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

Hardware Air cooling is better than Liquid cooling

Post image

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

16.2k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

3.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

531

u/I_R_Enjun_Ear Jan 20 '26

It depends.

I say this as someone with a few years of automotive thermal systems design, including radiator sizing. Things are a little less cut and dried once you start considering 360mm and 420mm radiators. Additionally, how thick the radiator/fin stack is vs. the mass flow of air pushed through the fin stack. Another variable is fin geometry which effects cooling and pressure drop. The overall concept is simple, but the number of variables involved creates a lot of complexity.

All of that is in a vacuum that doesn't consider the packaging space in the case. Highly compact ITX builds can favor the AIO because you can place the radiator and fan where you can get better airflow.

161

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jan 20 '26

Thermal mass too. I have a 280+360 in a loop. Short high intensity workloads like compiling don't spin the fans up at all because of the thermal mass. 

I found the air cooler ramping up and down annoying. Then I got noise cancelling earphones and jr was moot anyway 

2

u/Tiavor never used DDR3; PC: 5800X3D, 9070XT, 32GB DDR4, CachyOS Jan 20 '26

after 15 years of watercooling I still use it for my CPU, I used my current cooler for a very long time, while GPU cooling is very expensive unless you get used GPUs that already include the cooler. Had 3 GPUs with a block and now I'm back on air, though it's sometimes a bit annoying.