Air is better than water
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Technically, no, air is a much worse thermal conductor, and most liquids are significantly better. It's a pretty efficient thermal INSULATOR, however.
The practical applications, however, make the movement of air OUT of your system an efficient cooling method.
Not trying to be contrarian or a smart-ass, but aren't water cooled systems kinda just air cooled systems with the radiator moved elsewhere?
Yes. The advantage is that you can make the surface area of the air cooling part much, much larger. I had a water cooled system that could do web browsing and other basic tasks with zero fan speed (though it was better to leave it on very low speed to avoid hunting behavior).
Also, there's some benefits to thermal mass. Short term spikes can be absorbed by the water without increasing fan speed.
Isn't that the default for (air cooled) notebooks?
With CPUs with very low TDPs, yes.
I once built a home theatre PC that was completely passively cooled. The case was basically the entire heat sink. It got the heat from the CPU through heatpipes. Unfortunately the shitty motherboard died due to unreleased reasons and since then I didn't have the time or money to revive it.
The cases aren't even built anymore. No idea why, it was really cool.
Every liquid cooling system is pretty much that. Eventually you need to give it to the outside and the outside is usually air. Heck even river cooling for Power plants ends up "air cooling" through the rivers surface.
All of that air cooling is just radiation cooling in the end
All of that radiation cooling is just entropy cooling in the end.
The heat is not going anywhere in the long run though.
I think that the point is to get a much bigger radiator by moving it to a less cramped location. The point is to make the process more efficient, not to change its nature.
Not if you use water from the tap. A friend of mine in college did that when he had a water flatrate in his appartment. Worked pretty well.
It is now frowned upon to waste clean water in this fashion.
Nah, not everywhere. Our village has no water meters because, why. Spring water from the mountains is not treated, only monitored for microorganisms and contaminants and fed into our water supply by gravity. Doesn't really matter if it runs through a computer on its way to the sea or not.
In places like big cities or flat plains where the water needs to be pumped and treated that's a different thing.