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Originally Posted by LPorc
No math, but let's take a look at the issue.
Without water cooling air is already moving through the case with a hot CPU heatsink. So, even if the radiator exhaust is into the case, there can be no more heat in there than if we were air cooling.
But wait! Water has a much higher specific heat capacity than air, meaning the water is not heated as much as the air would have been. So we're going to be better than air even if we blow our radiator exhaust into the case, because it isn't going to be a warm as the air in the case if we were air cooling.
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But we still have the same amount of heat to exhaust (actually more because of the pump)? Seems to me that the water-cooling advantage over air-cooling is a combination of the higher specific heat capacity of water, more surface area to work with on the rad, and an increased volume of airflow. If we keep airflow volume more-or-less equal, than results should be the same for ac and wc.
So, for a design goal of both quiet and oc, we'd want to have:
- Higher heat capacity of water (additives?)
- Larger rad (I recall that Cathar has demonstrated diminishing returns here)
- Lower air volume to keep noise levels down or very large air volume sufficient to keep noise down. The consensus seems to be that more fans don’t generally lower noise even if running slow, so we’re probably talking passive here.
- Sound insulation
This translates to a higher temperature delta at the rad being an important variable if we want to achieve quiet WITH high oc.
Bringing this back to design goals and compromises that need to be made, if you don’t have to vent the rad into the same chamber as the heat source and you have space, a separate rad box should be better.
L