Submerge your PC in a vat of mineral oil

Single board computing is the preferred gaming solution of the proletariat.

I am all about comically large air coolers. Quiet, effective up to like 200W and zero leaks. Watercooling looks better though. Tubes.

The one thing that I don’t like about air coolers is how every case positions the motherboard vertically, which means the heatsink (if giant like mine) applies a lot of torque on the motherboard. I have never had this cause a problem, it just does not sit well with me

I have water cooling on my 3d printer of all things. It’s so incredibly unnecessary but it looks cool.

I’ve used a AIO water block on my PC that has given me no issues for a few years now. If you have a smaller case/a case with bad airflow, it’s worth it for a water cooler. But if your case has good airflow, if you have a AMD processor the cooler it came with is solid. if you have Intel I would get some sort of cooler, either air or water.

Open case with portable room fan blowing at it is the true way

For the first time since single core processors (my lovely Thunderbird 1333) I went and retried my ever changing custom loop like 6 months ago.

I started with my own copper block, a car heating radiator, and a garden pump (such was the custom at the time - if you wanted the quietest experience).

Soon after I got one od EKs first prototypes (there wasn’t a company yet) and proper 240 + 120 radiators (that lasted, never needed an upgrade).
Also went from a shitty generic GPU block (now my pencil holder) to only full cover water blocks bcs gfx cards became monsters.

We in the community looked down on the pre-built water cooling solutions for the common plebs.

Over the years I actually saved a lot of money by largely keeping the cooling components unchanged throughout the years - and having a completely silent PC all this time (defined by my hearing at 0.5m or more away). Everything was always on fixed rpm, no matter the load. Except the Seasonic PSU, which was passive up until certain loads or temperatures my rig basically never reached.

As air cooling (only recently) became actually good (like 150+W at lets say ‘only pleasantly audible fans’) I did feel like I was being a bit too snobbish insisting on water.

Now my ITX is air cooler … so my graphics card let’s me know when I’ve been playing a game for 30s or so. How thoughtful.

When I upgrade my gfx card I’ll prob buy a cheap full cover block from China & try fitting it (it will prob need some work). I kinda don’t want to pay that much extra for a card with a good stock cooler, nor go for a nice aftermarket air cooler.

But for CPU, as I don’t buy high end CPUs for my desktop no more, air is fine. And my Noctua could prob be fitted on future platforms as well.

I do have a 280 Arctic AIO pre-built water cooler, its actually good (I would prefer to have a separate reservoir, but it’s fine). But my i7 just doesn’t need it to stay quiet. And Im not watering my servers bcs they run 24/7 & I don’t care that much about the noise.

I watercool my PC because it’s a ThreadRipper with a couple of AMD Radeon 5700 XTs, and the latter is known to have overheating issues, so I opted for watercooling. Watercooling can be bourgeois decadence, but it can also be practical and necessary.

Nevertheless, I didn’t have great airflow in the case, so all of the heat that remained stagnant inside a room without air conditioning (which I had bought an air conditioner for but it took me 3 months to get the equipment and resources necessary to screw a piece of wood to the window so the air conditioner wasn’t slanted towards the apartment) during the heat waves last year killed one of my SSDs that was part of a contiguous LVM partition among 3 SSDs (I wish I learned about RAIDs earlier). I have been without a desktop for nearly a year now and have been in a slow process of building a couple of new machines.

I managed to successfully watercool my pc safely and follow recommended procedures to make sure my pc didn’t leak while running. I had to replace a water block that was leaking during my initial setup of the pc. I had towels and a couple of extra hands to help. You need to run the machine for a day with towels placed around the case before running the computer (this can be done by inserting a bridging plug to only run the watercooling system) to ensure no leaks are occurring. As long as you do diligent research and you are careful, it’s usually safe to watercool. The worse that happened to me is that I screwed in a fitting on a $700 distribution plate reservoir + pump system too tightly, and it created some cracks around the hole, but it hasn’t became much worse.

Fuck that buy a Thermalright Peerless Assassin, tests have shown liquid isn’t reliably better than air. Any of the good, inexpensive dual tower coolers will give you very similar performance and so much less fuss.

AIO is the way to go imo on modern computers. Self contained. Fairly easy setup.

Now a DIY watercooling setup is…risky and expensive. Custom parts. Makemsure you know what you are doing yadda yadda.

They make motherboards and GPUs specific for DIY whole system coolings and they look sweet AF but can have so many things go wrong. Plugging channels, leaks. But AIOs are pretty safe if you don’t completly cheap out and do some research and compare before you buy.

If you are getting anything above an i5 or one of those AMD x3Ds I would say water cooling is a must.

I was a water-cooling main for ages because I believed the hype that it’s quieter. For my last PC I went air cooled with comically large fans(120mmx2 on the CPU and 360x2 case fans) and it’s quieter, especially in the long run. With water cooling, especially AIOs, the pump gets louder over time.

I have a water cooler (Corsair 280 mm) for my cpu and an air-cooled gpu (1060 mini 6gb). The aio is safe but in hindsight not worth it. The gpu produces more heat and runs cooler. And it’s a mini form factor. a big ass air-cooler for the cpu was probably a better choice.

When these first came out it was a lot more risky since people were figuring out all the steps. I personally got scared away since I watched a dude fry his rig with one at a 2010 recreation of the LAN party.

I use an air cooled rig and lots of fans, downside is if you live somewhere hot and humid enough with no ac (like me) you’ll have to find another hobby in summer since you probably shouldn’t run them at all when its 90 some indoors or higher, not because it will damage the machine, but because it will damage you with heat sickness, its already 95 or something in your little slice of hell, pc puts out another 2-10f of heat depending on pc and size of the room, so now its 100 in your damn room, good luck sleeping that night. Might want to consider reverting to stock otherwise in summer. so it doesn’t put out as much heat.

Upside if you live someplace with cold winters, time to push all the settings to high and laugh as you get a warmer room as an added bonus.