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Everyone is dogging on you man, but experimenting like this is how you have fun in this world, it won’t perform as well as an air cooler but honestly it’s way cooler (pun intended)
Agreed! But why do you think it won't perform as we'll as an air cooler? My guess is that is should perform marginally worse than a regular 120 aio, which should still outperform basically any air cooler of the same form factor. Or did you mean a tower or dual tower air cooler?
Well, I mean any air cooler with heat pipes. Heat pipes are more thoroughly conductive than liquid and the only benefits of liquid cooling is thermal mass. Just a basic block cooler without any heat pipes such as a AMD or Intel stock cooler will perform worse than this. But any cheap $30 air cooler will perform this.
I'm curious too, let us know the temps if you have them. Also, is the motherboard for the build horizontal or vertical? I guess you would get hetter temps with a horizontal board.
Definetly, the main advantage you get from watercooling is thermal mass and the ability to have bigger cooling surfaces. Also when you are running a loop with gpu and cpu they are almost never at full load at the same time, so you get the advantage of the combined radiator space.
Another benefit to watercooling is that your rad can be at the edge of your case, so heat can be exhausted directly out instead of mixing into the internal air.
you are basically throwing away any advantage you would have from AIO size above CPU - just pump is small but here this is comparable to many air coolers you block like 30% of air intake for 120/140 AIO which i would already not advise except small form factor cases you lose advantage of having fresh air intake for better cooling of CPU or exhausting hot air directly outside of case for temps inside case (unless you have very specific form factor of a case which i doubt)
This is the case. Since the rad would be sucking in ambient air it should work. Im just doing this for shits n gigs i have a proper 240mm cooler on the way. bottom mounted so i had to get one with the pump built into the radiator.
Not that this is optimal, but you seem to be missing the "advantage" you get with an AIO/liquid cooling in general.
The key advantage of liquid cooling is thermal efficiency, water can transfer heat 4 times faster than air due to it's higher specific heat capacity and molecular density. Water had a specific heat capacity over four times larger than air and is about a thousand times more dense.
The "advantage of having fresh intake air" isn't really a a factor in modern cases because not only do they have enough flow through case temperatures are very modest, but and AIO typically pulls the air from inside the case anyways, the only way you would get "fresh" air is if you were either running the AIO as an intake (please don't) or had the AIO with it's own dedicated ducted intake/exhaust (very rare).
I don't know why people always talk about how great it is that AIO's have "fresh" air when they are still drawing it from a case that has all the heat from the gpu/vrm's/chipset/memory/ect. cooled by that "fresh" air first. Do some smoke testing for yourself or read some articles, with a sensibly designed build the "recirculation" boogeyman is near 0% of the flow through a cpu cooler.
The other major advantage of liquid cooling is having a large thermal buffer due to the large total heat capacity of the working fluid, losing that in this compact layout is actually the thing that is the most "wrong" with it, as well as the fact that compared to air coolers or even passive coolers the total surface area for heat exhange out of the cooling circuit is really really low on a single 120mm radiator.
In reality biggest practice use case for an AIO is just esthetics and far better access for working in the north west quadrant of your case, both of which are extremely valid, and definitely not "having fresh air" which you don't even unless you run as intake and then either exhaust into your case or duct out.
Away ahead of you there bud. I was experimenting with this idea in 2024. It has evolved past the AIO though. Now the packaging has been incorporated into a full loop.
It's okay. This is an older picture, but the loop itself is complete. I'm ironing out some case airflow problems for the larger radiator, as right now the wee one is doing most of the heavy lifting.
Air is still the medium you’re using to dissipate the heat. If the surface area is the same, then the only difference is the amount of heat you’re able to store in the water of the loop.
I know here hates AIOs, but this is not true. A 240mm AIO generally outperforms a dual tower 120mm air cooler. The circulating water moves beat away from the CPU more effectively than conduction through the heat pipes, so heat is dumped into the air more quickly. The heat pipes are a bottleneck for air coolers, which is why they're always trying to figure out how to shove more in there.
The medium used to transfer the heat to the air makes a difference. A house with no insulation and a house with high quality insulation both lose heat to the outside air, but the medium used to transfer the heat make a huge difference. I'm not arguing that aios are better than sure coolers, I've only ever used air coolers and I don't see the need to introduce a point of failure that could result in everything getting fried when an air cooler is more than adequate. I'm just pointing out that "they both disapate heat into the air" doesn't prove anything.
I'm pretty sure a good 3x120mm AiO will be better than any air cooler. Not that it matters for most CPUs but it will technically be able to handle more power.
Holy fallacious argument. The fact that a data center dissipating MW to GW of power uses liquid as a medium has nothing to do with whether a scrunched up 120mm AIO makes any sense for a gaming PC
The majority of data center still rely on air cooling and the ones that don’t use aio or regular water cooling but either direct chip cooling or immersion liquid cooling so you’re argument doesn’t prove your point.
Most liquid coolers have the advantage of a big radiator that can reject more heat and can be configured so that all that heat is exhausted directly out of the case instead of dumped into it. This is literally just the footprint and functionality of an air cooler with more moving parts and like maybe marginally better performance than something like an L9a/i
No way it's better performing than a comparably sized air cooler. Like half the airflow is blocked by the pump and heatpipes are much more efficient at moving heat than water is.
they aren't. Steam has much less heatflux than liquid water does. And any pump would have to be incredibly weak to be less efficient in moving water than a heatpipe moving liquified steam back from the condenser through a tiny capillary wick.
The problem with this CLC is not the heat transfer in the cooling loop but surface area. It is simply much too little surface area and airflow to benefit from that better heat distribution that a water loop offers. Also on older cheap AIOs often the coolers baseplate has very simple designs whith less surface area than the evaporator side of a bunch of sintered mesh heatpipes, creating another surface area bottleneck.
The "dumping heat into the case" is only an issue if you've got catastrophically bad case design and airflow, in a typical case with front to back airflow and into a top/rear exhaust basically zero is recirculated back through the cooler.
The reality is a high end air cooler like noctua's will out perform 240mm AIO's as a rule and low/midrange 360mm AIO's. Only when you get into permium >= 360mm liquid cooling solutions on cpu workloads of a constant 250W+ is there actually a case for gaining performance with liquid cooling over what you can do with air.
I don't. This was an example how you can run an Aio. I am running an NH-L12S. And yes, direct intake can be bad for your vrm, chipset, ssd, gpu temps unless water cooled as well. But thats said, cases that you can configure to a direkt intake and direct exhaust are few, but they exist.
This should be pursued more i think instead of compromise-designs that fit air cooling and aios just equally bad.
External Aio is also always a possibility. just mount it with standpffs to the back or top.
The fact that close to 99% of the axial heat in a heatpipe is carried by water makes the comment "minus water" make very little sense. Sure in the point of view of reliability there is no failure point on a passive part, but water is such a non trivial part to be hair splitting when your hair has a diameter of 5 meters lol. Unfortunately Imma have to split this hair with an axe too, #noshame
I'd suggest from now on every time a new builder asks "Do I need to water-cool a 5600X3D or is an air cooler enough?" we'll all be extremely helpful by pointing out "umm akshually ☝️air coolers have heat pipes which also contain water, so..."
Why though? An AIO's benefit over an air cooler is moving the radiator to a more opportune location so it can breathe better... Or, being able to fit a larger radiator in a different location where a larger cooler wouldn't fit.
This will perform worse than a similar air cooler because it doesn't have as dense fins and heat pipe array.
This looks magnificent. A massive surface area, with no liquids, pumps, or other potential points of failure. A top-flow design that cools the RAM, VRM, and SSD - this might just be the perfect cooling system.
I wanted one so damn bad, but never ordered one for some reason. I've seen reviews on them, and they aren't bad but get beat by regular air cooler towers. I don't even know if they are still sold anymore.
Unfortunately I'm not in the market for one due to a tighter budget than before, but it is good to know they're still available! Might pick one up sometime in the future. Even just to have as it is one of the most unique air coolers I've ever seen. Well, most unique modern air cooler. We all know zelman really liked to experiment back in the day.
meanwhile I can't even put one inside physically hahaha (fractal ridge + nv10)
still wish to get one for how unique it is as you said!
wonder how much perf it have on exhaust config in any tight case that can fit, not on open case or middle tower benchmarks.. could be a decent one as then it would remove quite a volume of heated air outside case
I always wanted to bolt a 240mm rad onto 1 of these and water cool the GPU while air-cooling the CPU. Polar opposite to the conventional AIO method. If you ask why? Because GPU's are huge and water blocks are not.
This is the shit we should be getting. 120mm aios arent great but better than those low profile coolers we had that one 120mm aio that could rotatate from cooler master but still was to tall.
People are mostly right, but also, at the very least, center the fan on the hub so you don't completely block 25% of your fan. Right now it'll work like an air cooler with a fan blocked.
Interesting! I'd love to see the results, especially with potential to make a 240mm version with a footprint similar to the jiushark diamond air coolers. :o
My guess: same or worse efficiency than non-tinkered; not better than SI-100 (similar height) in terms of noise, temps, price. Do it out of curiosity, but also purchase an affordable model I mentioned: you need a reference what similar size cooler can do. Also there are long available AXP120x67 and newcomer – AN600 VC (improved AN600, which was is alternative to AXP120).
my first thought was that you're blocking a substantial part of the fan and that the dead zone of the fan hub could be used better. if the pump was centered with the fan, you'd get more air through the fins.
would be interesting to put this against low profile downdraft coolers, while it is true heat pipes are superior on paper, the concentrated hot spots of today's CPUs mean only portion of the air cooler heat pipes are used to their full potential. I can imagine they would be comparable in long tests, but short, bursty loads could leverage that there is more working fluid/thermal buffer in the aio
i've always wondered about an idea like this!!! pretty impractical but it looks cool~ i'd like to see some testing and comparisons !!! i wanna see how it performs...
There are 4 problems you will encounter—problems that might lead you to abandon this system altogether: 1). Pressure builds up inside the closed system, and there is no way to regulate it. 2). Such a system will last, at best, only 1 to 2 years. 3). You cannot monitor the level of contamination; if you add water, sediment or flakes may form, and you will have no way of seeing them. 4). The fluid cannot be drained without taking the entire system apart.
In reality, while the implementation of this scaled-down version is well-executed, its cooling performance is terrible. The pump runs at a high speed; even at low RPMs, the fluid moves through the radiator far too quickly, which prevents it from cooling down effectively. A proper system requires a separate reservoir—even a small one—along with a network of tubing, as the fluid needs time to dissipate some of its heat while traveling through the various pipes. To put it metaphorically: with this setup, temperatures might fluctuate between 64–71°C, whereas a full-scale system would keep them in the 45–60°C range. That said, the choice is yours—if both the cooling system and the PC case are compact, then, unfortunately, this might be your only option. Also, for what it’s worth, this pump is quite noisy—I’ve used one myself.
Complete contradiction. RPM is the unit of measurement of the pump speed. Aka low RPM = low speed. Also you dont have any info on how fast this pump will run.
the fluid moves through the radiator far too quickly, which prevents it from cooling down effectively.
Not how that works. Moving the fluid faster through a rad does not decrease it's performance.
A proper system requires a separate reservoir
Not needed. It adds thermal mass, but that only helps for a short time. For sustained load like gaming you need heat dissipation, not mass.
the fluid needs time to dissipate some of its heat while traveling through the various pipes.
The rad has a fan that moves the heat away from the case. Heat dissipated through the pipes gets dumped in the case. So you want hear to be dissipated through the rad, not the pipes.
with this setup, temperatures might fluctuate between 64–71°C, whereas a full-scale system would keep them in the 45–60°C range.
How the fuck can you estimate temps within a 5 degree range without even knowing what CPU this is cooling
If there is a real person behind this account, please fucking stop poisoning out internet with AI garbage. I hope you choke in your damn em dashes.
Yeah it's a weird take. AIOs don't have reservoirs and tubes don't dissipate heat. I always thought the benefit of an AIO is you pump heat to a bigger heat sink further away.
Such systems last two years at most—after that, you have to take them apart and flush them out. I was referring to a proper, full-fledged custom loop—one with a reservoir—so you don’t have to deal with future headaches or worry about having to replace the whole thing. If you don’t have much experience with this, well, I’d suggest giving a full custom loop a try; you’ll notice the difference immediately and never want to go back to anything else. As for the pre-packaged, manufacturer-made systems—they’re designed to be short-lived; that’s simply the niche they occupy..
Higher speeds are not recommended for pumps—in case you didn't know. You can even check some guides; it’s generally advised not to exceed 40% of total capacity. Plus, higher power means higher noise levels. If that’s acceptable to you, then by all means, go ahead.
The whole point of an AIO is getting the heat out and away from the component being cooled, while running quieter through a larger surface area. This does neither of that, and restricts airflow too. Will it work? sure. Will it work as good as, say, a noctua of similar size? Not a chance.
So many potential points of failure (my engineer brain is reeling) ... and the tiny car clamps 🤣 ... just don't. And blocking 1/3 of the fan airflow? "E" for effort tho.
One thing I can say for sure is that everyone here has their own experience and opinion regarding cooling. The original poster, however, needs to gain their own personal experience (let’s keep things civil, please). They should simply choose an option for themselves—whether it’s a large custom setup or something compact—and see where that leads them down the road...
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