Air is better than water
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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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.