I've Happily Switched Away From The Current All-In-One Water Coolers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: I've Happily Switched Away From The Current All-In-One Water Coolers

As I've written about a few times now, I've been working towards eliminating the all-in-one water cooling setups from our Linux benchmarking lab since the performance of these aging water cooling loops hasn't been too incredible and they've been blocking me from migrating the last of my systems in ATX cases over to 4U enclosures. This weekend I finally phased out the last two water cooling systems in favor of well-performing ~$20 USD heatsinks...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Server-Room-Back-On-Air

[bridgman]

Nice. I'm impressed that the cooler fits into a 4U case... the pic of the cooler on the mobo outside the case looks like it would be much too tall.

[raonlinux]

Michael, since you change to air cooling, is less noisy than when you were using aio water cooling?

[pal666]

temperature over time is useless stat for coolers, the only important graph is noise over temperature over power dissipated

[Passso]

I own an Arctic cooler and they are close to 20Db, barely audible. So basically if temperature has not raised a lot Michael did a good choice

[schmidtbag]

These days, liquid cooling is really only necessary for GPUs. Sure, you might achieve a better CPU overclock with liquid cooling, but I wouldn't consider the extra few hundred MHz to be worth the cost and hassle.

[haplo602]

These days, liquid cooling is really only necessary for GPUs. Sure, you might achieve a better CPU overclock with liquid cooling, but I wouldn't consider the extra few hundred MHz to be worth the cost and hassle.

well try to fit an adequate cooler into an ITX HTPC case ... there's simply no space for air coolers there ....

[Michael]

Nice. I'm impressed that the cooler fits into a 4U case... the pic of the cooler on the mobo outside the case looks like it would be much too tall.

Yep it fits just perfectly.

[Michael]

Michael, since you change to air cooling, is less noisy than when you were using aio water cooling?

Forgot to mention it in article, the Arctic A11/i11 are very quiet.

[schmidtbag]

well try to fit an adequate cooler into an ITX HTPC case ... there's simply no space for air coolers there ....

Right... because there's no good reason to OC an HTPC in the first place. Those systems are meant to be small and power efficient (so they can be silent) while playing any kind of media you throw at it smoothly (with the exception of playing games bare-metal). To clarify, power efficient doesn't mean slow. If you feel the need to OC an HTPC to the point that you need liquid cooling, you need to upgrade everything else. If you're playing games on it, then it isn't a HTPC anymore.

There are mini ITX cases that have enough room to fit giant air coolers and an R9 295x2 if you really wanted.