liking big bulky air coolers.
Though I found some other surprising tips to reduce thermal load like getting high-density RAM sticks instead of the “gaming” ones.
Technically yes, the less RAM modules you have, the lower power consumption. But the power draw of RAM is so small compared to everything else that it doesn’t really make a difference. It might save you a few watts, but in a few hundred watts system it doesn’t really matter. If they are cheaper or more available, go for it, but if it is more expensive than normal/gaming RAM, I wouldn’t bother. Plus this might lead to slightly worse performance see this.
Noted. I just realized it’s possible to make an extreme build for less money 🧍♂️
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