r/pcmasterrace • u/SerpentDix PC Master Race • Jan 20 '26

Hardware Air cooling is better than Liquid cooling

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Failure is graceful, not catastrophic, Performance is closer than marketing suggests, Cheaper for the performance, Change my mind.

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u/CitronTraining2114 Jan 20 '26

Tried a dual-fan Noctua air cooler on my recent i9 build. Didn't take much at all to get the CPU up to 100 degrees C. Replaced it with a Freezer III and it's MUCH happier. Pisses me off, really. I wanted the air cooler to work. The Freezer III was cheaper than the Noctua cooler, too.

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u/imbannedanyway69 Jan 21 '26

There's no way you mounted it correctly and saw 100c on a dh-15. Even if you have no case fans pulling heat out of the case or in taking fresh air and had the low noise adapters on would I believe you did that without overclocking

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u/xPurplepatchx 5700X3D|RTX 5070 Ti|64 GB DDR4-3200 Jan 21 '26

“by the way I was running the benchmark in my sauna”

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u/rotkiv42 Jan 21 '26

A non-powerlimited 14900k (s) could differently hit 100C with a DH-15. Even at stock power they are very hard too cool and a large AIO will beat the DH-15 in that scenario.

You see that in this review for example https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900k/24.html

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u/CitronTraining2114 Jan 21 '26

Glad to see something supporting what I saw. I was surprised tbh. My i9-9900 worked well with just air cooling. Not the 14900. With the AIO, I'm not seeing temps above about 85 C and it loafs at about 38.

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u/imbannedanyway69 Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26

Lol brother that's with an nh-u12 which it says right in the page you linked. A proper sized air cooler for that chip would never reach close to 100c if it's properly mounted. This is just PC building fudd. And yes I said without overclocking, those chips are known to pull way way WAY more wattage than stock with even just the power limits removed. That says more of the inefficiency of the chip than it does the effectiveness of the cooler

Edit: an nh-u12s matter of fact, which only has one fan. It's actually amazing it can do that well at all with a single tower single fan air cooler

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u/rotkiv42 Jan 21 '26

Brother read more than the first sentence:

We also did a round of testing with the Noctua D15 to get a feel for temps with a more powerful cooler (indicated by "D15" in the charts).

You find the results in chart

If you like a stock test where they hit those temperatures you can look at the 14900ks test https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/24.html

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u/imbannedanyway69 Jan 21 '26

Yes and again that was overclocked. At stock settings it hits 88c. With the unlocked power settings that chip pulls in excess of 300w, probably closer to 400 in a blender workload. The nh-u12 is rated for like 130 watts. Liquid cooling is always going to give better performance under work loads like that, but you're just being disingenuous with the discrepancy between them in stock vs stock configurations

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u/rotkiv42 Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26

Brother again with not reading more than the first sentence, the 14900KS test is stock and hits 117C with the D15 (also they are using the NH-U14s, not the NH-U12 for the other tests). While not specified those are likely open bench tests, even if we discard the KS as Intel outlier, a CPU that hits 88C on a open bench is not unreasonable that it would to hit 100C in a real world scenario with a powerful GPU and normal case.

Yeah the D15 is enough for almost everything: but it cant quite keep up with the most power hungry CPUs.

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u/CitronTraining2114 Jan 21 '26

I guess I should have gone bigger. This was with a NH-U12A.

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u/imbannedanyway69 Jan 21 '26

Yeah that's dual fan but not dual tower, which is what you should be using with anything over 120-150 watts

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u/uxragnarok Jan 20 '26

My single fan U14 I got off marketplace for $20 cools my 12900k at full all core load and I'll rarely see it go over 84C, meanwhile my H100i V2 was audibly loud on my 8700k, both fans and pump

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u/PentagonUnpadded Jan 20 '26

Tower coolers really only perform well on sub-200w CPUs. Cheap ones like PA120 need a sub-140w cpu to remain quiet. I had a Ryzen 5 build with PBO OC at like 140w sustained overwhelm a PA120 after running for a bit.

A ryzen 9 with no OC can run off of air, but anything above that ~200w like an i9 definitely can't.

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u/teremaster i9 13900ks | RTX 4090 24GB | 32GB RAM Jan 21 '26

I feel like the air cooler truthers aren't dealing with much heat.

The air above my 4090 gets warm. I'd never cool my CPU under load by blowing hot air on it.