Not at all, but since the OP is clearly on what I would consider a tight budget, for his limited amount of money that extra $40-80 could mean getting something else that is far more useful to them.
Also, just because it's the latest and greatest doesn't mean you should adopt it the first chance you get.
A-Bit brought out the first ATA 66 motherboards, which had a fatal flaw that randomly corrupted your HDDs making the bus unusable.
Fijitsu brought out the first budget home 6-10GB HDDs, that every single one failed due to the new method of encapsulating the controller IC.
Intel mass produced and sold the Intel Atom CPUs to the enterprise sector for mission critical infrastructure where flip-chip BGA construction was used, which are now all failing due to unforeseen issues with the at the time new technology.
Samsung brought out the first 1TB home SATA SSDs that suffered a fatal performance flaw due to issues with the wear levelling implemented in silicon that was rectified in later models.
AMD brought out the Ryzen 7 series of CPUs that have a critical bug that exhibits under Linux when doing multi threaded workloads causing a full system halt that was fixed in later revisions.
These are just a few examples of new tech having critical bugs/flaws in new unproven technology that has bitten the early adopters.Remember those first motherboards with USB 3.0, which used a separate controller chip which was often actually slower and less reliable than the native USB 2.X connections on the same boards? Or the same story when SATA3 was introduced? Lots of fun, lots of confused people. I'm not saying that'll be the case here, but they're definitely examples of early adopter woes.
Air is quieter then AIO, but custom loop is even quieter and more flexible IMO Here is my current radiator.
(Attachment Link)
However it's now under a shroud and the pump it outside too. I love having my TR 1950X clocked at 4GHz, c-states disabled, and zero room noise, and with the current outside temperature of 1.2C
(Attachment Link)
I don't know how many actually tried a water-cooling and what have changed for last 5-6 years with tech,
but I were trying to "eliminate" a noise for non-overlocking X-series and Xeon class CPUs that sat in boxes near to me.
This is my one of worst purchase in decade, obsolete sh$t with very creepy noise!
Eventually, money very well spend on a bigger case and traditional "beefy" coolers.
Air is quieter then AIO, but custom loop is even quieter and more flexible IMO Here is my current radiator:
However it's now under a shroud and the pump is outside too. I love having my TR 1950X clocked at 4GHz, c-states disabled, and zero room noise, and with the current outside temperature of 1.2C
That's awesome! Is that a full copper setup? I've always toyed with the idea of doing something similar, but I'm absolutely positively too lazy to maintain a custom loop consistently over the lifetime of a machine. Forgetting to dust your air cooler won't get you into trouble as quickly and is more easily fixed. Dead reliability combined with low maintenance is generally what I'm aiming for.
Now THAT is an unfair advantage, and hardly representative!!!
But seriously... AIOs are now being designed and targeted to the "quiet performance" market. See where the $75 Corsair H100b I suggested comes up both on cooling and noise compared to most other coolers... and you KNOW it will maintain that cooling more consistently and with a flatter response slope (until it dies, of course): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPUCooling/774
I think the big argument here is not over the tech itself... it's over an unreasonable expectation of lifetime. Yes, it is unreasonable to expect an AIO to last more than 3-5 years. That's fine, as long as you treat it as a consumable supply like a fan. Yes, SOME fans last 10 years or more... I have a Silent Copper cooler that is 15 years old and was still working, still quiet on my old build just before I went with the AIO.
But EXPECTING that lifespan out of a cooler is unreasonable. And poo-pooing liquid-cooling by comparison to that as others in here have done is unreasonable.
mnem
Having the radiator outside makes maintenance so much easier, I soldered on a tap to cut the supply so I can simply go outside and turn the tap off, then disconnect the loop letting the just the pipes drain out so I can work on the PC. That said though I am yet to have to actually service this setup, the thermal mass is just insane and with the surface area I don't even need to run fans, so dust buildup is not an issue.
If I've learnt anything it's that the silent computing crowd is anything but uniform. One guy calls his system dead silent, the other can't stand to bear it. There's a huge product and end consumer gradient.
If I've learnt anything it's that the silent computing crowd is anything but uniform. One guy calls his system dead silent, the other can't stand to bear it. There's a huge product and end consumer gradient.
I agree entirely that AMD are the ones pushing the envelope however I am also well aware (because I am working with AMD on them) that the new AMD generations have major bugs that AMD had fixed that keep coming back in each generation.
AMD Threadripper:
* Issue that prevents PCI devices from being reset making them inaccessible until a hard reboot is performed.
* CPU scheduler on the last core was not exposed to the OS preventing it from being set to a performance profile.
* CPU core numbering didn't follow the already set Intel standard preventing the OS from knowing which threads were paired for each HT pair per core.
* CPU core numbering was changed to fix the above, but then reverted in the next update, and then fixed again in the update after that
* Missing CPU scheduler bug returned and then was fixed again
* NUMA issues... oh so many NUMA issues
* IOMMU groupings keep getting changed around every few updates (if you use SR-IOV or VFIO, you care about this)
These are all mostly fixed now except for the reset issue, it still plagues some as it's partly CPU related and chip-set related.
Then AMD released the Zen+ CPUs a year later and PCI reset issues that were fixed for TR are back, and the cause is the same issue...
AMD Vega (All variants):
* Random hard crashes under Linux with the official AMDGPU drivers
* Broken support to reset the SOC and return it to an operational state
* Missing support to program the SOC for PCIe 3.0 bus speeds under Linux (maybe windows too)
If you ever wanted to use NPT (nested page tables) for virtualization with sr-iov devices (ie, network/gpu device pass-through) your performance would have been sub-par because of a bug that AMD failed to identify and fix in the Linux kernel for 10+ years which I ended up fixing.
This makes me doubt the new PCIe 4.0 technology and chipsets, I personally will be holding off until the tech has seen more widespread usage.
If not for them and Intel had their way, all "personal computers" would still be 32-bit, and everybody waiting, waiting, waiting with baited breath every quarter as they dole out a few hundred more MHz on the umpteenth revision of the original PENTIUM platform.
Having the radiator outside makes maintenance so much easier, I soldered on a tap to cut the supply so I can simply go outside and turn the tap off, then disconnect the loop letting the just the pipes drain out so I can work on the PC. That said though I am yet to have to actually service this setup, the thermal mass is just insane and with the surface area I don't even need to run fans, so dust buildup is not an issue.
If I ever did water cooling I would do that. I work for a radiator company and it was instantly obvious to me that these vehicle radiators that dissipate KW's of heat will take the sub 0.1KW output of a CPU in their stride, yes masses of surface area and masses of inertia.
I once poured a kettle of boiling water into a radiator about 200x100x30mm, it didn't even warm up (I was hoping to clean it out)
And YES, Itanium was available... for an ungodly amount, if you wanted to run NT or some other server/workstation OS. I wonder why it was a commercial flop. It was still not even close to being properly supported by Microsoft/Windows who deliberately castrated XP 64-bit so it WOULDN'T run worth a shit until Intel got their asses in gear. It's not hearsay to me; I lived through it.
I still don't get anyones need for 32GB of RAM unless they have an actual use for it. I do everything on 16GB and no pagefile.