Is it safe to use liquid cooler

[nickbandit]

Is it safe to use a h80i?.
What is the change of it breaking / leaking while pc is on?

 

[manofchalk]

Yes.
Very little unless you cut the tubes yourself.

 

[sDGam]

Watercooling is safe enough, especially closed loops. Bad products exist though so if you dont want to risk anything you can to for a high end air cooler that will perform similar/better to the h80i.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Pretty much .... there are exceptions.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1440506/my-corsair-h60-exploded-water-explosion

The real question is .... is there an advantage to be gained ? There is certainly a risk but it is small..... to take that risk you have to make a determination as to whether you gain anything by assuming that risk. If ya late for work, ya might decide to do 10 miles over the speed limit with little risk .... OTOH driving 40 miles over the speed limit I think we'd agree is probably not worth the risk.

So on one side we have a small risk of a problem, replacing damaged components and losing the PC for a period of time and we probably gonna spend more for the AIO.

On the other side we have what ? Hopefully lower noise and better thermals.

So how does the H80 compare to say a Phanteks PH-TC14-PE

looking at the above the first few rows are :

H100 with extra fans
H100 w/ special paste
Phanteks w/ extra fans ....

Then we see on the 11th line that the stock Phanteks w/ 2 140TS fans "right outta the box with no extra goodies gets 51.75C. The H100 with two stock fans gets 52.5C. Tbe H80 of course won't do near as well.

Looking here we see .... er ... hear that the H100i breaks 60 dBA and the sound is quite annoying from about 55% CPU load on up.

http://martinsliquidlab.org/2013/03/12/swiftech-h220-vs-corsair-h100i-noise-testing/

So the question I don't think if there is a risk .... yes there is but not a big one ..... but whether taking that risk brings you anything in return to make it worthwhile.

-The H80 is more expensive than a Big 3 Air cooler (Phanteks, Silver Arrow or Noctua DH-14)
-The H80 will be much louder than the Big 3
-The H80 will not equal the cooling performance of the Big 3
-The H80 may have an advantage if you ship the PC via common carrier and the FedEx Gorilla's get to toss it around