Noise should also be lower again assuming you'd be actually cooling enough power with an air cooler that'd require higher fan RPMs. Pump noise differs by model, with quite a lot of them being silent
Plus you can't see all your OLED RAM through the glass side.
I put a 420mm AIO on a 7950X3D (because I was originally getting a 7950X but the X3D went on sale) - the fans barely come on most of the time and the absolute hottest I've ever got it was 77C during the soak in test (stress-ng on 32 cores for a few hours).
If I was building another on say the 9800X3D I'd go back to air - the AIO's only have a five year warranty so you need to replace them fairly often vs air where you just blast the dust off.
If you are running a CPU that can routinely site over 200W under heavy load the AIO's can make sense.
Is it an AIO, or a custom loop with a resevoir and such?
But yeah, short story: water cooling is very rarely worth it in a consumer pc. But it shouldn't sound like you're describing, it's just overcomplicated and too expensive.
A real ‘closed loop system’ is a chilled water loop with no evaporative cooling tower.
A real ‘open loop system’ is a chilled water loop with an evaporative cooling tower. The loop is open to the atmosphere at the cooling tower.
What the computer cooling industry calls a ‘closed loop system’ (a refrigerant based cooler that comes with precharged lines) normal people call them ‘a closed loop system with pre-charged linesets’.
Split A/C units often come with precharged linesets that you just plug in to the condenser and evaporator (air handler) without having to charge the system with refrigerant.
Now, for some on-topic commentary. If you put together what I will call a closed loop system consisting of tubing, water blocks, a pump, and a remote condenser, it could potentially be almost silent. The only things that make noise are the fans and pumps and those can be located anywhere you want with enough tubing. If you’re trying to dissipate 1kW of heat, it’ll be a lot easier with a heat pump than with air alone, liquid-to-air heat exchangers are quite amazing.
ggm•3mo ago
I helped in very minor ways commissioning the system, so I got to play around the edges. Looking at hotspots through an old school IR camera with about 127 scanlines was fun too.
Hint: just because a raised floor was OK for IBM cooling pipes doesn't mean it meets minimum bend radius for a Cray. Oh dear..