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.

  • JoeMarx 193OP
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • @Prologue7642
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      41 year ago

      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.

      • JoeMarx 193OP
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        11 year ago

        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?

        • @Prologue7642
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          31 year ago

          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.

          • JoeMarx 193OP
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            11 year ago

            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.

            • @Prologue7642
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              21 year ago

              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.

              • JoeMarx 193OP
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                11 year ago

                Noted. I just realized it’s possible to make an extreme build for less money 🧍‍♂️