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Well yes. It is. Liquid cooling does have merits. I won’t say it’s better than air cooling in a general sense; at the end of the day, the heat ends up in the air.
With liquid cooling, you can transport it further, use larger radiators… The list goes on.
My key point is that as long as the components get cooled, who cares which you use? Do what you want.
Yeah… they call it that cuz the same principle applies to vehicle engine cooling.
Air cooling is not as effective as water cooling, but just take a look at beetle engines made more than half a century ago, they’re all air cooled and still up and running. It’s all in the design, if it’s good and overengineered, it will pracatically run forever.
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
they had a tendency to overheat in hot conditions, and when stuck in traffic. this is because they need a certain amount of air flowing in order to cool properly.
they also weren’t very good for heat in the winter.
air cooling is a simpler system, and as such has less to go wrong with it. that doesn’t make it better or worse. there are pros and cons to both systems.
VW and Porsche engines area really oil cooled. They have oil cooling radiators inside fan shrouds with thermal expansion baffles that open when it gets hot and close to prevent overcooling in winter.
They didn’t really overheat very often of all the shroud and engine compartment seals were in place and the baffles were in good working order.
The reason you can often go start up an ancient air cooled engine is mainly that they don’t have any water pumps (and water) to sit in them and rust up. That any that there’s no crazy fuel injectors or fancy electrical systems to fail. Just a Carb and distributor to clean/adjust.
Those problems can be easily fixed with aditional fans.
Really strange that it’s so easy but I don’t see any new cars for sale that do it that way
Maybe it’s because air cooling was abandoned a long time ago. All new cars are water cooled.
You’re almost there. Keep going
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
Where do people keep getting this from? Cars today tend to last far longer anywhere where winter is a thing.
As for air cooled vs water cooled engines, the power output (and vehicle mass) has to be part of that conversation. Yes air cooling works on on a 25 HP motor, but it doesn’t work so well on modern engines making an order of magnitude more power.
Honestly people give old vehicles (or old anything) way too much credit. It’s survivor bias, only the good stuff lasted this long. The shitty products have all been recycled multiple times by now. I mean think about it, 100,000 miles used to be an old-ass car back in the day, but for anything post 1990 or so that’s just getting started. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the simplicity and repairability of old vehicles
You have clearly never lived with an old air cooled VW engine and dealt with it overheating in traffic.
Or going uphill
Air cooling is not as effective as water cooling,
It’s not that simple because air cooling in pcs today means a heatpipe. A heatpipe uses fluid (such as water under a vacuum) that boils at a low temperature. The phase transition of liquid to vapor transfers hundreds of more times heat than simple conduction of cold water running over the CPU.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
It’s how refrigerator compressors work to cool things so effectively. The genius of a heat pipe is it works without an electric compressor ( this limits it’s cooling ability but it’s still genius).
So a heatpipe CPU air cooler with a 120mm radiator will outperform a water-cooler with a 120mm radiator in almost every situation. The advantage of water-cooling is you can make that radiator huge (280mm is typical today), and place it on one of the side/top panels of the case where air is cool instead of deep inside where the air is hot.
Cars built today will outlast most of the old Beetles. There is a big survivorship bias at work. A percentage of them were built to slightly tighter tolerances and quality than all the others off the same line. A percentage of those will end up in the hands of owners that are meticulous about maintenance, never get in a major accident, and keep it going for decades. The handful you see left are the ones that went through several rounds of small percentage chances. There were a bajillion of those old Beetles made, so a few were bound to get through.
What cars have problems with today are things that rarely have to do with making the wheels go. They get into accidents. Their auto-dimming back windows no longer work. The GPS doesn’t get updates and thinks you’re three counties away. The engine and transmission, however, will probably go to the junkyard in perfect working order, even with shitty maintenance on the part of the owner.
Two problems with the drivelines of modern cars: sensors, which can cause some pretty spectacular mechanical failures; and cost-cutting engineering. Trimming parts to use less material and that kind of thing, but also less investment in QC (looking at you, Kia engine recalls).
There’s truly more to go wrong in modern cars, and the electronics can fail and cause mechanical failures, too, especially in the combustion cycle.
The fact remains that most cars today will go to the junkyard with perfectly good engines and transmissions. Those sensors tend to kill themselves before killing other parts of the car, and then you just replace them.
I beg to differ, I was an owner of a Renault Megane which had a screwed up onboard computer that somehow managed to mangle 3 timing belts and a cylinder head. I spent more reparing it than the ammount I spent to buy the car… all because of a screwed up onboard computer.
And not one mechanic listened to me, I told them the computer was acting up, throwing errors left and right, then silence for a month, then errors again, they said it’s the sensors 😤… I mean, come on, all of the sensors acting up at the same time, then they go in deep sleep for a month, then the same shit again… excuse me, but you’re either dumb or just wanna squeeze money out of me.
Yeah but VW engines were pretty small, carrying pretty small cars.
It got you from point A to point B, didn’t it?
Water cooling at what kind of scale? Since you can engineer a system with the final heat exchanger to the environment stuck in a river. Is that air cooling with extra steps?
If we’re talking PC’s though, yes. You’re right.
Some guy once built a geocooled system back in I think 2010, just to cool quad SLI 580s. He had some crazy 6-screen Sony FW900 setup with a fresnel lens.
LinusTechTips has a cooling system that uses a water loop under his backyard pool to water cool an entire home server rack.
Granted uptime seems… less than ideal. They keep not hiring a plumber to do/inspect it and effectively re-jury-rigging it for videos. But solid (liquid) idea.
Air cooling is just radiative cooling with extra steps
nah, radiative cooling means that radiation is the only mechanism for heat exchange in use. I’m pretty sure most modern air coolers use forced convection as one of their heat exchange mechanisms.
The heat released into the atmosphere has to go somewhere. The only place it can go is to be radiated into space
Every type of cooling is just entropy
How does heat get from the water radiator to the air?
Radiation.
Atoms don’t physically touch. The electrostatic force that both binds atoms into molecules and keeps molecules separated is mediated by photon exchange.
Counterpoint: at the boundary layers, right where the air touches the fins, the main mechanism for heat exchange is conduction. Ultimately, convection is just conduction, where the medium undergoing heat conduction is a moving fluid, which massively amplifies the rate of heat exchange.
Air is kinda shit at taking in heat through radiation, but fine at doing so via conduction and convection.
conduction
The metal atoms in the fins don’t move into the air. They stay on the fins. The fins’ atoms have to transfer their kinetic energy via photon exchange to the atoms in the air.
So conduction is radiation at atomic distances.
Ah, I see we’re getting to the point where it’s hard to tell if we’re being philosophical or pedantic.
If you live somewhere that’s consistently 98-100% humidity: Air cooling is simultaneously liquid cooling.
And wheres that, in the occean?
Florida
They mean 98%-100% relative humidity. 100% relative humidity is the maximum amount of water that the air can hold at a given temperature and pressure as vapour. Once you get to 100% then you can evaporate any more water / was will start condensing out of the air (especially if the temperature drops)
Many places in the South. Swamps. Farmland. Etc.
By extension, air cooling is global thermal mass cooling, which, by extension is radiative cooling, which by extension is universal entropy cooling or whatever you’d call that.
THERE IS, AS YET, INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Thanks Multivac!
Idk, needs more steps, put a Peltier in it, a heat exchanger with a second loop, and don’t forget the compressor for extra chill.
And also make it so that the end radiator doesn’t radiate heat into the air but into the ground instead, so that it won’t be just air cooling with extra steps.
Surface area of the fin stack matters. An air cooler will always be limited by the space available around the CPU. A water cooling radiator has more flexibility to be placed in around the case.
That said, having less than a 360mm AIO is probably a waste. Also, higher end Intel chips these days are so power hungry that they can’t be physically cooled properly with the surface area available on the package.
“having less than a 360 AIO is a waste” no, the entire SFF community would disagree with you there
The whole point for AIO water loops is that you have more flexibility in radiator placement. For advanced systems you can beat static copper tubes pretty easily by moving more water.
Air cooling is just vacuum cooling with extra steps.
Porsche used to agree, until 1998.
Sure, but if you can find an air-cooled VW bus that’s still running in this decade they’re probably asking $30k for it.
My grandpa has a Vanagon but it’s in kinda rough shape.
Body is pretty good but the interior is pretty much gone and it has electrical grimlins so it either starts and drives perfectly or just screams at you doesn’t even attempt to start.
Super cool vehicle though.
Air cooling is just an intermediate product of nuclear fusion
It depends on which part of the environment the heat is being exchanged with - if your watercooling system is releasing heat to the ground under your house or a somebody else suggested (which is even more effective) a river next to your house, it’s not at all equivalent to air cooling.
Further, the heat storage capacity of a material depends on both the kind of material and its mass, so almost all liquids have a higher heat sforage capacity per unit of volume than air (certainly water does) and solids even more (much more, given their much higher density) so even in the big scheme of things (i.e. were will most of that heat end up in given enough time), even heat released by a watercoolong system to the air will mostly end up in tne Earth’s crust and oceans and only a tiny fraction of it will remain in the athmosphere.
Even if the water is used from a river, the heat still gets dissipated into the air from the surface of that river.
So river cooling is still just air cooling with extra steps.
As I pointed out further down in my comment, solids and liquids have a much higher heat capacity than air (or in other words, they can absorb a lot more heat before they warm up), so most of the heat dissipated to the river would end up stored in the Earth’s Crust and Oceans and very little of it in the Air.
It all makes its way into the cold vacuum of space eventually
Have you seen what Linus did with his pool lmao
The one where he complained about the cost of running a pump and tubing out to a fucking swimming pool? Like, yes, this is going to cost more than a very good gaming PC.
