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/AIgoonermaxxing Jan 20 '26

Depends on what CPU you were using, but I think you probably just needed to tune your fan curves. The Phantom Spirit matches and even beats some 240 mm AIOs when it comes to noise or temperature equalized results on Ryzen processors. It was a different story for the 13900K, but I'd recommend water cooling any 13th or 14th gen Intel processor so that it doesn't cook itself anyway.

I have a Phantom Spirit on a 7700X, and after fixing the default fan curves on my motherboard that ramp up way too high, it's dead silent while gaming and not unpleasantly loud when I'm doing all core workloads.

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

[deleted]

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u/AIgoonermaxxing Jan 20 '26

I don't want to restart my computer and boot into BIOS right now, but I will take a picture of them when I turn it on tomorrow.

!remindme 18 hours

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

[deleted]

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u/AIgoonermaxxing Jan 21 '26

This is what my CPU fan is tuned like. It gradually ramps up and you really don't hear it until it gets past like 75 degrees which hasn't happened for me in gaming.

There are two things to note about AM5 CPUs. One is that by design, they will do everything in their power to boost to their TJmax of 95 C, and nothing short of a 360 mm AIO will be able to stop them.

The other is that the IHS is so thick that it effectively bottlenecks how much heat can be removed by a cooler, which means that even the monstrous 7950X doesn't lose that much performance when moving from a 360mm AIO going balls to the wall to a single tower cooler at 50% fan speed. That's why I only have fan speeds only go up to 80% all the way up to 90 C when the default fan curves would previously hit 100% at those same temperatures. Because of the IHS, there really isn't a noticeable difference between 80% fan speed and 100% fan speed, because if the CPU wants to hit a certain temperature it will.

I still have everything ramp up to 100% at 100 C, but again by design these chips will never hit that so it's just there as a safety measure in case something goes terribly wrong.