Question Liquid Cooling or Fan cooling for my setup?

[jimmulvaney]

Hello, I am really not a hardware guy but my PC is 8 yrs old and runs an AIO on an Intel i9 9900K CPU with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti - 11GB GDDR6 GPU. Sadly, the pump died and the computer guy I use recommended I switch to air cooling…? Now, I don’t overclock my system but I do try to play all my games on Ultra or High settings if possible and I do 3D rendering on the side too. What are your thoughts on converting it to air only? Should I stick with liquid for my needs or is it overkill? Also, if you can help me identify what I am currently using and possible replacements, that would be greatly appreciated.

 

[COLGeek]

Air. Efficient, effective, and reliable.

What is your budget to replace?

 

[jimmulvaney]

Air. Efficient, effective, and reliable.

What is your budget to replace?

I’d like to keep it around the $100 mark if possible.

 

[Phaaze88]

It's all air cooling. Radiators have greater fluid volume than air coolers, and both need air passing through them to function. The heat energy leaving the case is slightly more with radiators - the exhausted air mixes with the room air, some of said air is drawn back in the case... rinse and repeat.

I’d like to keep it around the $100 mark if possible.

Is Thermalright available to you?
Phantom Spirits and Peerless Assassins - check case and ram compatibility with these.
They also have many affordable cpu AIOs, if you want to stay this route.

 

[jimmulvaney]

I ended up going with a BeQuiet! Pure Rock 2 FX fan cooler and everything is running smooth (and extremely quiet) again. I can put my hand inside the case and feel the cool air running around. My CPU requires 95 TDP and this one does 150. For a $50 DIY installation, I am quite happy.

Did you know the repair people I took it too wanted to charge me $500 !? $60 for a diag (which I paid and that was how I found out my AIO pump died) then $160 for a Noctua fan, and $280 for an installation!! Altogether it would have cost me $500. I ended up asking them some questions about my system and took care of it myself. Ridiculous.

 

[bill001g]

It is unfortunate that those places want so much. You could have likely had someone on this forum tell you how to diagnose it your self for free.

Noctua has many "fan" boys. They are quality coolers but you can get cheaper ones along with a spare or two for the same price. The noctua does win by very small amounts on benchmarks but in real life unless you buy pure junk almost all air coolers do well keeping cpu under control.

Hard to say if the fees are valid. It likely would take close to a hour to swap everything out and then run good benchmarks to ensure it doesn't overheat. If this is a shop they pay a lot of rent for the building.

Most these places are going to go out of business. Only very high end places can actually fix computer boards or recover data from a drive that has failed. The rest just swap parts and for many people the money would be better invested in a new computer. Your current machine you likely would have trouble selling it for $500 fully functional.

 

[lvt]

Newer CPU tend to run cooler.

It's not worth having liquid cooling if the difference is something like 5°C.