Question Is it worth to upgrade to a water cooling?

Doru1122

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Recently I found a AIO CPU cooler (ID-Cooling Auraflow X 240 RGB) at sale, and the price is $50. Is it worth to buy it if i have a non K CPU? I5-8500
 

Karadjgne

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Dunno. Larger coolers are always a bonus to temps, many times even if nothing more than being far quieter as the cooler has far greater capacity, so fans spin slower.

But if you are happy with temps as they are now, happy with noise (or lack of), then changing coolers will either make you happier or do really nothing.

It's a decent price, and the cooler is ok, but the question is whether you feel there's a need/desire for something better. You could do just as well with a decent aircooler such as an Arctic esports 33 duo at less cost.
 
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This is just my personal opinion. I've seen where aio water coolers have gone out and ruined a gpu and motherboard possibly. So in my opinion, stick with air. At least with air, if a fan stops spinning, you can shut down and replace the fan.

The situation above was a gentleman that had a cyberpower pc, and it developed power supply issues. Plus apparently the aio started leaking. Suffice to say that between the power supply and water leaking onto the motherboard/gpu, the system was in a bad way. Ended up rebulding that box with new cpu, new board, new gpu, and new psu. Used a Hyper 212 evo instead of water cooling. Haven't had a call about that system since. That's been 3-4 years ago now.
 
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Some will buy an aio cooler for looks.
I can't really argue about that.
But, as a practical matter 120 and 240 aio coolers are no more effective than their 120mm and 140mm counterparts like the noctua NH-U12s and NH-D15s
The radiator sizes are equivalent.
The only difference is where the heat exchange takes place.

To complicate matters, there is a catch 22 on how to mount a aio radiator.
If you mount it as intake, you will cool the cpu better, but the heated air will not be so good for motherboard or graphics card cooling.
OTOH if you mount the radiator as exhaust the cpu cooling will have warm case air to work with and cpu cooling will not be the best.

Lastly, most non-overclockable processors do not usually need anything past stock cooling.
 
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I agree. If your cpu is locked, unless you are just going for looks, stay with the stock cooler. If you want, this is something I'd probably do anyway, swap the thermal paste. I just prefer arctic silver to paste from the factory. But that is my own opinion. The factory paste usually does well enough. But for an i5 8500, just keep stock cooling, and put the money towards more ram, or start saving for a new gpu.
 

xravenxdota

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I don't oc but got an AIO cause i personally think the R5 non x cpu's have a horrible cooler.But with that being said when this cooler packs up i will install a R7 2700x cooler(very thing case doesn't find a cooler that fits)AIO is not really worth it on your cpu.Nothing beats a good air cooler.First it's safer.Second it's cheaper and 3.It last longer.(i have a cooler that's been running from 2005 on my old amd cpu.
 

FullTank

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for i5 8500 do not buy 50 usd cooler, be it air or water, max go for 14~22 usd air tower , and Only if your stock cooler can't keep up in case if you live in quite hot area, since in regular places the stock cooler will do just fine, even on auto volts,

@xravenxdota maybe for hexacore that is true, but on the R5 1400 which i built for my brother the temps never exceeded 60's range in any stresstests with stock cooler, paste was thermal grizzly kryonaut and GHz 3.6 at 1.35V , volts is quite high and GHz is quite low, for volts i probably didn't bothered at all since it already was cold, for GHz i blame my choice of mobo since it only had a single 4 pin. (i personally think 60's max at 1.35V is a very good result for a stock cooler, even when with the best nonmetal paste..)