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After all, liquid-cooled machines are just incredible things to behold.
Since then Ive built numerous liquid-cooled systems, for both personal use and for publication too.
This PC was built back in 2017, the liquid-cooling heyday, with SLI Titan cards and liquid-cooled X-series CPUs .
I even built a few of themhere at TechRadar.
Today though, that landscape has changed massively.
Liquid cooling might just be on its way out - at least, for the time being.
This PC was built back in 2017, the liquid-cooling heyday, with SLI Titan cards and liquid-cooled X-series CPUs .
Then vs Now: whats changed?
CPU cooling was in its infancy, and the chips themselves were easily unlocked.
Plumbing parts were often used as substitutes in those early days.
AMD’s Ryzen chips revitalized the CPU race and forever changed the PC-building landscape.
Over time, companies emerged from that premise.
That led to hotter chips as a result.
We moved away from IHSs with thermal paste, to fully soldered articles and voltages ramped up too.
It’s been five years, I still haven’t stripped down this PC properly…
Find me atop-tier GPUtoday that, under load, runs hotter than 85 C. Its almost impossible.
Ive got two RTX 4080s here, one an FE Super, the other a Gigabyte Aero OC.
So whats the point?
It was cooler for sure, and it was quieter too than a standard AIO build.
Today though, those arguments are pretty moot.
Then theres the convenience.
Say you want to swap out a CPU, or a graphics card?
If its a hard loop, you have to drain the entire system and disassemble it.
Then you have to swap out the coolant, deal with rubber sealants failing, the works.
From a cooling perspective as well, there are diminishing returns thanks to some fairly hefty bottlenecks too.
Perhaps thats the reason why companies like EKWB are struggling.
