A gamer leaves his gaming PC unattended for an hour, after which his PC is underwater. This triggers the discussion about whether water or air cooling is the better idea.
What happened? A gamer explained on Reddit that he wanted to give his gaming PC a thorough clean. However, when reassembling and connecting the components, he accidentally unplugged the water pump of his cooling system.
He himself explains in another comment that the pump works perfectly, he just unplugged it while cleaning it without noticing. After cleaning, he started his computer and went away for an hour, leaving his PC alone. When he came back, he noticed that everything was wet:
When I came back, my PC was frozen, I rebooted and noticed that my pump was not running… the [Kühl-]Block started to melt and water ran onto the motherboard and GPU.
An annoying mistake that shouldn’t have happened. The “air cooler” gang immediately explained that none of this would have happened with air cooling. For example, someone explains that this would never have happened with air cooling:
The people from water cooling were very annoyed about this post. But they keep encouraging me in my choice of cooling.
What is the advantage of air cooling? Air cooling is generally less complex and easier to maintain. And air cooling is more than sufficient for most computers. AiO water cooling systems are generally more complex to install than air cooling systems, but they also cool better than their “colleagues” and generally look “cooler”.
But you also have to connect an air cooler to your motherboard with a “power connector”. The connector is usually located near the processor. Otherwise the cooler won’t move and won’t cool your CPU. However, the mess with the water wouldn’t have happened with an air cooler.
High temperatures reduce the performance of your PC
Why should high temperatures be avoided? Hardware will eventually run significantly slower under high temperatures. This is because the processor and graphics card throttle performance to cope with the heat or switch off in an emergency to protect components.
In addition, some components wear out faster when there are large temperature fluctuations or at very high temperatures. Therefore, many gamers try to keep the temperatures and possible fluctuations within limits and either use extensive air cooling or opt for AIO water cooling.
If you are struggling with high temperatures in your PC, then take a look at the following guide here on MeinMMO. Here you will find tips and tricks on how to keep your gaming PC cool: 8 tips to keep your gaming PC cool and make it faster