Simply put... No, no I don't... And this isn't just some trifling aversion, I mean I have a real deep rooted problem with going and putting a water reservoir inside a machine, this is even before we consider the logistical challenges to installing a water loop. Lets delve deeper....
Traditionally PC's, and indeed most computers, have been air cooled, initially machines were pretty slow meaning the surface area of the chip alone was sufficient for heat dissipation (my 68000 equipped ST's for example).
However, as machines got faster so the electronic head began to build, essentially the more power the machine uses literally the more heat is put off, in the broadest sense thermodynamics demands that electrical energy moving the electrons inside the components not be 100% efficient and therefore some of that energy be lost, and it's only escape is as heat energy.
This was dealt with by the addition of extra surface area to chips, in the form is heat-sinks, many finned metal constructs stuck on, simply to provide the added folders of more surface area, indeed some components - or whole systems - can be cooled this way quite well.
Things never stay still, so as Moores Law gained traction into the 1990's fans were added to many systems to draw cool air in and over the components, specifically the processor or CPU, which is where I found my first system fan, on my Intel 480 DX4-100 chip in the mid 90's (prior to this my 486 SX-25 was still passively cooled, with just a heat sink!).
Since then the fans in my system have evolved over and over, and as a bachelor I had no issues with massively loud fans blowing or whirring systems... This is just what you had, usually tiny fans spinning incredibly fast, plus hard drives etc, PC's made a hell of a clatter in the late 90's and early naughties.
Enter the wife to be, and things had to change, so I looked at quietening the systems I use down:
And it became a bit of a tradition with each iteration of my work area to improve the sound aspects, even on systems not kept directly in my working area:
So now I have a happy-and-successful train of experience with both Knix, Sharkoon and Noctua fans, all excellent in their ways, I have experience with drive ordering, switching SSD's, orientating my power supplies, smoothing dust filters... The systems I run close to me are whisper quite, yet extremely powerful, and never get too loud, my typing is always the loudest thing around!
Water cooling however is "silent".... Erm, reality police, no it's not.... You still have the sound of a power supply unit in your machine, and unless you're absolutely crazy you don't really open them up and try to passively cool them, so it will have a fan in there. I can switch the fan out for a silent brand, voiding any warranty, but really is it going to be silent? No, of course its not.
So, what do I gain with water cooling? Really, what do I personally gain?
- Worry about the joint fittings
- Pump seal
- Block corrosion & blockages
- Coolant contamination/algae growth
- Tube decay
All leading me to think about catastrophic failure, which is coolant, be it electronic safe or not (most likely not) spilling out everywhere, literally hosing my machine.
What do I get with a fan? A high temp warning, or an indicative sound, and the chance to clean things up with a blow of air!... Air, not water, air, not worry.
And I'm going to sit like this forever I think, I see JaysTwoCents, I see ScienceStudio, I see Linus Media Group and a plethora of other skilled and knowledgeable folks on YouTube and at large vaunting water cooling all the time, but truth be told... I can't ever help but wonder if this is just folks looking for someway to express just how superior they are to others.
Lets face it, the PC master race exists, we're here... And some of us have been on the band wagon a long long time*, and it's the need in us to express this that I think is this very trait driving this die-hard gamble on water-cooling.
Anyone, and I mean anyone, can build a modern PC... You literally buy the parts and slot them together like the ultimate in expensive Lego... The elite caché of being able to do this once highly skilled and technical task has been ebbed away, the fire was literally stolen from us and passed to the masses.
What therefore do those of us, whom endured being the nerds and the geeks and the outcasts so long, turn to in order to almost prove our superiority, how to we edge the masses back out of the picture? Well, I think that's water cooling**.
Water cooling is nothing but a risk, you can't scale it, you can't use it in production, you can't easily maintain it, and the ultimate common denominator is spillage, that liquid does not want to stay in that loop... Where as air is ubiquitous, your kit can cope with being submerged in air all the time!
The final incarnation of this is perhaps the most perverse in "ultimate", to exclude the masses and that is the niche phenomena of submerging a PC in mineral oil... As seen here...
The ultimate irony of this entertaining video being the CoolMaster*** sponsorship at the beginning, being for a CPU water cooling kit... CPU only, not scaling to the GPU as well... and vaunting "silent" fans... Just put the damn silent fans in your case, on your CPU, let the air do the job...
You can argue with me about the thermal properties of water being so much more than air, meaning you can "push your hardware further, faster than before", that maybe so, but it's again an edge case, you can over-clock on air, and if you're buying a new system to overclock you're falling straight back into my master-race theory, you're striving for more than the public can reach, you're pushing the envelope, you're ultimately trying to be more interesting than you actually are...
Good luck, really, truly, good luck, I can't wait to see your video posts about it, and I will watch with baited breath. However, my breath will ultimately be passing through and cooling an air cooled machine, as it's simply safer, easier and more maintainable, and I'm not worried about being boring or proving anything.
* Anecdote of the day, one kid at school found out I had an Atari ST, and he offered to "Swap you a Neogeo with Contra for it right now"... I laughed in his face, I in fact looked at him like a cockroach; as he was being nasty; "do you think all I do is play games?" He had no concept of using a piece of electronics beyond plugging it in, I was creating. I went home each night and I tinkered with STOS, later I tinkered with Pascal, and I'm paid to now tinker with code all day... I don't think that lad is paid to play his Neogeo, or any other console, and no it's not a twitch streamer - I've looked.
** I have a very similar theory as to why very boring people get a piercing or a tattoo, they've no idea what it means, nor any idea why, but they can't help but point it out... Imagine a 1990's computer geek getting a skull tattoo on his face... Same thing with water cooling.
*** I love CoolMaster cases, but I never want to touch these kits....
I rest my case.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x06nsDhpOT0... or PC cases.
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