I've been looking at a lot of different water cooled setups and I have a very basic question.
Almost all of the setups I've seen take the heat away from the various sources (namely cpu and gpu) with a liquid carrier. This carrier then runs through a radiator which has air flowing over it to help dissipate the heat.
Ultimately how does this shed more heat than you would from air cooling? The end of the process still has fans flowing over a heatsink/radiator to carry the heat away.
The only room I can see for performance gains is if...
A: The radiator, which isn't confined by the dimensions of the case, can be much larger with much more area than the traditional heatsink.
or
2: You don't use don't use air to take the heat away from the radiator, such as in the geothermal thread (very cool by the way).
P.S. I have read that water can hold more heat than air, but wouldn't that run into the law of diminishing returns. I.E. Your water can old more heat, but now you're running warm water through your block reducing the amount of heat it can absorb and shuttle away.
In essence, aside using a much larger radiator than air cooled heat sink or using an exotic (geothermal cooling) method of shedding heat, why do water cooled systems run at cooler temps? Or at least are reported to run at cooler temps.
Thanks in advance and sorry if this a repeat thread, tried throwing some terms into search, couldn't find anything.
Almost all of the setups I've seen take the heat away from the various sources (namely cpu and gpu) with a liquid carrier. This carrier then runs through a radiator which has air flowing over it to help dissipate the heat.
Ultimately how does this shed more heat than you would from air cooling? The end of the process still has fans flowing over a heatsink/radiator to carry the heat away.
The only room I can see for performance gains is if...
A: The radiator, which isn't confined by the dimensions of the case, can be much larger with much more area than the traditional heatsink.
or
2: You don't use don't use air to take the heat away from the radiator, such as in the geothermal thread (very cool by the way).
P.S. I have read that water can hold more heat than air, but wouldn't that run into the law of diminishing returns. I.E. Your water can old more heat, but now you're running warm water through your block reducing the amount of heat it can absorb and shuttle away.
In essence, aside using a much larger radiator than air cooled heat sink or using an exotic (geothermal cooling) method of shedding heat, why do water cooled systems run at cooler temps? Or at least are reported to run at cooler temps.
Thanks in advance and sorry if this a repeat thread, tried throwing some terms into search, couldn't find anything.