Yeah... they call it that cuz the same principle applies to vehicle engine cooling.
Air cooling is not as effective as water cooling, but just take a look at beetle engines made more than half a century ago, they're all air cooled and still up and running. It's all in the design, if it's good and overengineered, it will pracatically run forever.
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
they had a tendency to overheat in hot conditions, and when stuck in traffic. this is because they need a certain amount of air flowing in order to cool properly.
they also weren't very good for heat in the winter.
air cooling is a simpler system, and as such has less to go wrong with it. that doesn't make it better or worse. there are pros and cons to both systems.
VW and Porsche engines area really oil cooled. They have oil cooling radiators inside fan shrouds with thermal expansion baffles that open when it gets hot and close to prevent overcooling in winter.
They didn’t really overheat very often of all the shroud and engine compartment seals were in place and the baffles were in good working order.
The reason you can often go start up an ancient air cooled engine is mainly that they don’t have any water pumps (and water) to sit in them and rust up. That any that there’s no crazy fuel injectors or fancy electrical systems to fail. Just a Carb and distributor to clean/adjust.
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
Where do people keep getting this from? Cars today tend to last far longer anywhere where winter is a thing.
As for air cooled vs water cooled engines, the power output (and vehicle mass) has to be part of that conversation. Yes air cooling works on on a 25 HP motor, but it doesn't work so well on modern engines making an order of magnitude more power.
Honestly people give old vehicles (or old anything) way too much credit. It's survivor bias, only the good stuff lasted this long. The shitty products have all been recycled multiple times by now. I mean think about it, 100,000 miles used to be an old-ass car back in the day, but for anything post 1990 or so that's just getting started. Don't get me wrong, I admire the simplicity and repairability of old vehicles
You have clearly never lived with an old air cooled VW engine and dealt with it overheating in traffic.
Or going uphill
Air cooling is a lot less complex than water cooling, so there are fewer points of failure. If both can do the job, I'll pick reliability over efficiency every time.
My thoughts exactly.
Similarly it's actually easier to fuck up the design of a water cooler than an air cooling system. Notably motherboard warp can happen from an improperly set up water cooling.
Didn't know this, thanks for the info 👍.
Air cooling is not as effective as water cooling,
It's not that simple because air cooling in pcs today means a heatpipe. A heatpipe uses fluid (such as water under a vacuum) that boils at a low temperature. The phase transition of liquid to vapor transfers hundreds of more times heat than simple conduction of cold water running over the CPU.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
It's how refrigerator compressors work to cool things so effectively. The genius of a heat pipe is it works without an electric compressor ( this limits it's cooling ability but it's still genius).
So a heatpipe CPU air cooler with a 120mm radiator will outperform a water-cooler with a 120mm radiator in almost every situation. The advantage of water-cooling is you can make that radiator huge (280mm is typical today), and place it on one of the side/top panels of the case where air is cool instead of deep inside where the air is hot.
Yeah but VW engines were pretty small, carrying pretty small cars.
It got you from point A to point B, didn't it?
Cars built today will outlast most of the old Beetles. There is a big survivorship bias at work. A percentage of them were built to slightly tighter tolerances and quality than all the others off the same line. A percentage of those will end up in the hands of owners that are meticulous about maintenance, never get in a major accident, and keep it going for decades. The handful you see left are the ones that went through several rounds of small percentage chances. There were a bajillion of those old Beetles made, so a few were bound to get through.
What cars have problems with today are things that rarely have to do with making the wheels go. They get into accidents. Their auto-dimming back windows no longer work. The GPS doesn't get updates and thinks you're three counties away. The engine and transmission, however, will probably go to the junkyard in perfect working order, even with shitty maintenance on the part of the owner.
Two problems with the drivelines of modern cars: sensors, which can cause some pretty spectacular mechanical failures; and cost-cutting engineering. Trimming parts to use less material and that kind of thing, but also less investment in QC (looking at you, Kia engine recalls).
There’s truly more to go wrong in modern cars, and the electronics can fail and cause mechanical failures, too, especially in the combustion cycle.
Buy air cooler
Look inside
Water
If you live somewhere that's consistently 98-100% humidity: Air cooling is simultaneously liquid cooling.
And wheres that, in the occean?
Tennessee
They mean 98%-100% relative humidity. 100% relative humidity is the maximum amount of water that the air can hold at a given temperature and pressure as vapour. Once you get to 100% then you can evaporate any more water / was will start condensing out of the air (especially if the temperature drops)
Many places in the South. Swamps. Farmland. Etc.
Personally I just like the lack of difficulty in air cooling. And air cooling can also be very quiet. I have a case with soundproofing inside, and my PSU and GPU fans only spin up when they get hot enough to justify it. The noise level is so low as to be imperceptible. My dog breathes louder.
You have my attention. Tell me more about your dog
- His name is Sherlock.
- He's a year old.
- He weighs about 70 pounds/~32 kg.
- He's a mix adopted from a local shelter. Google Lens calls him a Dutch Shepherd. Might have a little pit in him. Gonna get a DNA kit for him.
- He has XXXL ears. Everyone comments on how oversized his ears are.
- He gives the softest, sweetest kisses.
- He does not like walks or new people or new places.
- He loves other dogs.
- He doesn't understand the cat. Or his boundaries.
- He pooped in the car once.
- If left to his own devices, he will eat all the grass in the yard. The concept of not eating too much fiber at once is one he can't digest.
- Despite not loving new people, he does warm up to you fairly quick. It took 20 minutes of my in-laws being around before he got lovey dovey on them.
- He doesn't like bones that much. He'd rather have a cloth toy he can pull apart thread by thread.
- His two favorite places in the world are 1) Daycare, and 2) Wherever mom is sitting. I'm the spare lol
- I wanted to name him Rye Bread because of the color of his coat. My sister in law has a dog named Tater and my brother's dog is named Biscuit so I thought going with the theme of carbs would be cute. But he responds to Sherlock and that just makes handling him a million times easier so we stuck with that.
Here he is peeping out the window with the aforementioned cat:
Can you tell me more about your case and noise insulation? I've recently been unhappy with my PC's noise level and I'm looking for upgrades.
It's the windowless version of the Fractal Design Define R5. The panels are all lined with padding to reduce noise. I have a single Noctua NF-F12 moving air through it. It's capable of spinning to 2,000 RPM if needed, but it never gets hot enough inside to ever spin faster than 1,200. Even at full speed, the fan is still very tolerably quiet. I only bought the ippc version because it wasn't brown and brown.
Also, the CPU is a 4790K cooled by a Noctua NH-U9B SE2. It's a 92mm cooler that fit nicely in my old "Optimus Prime we have at home" case. It has two fans on it that run at a constant 900 RPM. It does a great job keeping heat in check at stock clock, but I wouldn't trust it in an overclock situation on this CPU.
Not OP but I went on my own crusade against noise a few years ago. I had a ryzen 1600 and a 1070 in an NZXT S340 case using the included case fans. I wanted to get rid of noisy components entirely instead of using any kind of sound isolation or insulation because I thought it would be easier to get rid of the problem at the source than to try to hide it. I replaced both case fans with be quiet shadow wings 2s and got a be quiet dark rock 4 to replace the stock CPU cooler. My CPU never used more than 100w but the new cooler was rated for 200w. I thought it would be quieter to have an oversized cooler for my CPU since a bigger cooler would need a slower fan speed to get rid of the same amount of heat as an appropriately sized cooler. I also got a 850w power supply with a mode that turns off the fan completely if it's using less than 200w. My whole tower used around 300w when playing the games I normally played and around 100w or less while doing light work. I tweaked the fan curves of everything so temps stayed under 50C with light loads and all my fans stayed at about 900rpm. Every fan got faster and louder while gaming but I didn't notice or care since it was quieter than the sounds and music of the games. After I got all my new fancy fans my 8TB internal HDD became by far the noisiest thing in my whole set up so I built a NAS with hand-me-down hardware and put all my spinning rust storage in a different room. Since then my only upgrades have been a bigger SSD and a ryzen 5800X CPU.
In the dead of night when the whole house is quiet my own breathing is louder than my PC 2 feet away on the desk if I'm not gaming.
CPU AIO's are awesome, all the benefits of water cooling with none of the hassle.
I fully agree, except my Corsair Platinum was mega loud, until it died. They gave me an upgraded new one under warranty tho!
But I put a D15 in instead.
Edit: side note, the AIO cooled amazingly, worked for over three and a half years, and no liquid escaped. It just got janky.
Air cooling is just radiative cooling with extra steps
nah, radiative cooling means that radiation is the only mechanism for heat exchange in use. I'm pretty sure most modern air coolers use forced convection as one of their heat exchange mechanisms.
Well yes. It is. Liquid cooling does have merits. I won't say it's better than air cooling in a general sense; at the end of the day, the heat ends up in the air.
With liquid cooling, you can transport it further, use larger radiators.... The list goes on.
My key point is that as long as the components get cooled, who cares which you use? Do what you want.
Water cooling at what kind of scale? Since you can engineer a system with the final heat exchanger to the environment stuck in a river. Is that air cooling with extra steps?
If we're talking PC's though, yes. You're right.
Some guy once built a geocooled system back in I think 2010, just to cool quad SLI 580s. He had some crazy 6-screen Sony FW900 setup with a fresnel lens.
LinusTechTips has a cooling system that uses a water loop under his backyard pool to water cool an entire home server rack.
Granted uptime seems... less than ideal. They keep not hiring a plumber to do/inspect it and effectively re-jury-rigging it for videos. But solid (liquid) idea.
And better noise level. Treated myself to a custom loop a couple months ago and never looked back. I mean, it is expensive and can be a lot of work to get going, but fuck aircooling an RTX 3090. Never again (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
The whole point for AIO water loops is that you have more flexibility in radiator placement. For advanced systems you can beat static copper tubes pretty easily by moving more water.
Idk, needs more steps, put a Peltier in it, a heat exchanger with a second loop, and don't forget the compressor for extra chill.
And also make it so that the end radiator doesn't radiate heat into the air but into the ground instead, so that it won't be just air cooling with extra steps.
Unless you're in a boat, in which case you're likely using a water to water heat exchanger.
I am not a gamer so my fans only spin up when the vents clog with dust or I am doing some high end rendering. I'd never do water cooling because a leak could kill everything. I have lived through floods.
You can use oil or other non conductive fluids instead.
Bought water cooler when I built it. That was five years ago. No problems so far.
Ground-source water-water heat pumps have entered the chat
Have you seen what Linus did with his pool lmao
Air cooling is just an intermediate product of nuclear fusion
By extension, air cooling is global thermal mass cooling, which, by extension is radiative cooling, which by extension is universal entropy cooling or whatever you'd call that.
THERE IS, AS YET, INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Thanks Multivac!
AIO Liquid Coolers suck, good performance but they'll eventually get worse as water evaporate and they don't all offer proper ways to refill, a custom loop is far superior, but then custom loops are such big effort and cost.
I'll stick to my Hyper 212 Turbo.
And the ability to know where the heat is being dissipated too.
And get more surface area to the air than you could with straight air cooling.
And control the temperature more acurately if desired through a thermostat.
Sure, but if you can find an air-cooled VW bus that's still running in this decade they're probably asking $30k for it.
My grandpa has a Vanagon but it's in kinda rough shape.
Body is pretty good but the interior is pretty much gone and it has electrical grimlins so it either starts and drives perfectly or just screams at you doesn't even attempt to start.
Super cool vehicle though.
Porsche used to agree, until 1998.
Surface area of the fin stack matters. An air cooler will always be limited by the space available around the CPU. A water cooling radiator has more flexibility to be placed in around the case.
That said, having less than a 360mm AIO is probably a waste. Also, higher end Intel chips these days are so power hungry that they can't be physically cooled properly with the surface area available on the package.
"having less than a 360 AIO is a waste" no, the entire SFF community would disagree with you there
It depends on which part of the environment the heat is being exchanged with - if your watercooling system is releasing heat to the ground under your house or a somebody else suggested (which is even more effective) a river next to your house, it's not at all equivalent to air cooling.
Further, the heat storage capacity of a material depends on both the kind of material and its mass, so almost all liquids have a higher heat sforage capacity per unit of volume than air (certainly water does) and solids even more (much more, given their much higher density) so even in the big scheme of things (i.e. were will most of that heat end up in given enough time), even heat released by a watercoolong system to the air will mostly end up in tne Earth's crust and oceans and only a tiny fraction of it will remain in the athmosphere.
Even if the water is used from a river, the heat still gets dissipated into the air from the surface of that river.
So river cooling is still just air cooling with extra steps.
As I pointed out further down in my comment, solids and liquids have a much higher heat capacity than air (or in other words, they can absorb a lot more heat before they warm up), so most of the heat dissipated to the river would end up stored in the Earth's Crust and Oceans and very little of it in the Air.
It all makes its way into the cold vacuum of space eventually
