Sick of watercooling...

[SiliconWizard]

So, here's the deal. I've used watercooling on my computers for years now. I did like the performance compared to air cooling, and the fact they would take up a lot less space on the motherboard itself. I've also done overclocking so those watercooling solutions worked well.

Gone from a couple AIOs to a custom loop over the years.

But I'm now getting sick of them. The probability of failure is much higher than with air cooling. Leaks are always possible, so you need to have a regular look at the installation. Even when it doesn't leak, air bubbles are also always possible at some point and can be a major annoyance (from noise, decreased cooling performance, to the pump failing.) All in all, they work great when they work, but they are just too much maintenance for my taste now.

So I'm looking for good air cooling solutions (ventirads), that are not too bulky (some of the current ones are VERY bulky and do not always fit easily on some motherboards, etc.)
The target TDP would be something between 150W to 200W.

Any good suggestions are most welcome. So far, I have my eye on the Be Quiet Dark Rock 4 (not the Pro, which is apparently pretty good, but much too bulky for my taste and use case.)

[BeBuLamar]

If you live some where cold put the computer outside during winter months. I deal with a lot of stuff with water cooling (not computer though) to not want to water cool my computer.

[bdunham7]

https://www.electronicproducts.com/ces-2017-highlight-cool-your-pc-by-fully-submerging-it-in-this-non-electrically-conductive-fluid/

[KaneTW]

Interesting that you're running into failures. My custom loop has been running 24/7 for about 5 years now with no issue, maintenance about every 2 years.

Maybe look into how data centers to watercooling?

[RoGeorge]

 

[Gyro]

It was the Cray-2 that was imersed in Fluorinert wasn't it?

[TimFox]

I saw a CDC 6600 mainframe (ca. 1964) in a computer museum that had a pressure gauge on the front panel to measure the Freon pressure.

[free_electron]

yup. real computers are dunked in a tank of freon.  and you blow air bubbles through it so the sysops can hit the emergency shutdown if the bubbles stop (no flow)

[TimFox]

For high-power transmitting vacuum tubes, "vapor phase cooling" (a boiler around the plate and a loop for the steam to pass through a condensor) has the advantage of gravity feed and no noisy mechanical fans or pumps. 
The temperature at the anode interface is maybe 100^o C, and exploits the latent heat of boiling water to carry off more heat than a liquid-phase cooling system.
See pp 121ff of  https://w5rkl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Eimac-care-and-feeding-of-power-grid-tubes.pdf

[SiliconWizard]

Thanks guys, that's being pretty helpful so far!

[Mechatrommer]

i recently purchased Jonsbo CR1400 White Edition for my latest PC cpu upgrade, checking it, its about 1/4X the price of Be Quiet Dark Rock 4, because its cheap, i also bought the CR1200 3pin fan at half the price of CR1400 as spare or use it to cool some mosfets... even though they have colorful led that i dont quite like, maybe when kids see it they think i'm cool. otoh i have water cooled system (SEGOTEP HALO BLUE) in my Lecroy SDA6000, and also another one stored as spare. just because the space is tight that an appropriate sized heatsink + fan wont fit, so i carefully checked the piping wont pass above sensitive circuit in case of leak, SDA6000 has a compartment/separator like casing inside that can act as water drainage i guess channeling the leak coolant to the side of unit i hope out of the sensitive circuit. and maybe in 5yrs or so time from installation date (about 2 years ago), if bend check shows crack appearance on tubing, i will refit with the best undestructible rubber tubing available on the market, view glass to ensure flow of coolant and/or other mechanical fanciness.. ymmv.

[Berni]

I tend to go with PC cooling products from Arctic Cooling. They make good quiet fans at a good price.

Unfortunately tho with air cooling getting great cooling performance while staying quiet means gigantic heatsinks. At quiet low fan speeds you don't have a large volume of air to work with nor the static pressure required to push it trough tightly packed fins. So you need many fins with a lot of spacing, so means the cooler overall is very big.

As a result most of my coolers occupy most of the available room. Going from the top of the graphics card to the top of the case and going from the motherboard right up to the case lid. The cooler manufacturers know the typical room inside a PC case. The place to watch out for is RAM slots, those can get in the way (especially if you have some of those tall gaming marketed sticks). Asymmetric designed coolers can help with this since you can rotate it into an orientation that gives more space where the ram slots are (Unless you have a server CPU with tons of slots on both sides)

[Jeroen3]

Just go on the website of Noctua and pick one.
You say not too bulky, but the bulkiness is what defines the performance.

If you take the NH-D15, which their largest offering, you can probably get a reasonable processor into turbo most of the time.
But you can also get on their NH-U series, which is smaller.
Not the most high-end stuff though, like AMD's 64 core threadrippers are just very hot.

If you take the AMD Ryzen 7 5900X you can see compared performance.
For example, the D12 and D15 can take all of it. And the U12 can take most of it, some limitations in turbo to be expected.

[Ranayna]

I would suggest taking a look at Noctuas catalog. Yes, they are bulky, among the largest air coolers available. Yes, they are expensive. Yes, you might find the "shitbrown" color scheme ugly.
But they are the best.

I myself use a DH15s, on a Ryzen 7 5900x, in a Fractal Design Define 7. This case is quite large, so the cooler fits well. Memory height *might* be an issue if i fit a second fan to the cooler, but i don't need one.

The "s" of DH-15s is important though if you use a large GPU. The 15s is not symmetrical, therefore there is more space between the cooler and the GPU. With a normal DH-15, there is essentially no space between these parts. With a GPU without backplane you might have to put some insulation between the two to avoid shortcuts. And you will not be able to reach the clip at the end of the PCIe slot to remove the card.
The DH-15s fits much better.
Clips to mount a second fan are included, if you need two (i don't with my setup), you can simply add one.

And considering past actions of Noctua: If new CPU Sockets become available where their coolers don't fit, you can get new mounting hardware for very cheap or even free. A Noctua cooler can theoretically last you for may CPU generations.

[bd139]

Any good suggestions are most welcome. So far, I have my eye on the Be Quiet Dark Rock 4 (not the Pro, which is apparently pretty good, but much too bulky for my taste and use case.)

Can recommend anything by Be Quiet. If building PCs I use their coolers, power supplies and fans exclusively. I've had nothing but reliable and near silent PCs out of them. Paired with the Fractal Design Meshify cases they are a winner.

Couple of gotchas though: Make sure you use the motherboard compatibility checker on their web site for the coolers and watch out for the incompatibility with some new Intel socket 1700 if you go down that route. They will send out a new bracket kit if you have a 1700.

If you go for a Be Quiet power supply grab a -CM variant which are semi modular. None of the last builds I've done needed any of the SATA cables and it saves bundling them up somewhere horrible.

Looking at the thread, a lot of people have suggested other coolers because they are cheaper, which is true. But you're paying for the fan as well. Remember that. Most of the coolers ship the crappiest fan they could strap on to it.

But I dumped all that for a mac mini because it was faster and quieter.

[newbrain]

f you take the AMD Ryzen 7 5900X you can see compared performance.
For example, the D12 and D15 can take all of it. And the U12 can take most of it, some limitations in turbo to be expected.

Minor quibble: 5900X is aRyzen 9, not 7 and, in fact, you pointed to the 5800X page.

That does not change the matter though: I have exactly a 5900X with a D15.

Cool, very silent in normal usage, OK under 100% load, and BULKY.

Obviously, for good air coolers, the bulkier the more silent and efficient.

Choose your MB and RAM carefully if you get one of these, did I say they are BULKY?

I gave thought to water cooling, but the risks are too high for my use case:
I often use the machine from another country for long periods, and while an air cooler failure (quite improbable with two fans) would just shut it off for overheating, a water cooling failure would be catastrophic.

For high-power transmitting vacuum tubes, "vapor phase cooling" (a boiler around the plate and a loop for the steam to pass through a condensor) has the advantage of gravity feed and no noisy mechanical fans or pumps. 

Every reasonable consumer air cooler or GPU has that nowadays.

[RoGeorge]

I'm a big fan of Noctua.  Have a huge https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15 on an i7-4790k and it's silent in a quiet room.  TDP for this proc is 88 W (average according to Intel), I don't know the max power.  The fans can only be hear (as a silent air hiss) while compiling with all the 8 cores at 100% load, for example when compiling Gentoo.  I don't overclock.

[Ranayna]

I forgot to add something regarding compatibility of the Noctua coolers.

It is *very* rarely a mainboard issue. The keepout zones around the socket are well defined, and the Noctua coolers hold well to that. I have not yet heard of mainboards with compatible sockets, that the Noctua coolers do not fit. But Noctua publishes an extensive compatibility list, so you can check if your particular board has any issues: https://ncc.noctua.at/coolers/NH-D15S-5/motherboards/all
Memory *can* be an issue for the NH-D15, or the D15s with two fans. You can either omit the second fan completely, or if the case allows mount the fan a couple of centimeters higher, to give your RAM enough clearance. Again, a compatibility list by Noctua: https://ncc.noctua.at/coolers/NH-D15S-5/ram/all

The deciding factor for cooler compatibility is your case. The DH-15(s) is high, and according to noctua, needs almost 180 milimeters clearance. But again, Noctua publishes an extensive compatibility list: https://ncc.noctua.at/coolers/NH-D15S-5/cases/all

[Ed.Kloonk]

Another Noctua fanboy here.

Have been for many years.

Any PC that I build and don't farm out gets a big fat heatsink. The only noise now is the spinning HDDs. But I'm sure even that would stop if I bothered to put the sides back on the cases. 

[pcprogrammer]

I have been using Scythe coolers for years and are very happy with them because they are quiet https://www.scythe-eu.com/en/products/cpu-cooler/mugen-5-pcgh-edition.html

Might be to bulky for your taste though.

[DavidAlfa]

Scythe are great. I have my Ninja 3 since 2010 or so. The fan broke down years ago, but being so big it managed to keep the temps down by natural convection.
Until the pandemic lockdown, I installed some games and started crashing after 15 minutes or so,  hitting 90ºC. New fan and doing great again.

If you want an air cooler for such TDP, you can go two ways:
- Small cooler with fan rocketing at 10.000rpm
- Large cooler with silent fan.
You can't have a small cooler to get rid of such power silently.

There's a very good one for the price,  check Thermalright PA120
Relatively cheap on Amazon, "SE" version adds support for Alder Lake socket.
There're several reviews, like this, this and this (Nice pictures, different TDP vs temps), it plays with the bigger ones, but much cheaper.

[Zoli]

Another Noctua fan(pun intended) here; for the last 10 years I'm running an NH-D14.
My recommendation would be to move to 140mm PWM fans(air cooler choice will be limited, but that's the scope) both cooler and case; as example for fans: NF-P14s redux-1500 PWM; idle @500RPM - inaudible from 1m; max @1500RPM - slight hurricane.

[SiliconWizard]

Thanks for the feedback.

Before switching to watercooling, my go-to brand for ventirads was Noctua indeed. Never used Be Quiet so far, but I've only heard good things about them.

Just to reply to the point of watercooling failures: I haven't had that many over the years: essentially one bad failure, a leak in some Corsair AIO (so not your random cheapass shit) which ruined a graphics card. And then as I said, occasional annoying air bubbles and pumps sometimes failing to start. Yes, most watercooling pumps are pretty finicky due to their simple design, and sometimes the tiniest air bubble may make them fail to even start.

But as I said, it's also just the maintenance factor and the objective fact that watercooling has more probability of failing than just a ventirad. Having to flush it every year or every two years is not a huge deal but it's annoying. And moving a computer with watercooling installed is always tricky.

And yes, a fan failing on a ventirad (and I've personally never had any fan fail) is less serious usually. You have significant leeway and enough time to act before it gets too hot, while with watercooling, if the pump fails to start, it just gets to > 90°C temperatures within... seconds. Pretty bad.

Problem with those bulky ventirads is that many of them are very hard to fit unless you use the restricted number of motherboards listed 100% compatible. If not, most of the time, they just get too close to RAM sticks or even prevent to install them altogether. Major pain. Another point I'm not very comfortable with is their weight. Must put some nasty constraint on the motherboard, however sturdy the backplate is, especially when in a vertical tower.

I mentioned the Dark Rock 4, I've seen tests which show just about 3° above what you get with the Dark Rock Pro 4 (which is the bigger one and closer to the Noctua ones mentioned here too), but it's significantly smaller. So that may be adequate. Would be cool if anyone here had experience with it.

I've also seen the relatively new Deepcool AK620, which, while "cheap", seems to be one of the best at the moment from tests I've seen. But it is also big and heavy.

Also wondering if anyone else had or was having the same thought as me, going back from watercooling to aircooling, to hear about their experience.

I might also end up sticking to watercooling, who knows. Possibly using better pumps and a reservoir easier to flush would make things a little less annoying.

[DavidAlfa]

Unless you have rams with large heatsinks, it'll fit without problem. See how the heastink has a zone for that.
The fan can be moved easily.

[SiliconWizard]

Have you looked at your picture? You think that's appropriate? I personally don't. And even so, those are the smallest RAM sticks I've seen. But the fan is stuck to them as far as I can tell, and it'll happily keep transmitting vibrations to them. How sweet!

I think ventirad designers must smoke something strong. And on many motherboards, there are RAM slots on both sides of the CPU, so you can't move the fan anywhere else, it'll be the same. It's just a huge mess bordering ridiculous IMHO and one reason why many people these days resort to watercooling even when they don't actually need the extra cooling performance.