System Cooling Methods

When i build a system for you there is two primary methods for cooling a central processor unit, each has benefits and potential draw backs.

Air-coolers

Are the most simple way to cool a CPU, the way it works is mainly three core elements which make up an air cooler the vapor chamber, the cooling fans and the heat-exchanger fins. At the first point the vapor chamber is a low boiling point liquid contained within the heat pipes of a CPU what happens inside these chambers is as the CPU block which is the component in direct contact with the CPU itself heats up, it vaporizes that low boiling point liquid and moves up the heat pipes at the ends of the heat pipes is a group of fins these fins are not unlike the cooling fins you find in a refrigerator or a air conditioner, their main purpose is to maximise the amount of surface area available to remove as much heat as possible, then at the last stage this heat is removed by a dedicated fan(s) and removed from the case of the computer. CPU coolers work using the physics based property of thermal conduction and convection, heat is conducted to the fins and convection moves that thermal energy away.

Water-coolers

Water is a wonderful thing, you probably don't know this but what has a high specific heat capacity which means that the amount of energy you can pump into water is incredibly high and causes little temperature change. In a water cooling setup on a CPU vapor chamber system is replaced and turned into a pump, radiator and similar fin technology as a air cooler only difference is the pump moves the heat from the CPU to the thermal block which is connected by two or more pipes typically in a push-pull configuration pulling cool water from the heat exchanger that is the radiator and pushing hot water to the radiator to have the heat removed and just like air coolers this is done by 2 or more fans.

Exotic coolers

This here is problem one of the more strange kinds of coolers you know a refrigerator and freezer? You can actually get coolers which are called actual phase change refrigeration coolers, they create very low temperatures at the CPU or GPU block, the only problem is because they are based on refrigeration technology one they consume obscene amounts of energy, they typically have a 1000W minimum power requirement from the power supply, in this situation this is usually for extremely overclocked CPUs commonly you often have to cover the motherboard in something highly insulating to prevent the water that builds up around the cold block from touching the motherboard conformal coating is typically used for this purpose. It's very quite a few years since I've seen these types of coolers which is rather unfortunate the days of AtomicPC builds were truly some of the most epic cooling solutions I've ever seen. There is also cases of hybrid watercooling configurations which used instead of just pure custom loops they combined a peltier with the watercooling loop to work as a type of chiller for the water, but the effectiveness of this is dependent on whether you can get the heat away from the peltier fast enough to facility cooling which has sufficient performance for everyday use.

• True phase change systems - Are typically based on an actual refrigerator unit, just like the freezer system in your fridge, they usually had dual power supplies with a small timer circuit and relay close, once you pressed the power button on a phase change cooled PC it would trigger usually a warmup period during this period the refrigeration unit would get kicked in and wait till it reached a very low temperature at this temperature the relay would close and start the computer the reason for this mechanism is because the CPUs in phase change system were so hot running that if the refrigeration system was not powered and up it could cause the CPU to overheat and shutdown and because these were typically heavily overclocked they needed this phase change system.

  
  

• Peltier hybrids - A rather inefficient way to go about chilling a watercooled loop peltiers leveraged the thermal electric effect when by an electric current is applied to a thermal pile as it is know as one side gets hotter and the other side gets colder, allowing you to cool a CPU or suitable component, Peliters were also sometimes combined with water coolers or even engineered fluid cooling.

  
  

• Engineered Fluid Cooling - Is done very interestingly so what this technology usually involved was a closed system with seals and the entire computer was submerged into the engineered fluid it had some very useful properties from a coolant stand point. It was a fluid, non-conductive, non-flammable, non-conductive fluid with a low boiling point, in some deployments of these either a refrigeration unit was used or a peltier cooler to condense the engineered coolant back to a fluid state and because of the low boiling point this didn't require a huge amount of cooling capability.

  
  

• Coolant Distribution Unit - This technology is typically found in very large and hot server rack units what a CDU typically is an external cooling system not contained within the rack cabinet space, and instead multiple liquid hoses are being fed out the back of a computer tower or rack mount unit to the coolant distribution network, on consume system CDUs can be build but they require custom design as they are just a metal case with a bunch of fans, radiators, and pumps, which connect to the hoses inside a computer, CDUs are for those who don't want their radiators inside the case, which can have a benefit as if the CDU unit leaks which can happen with radiators over time, it might actually be better because it won't come through the radiator block.

Air-coolers

• Cost - Air coolers are often cheaper then other types of cooling such as liquid cooling, they also offer a cheaper cost in the long run, where as a fan can be replaced in an air cooler and easily maintained a water cooler can have the pump fail, the radiator start leaking or the hoses start leaking.

• Reliability - As mentioned above air coolers are very simple device which are easy to maintain so they are generally reliable for a very long time. This can be critically important for certain system builds because if your cooler fails replacing a fan is a lot easier than replacing an AIO cooler. Workstations that need absolute reliability should always have an air cooler in preference to a AIO if the goal is reliability.

• Maintenance - Only maintained you need to do with an air cooler make sure the fins a clean of dust and remove dust from fans, very simple very easy.

• Space - Aircoolers can be quite large in size however this is dependent on the kind of cooler chosen and whether or not it actually takes up more space than an air cooler.

• Power - Aircoolers will pull much less power because it's simple pump + fans = more power draw for watercoolers, aircooling on the other hand is simply a fan.

Watercoolers

• Cost - Watercoolers are often much more expensive than air coolers because there is both a pump, water piles, radiator and fans all combined into one, this creates multiple points of failure and water coolers have potentially a shorter lifespan as replacing the pump is not a consideration of many AIO manufacturers.

• Cooling Performance - Watercoolers usually have better thermal transfer performance because of waters high heat capacity meaning the amount of energy that can be imparted to water before it starts raising temperature.

• Reliability - Watercoolers can potentially be unreliable especially if cheap ones are chosen, water coolers IF you want one you'll have to explicitly ask. Another problem that can crop up is the blockage of the tiny channels inside the cooling radiator leading to a reduction in cooling performance.

• Power - Liquid coolers do actually consume more power because a pump is necessary to run the fluid from the cooing block to the radiators and back, and then fans on the radiator to remove the heat, it makes perfect sense that they will draw more power.

• Space - Watercooler units can be quite large they often have 120MM * 3 mounted to the radiators or some have 140MM fans.

• Noise - Watercoolers can be much quieter inside a PC case is silence is your goal, however it should be noted some aircoolers are very quiet as well it just depends on the kind of fan bearing on the fans.