^ water cooling is not required.
However good watercooling is nearly as effective getting slightly above ambient. Bongs go just as much beow ambient if you're into that.
Anyone intrested in a heatsink tec on a modern cpu imho needs to just sit down and do it water cooled from the beginning.
The simple fact remains if the #1 heatsink in the world for computer cooling can "bearly" eek by with those loads today.
You might as well throw it in the garbage as a $40 waste in two years.
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Atleast you won't *have* top upgrade a water system two or three years down the line to handle a heatload, at which point you could ahve just bought the 3 or 4 expencive ehatsinks WITHOUT the cost of a TEC by themselves.
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This is a major advantage of water that noone talks about. ONE TIME ENTRY FEE!!! If you're smart enough for the simple process of picking out your parts, putting it together, and having it work well enough, you're smart enough to come up with a hold-down plate when sicket change...