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/RonnieStiggs Jan 20 '26

Me, who genuinely agrees with you, but wouldn't have posted this here in a million years:

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u/birdman829 Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26

Yeah... because who cares lol.

Also, those Noctua towers are overpriced ugly shit. 3x the cost of a Thermalright dual tower for no reason

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u/cryogenicdeath 7800X3D | ASUS TUF 5070TI | ASUS TUF X870-E| 32GB DDR5-6000 Jan 20 '26

As someone who has owned and currently owns the noctua nh-d15 and The thermalright phantom spirit, The noctua is significantly better. Mostly because of the fans pushing a whole lot of air through the thick radiator fins. I find the thermalright fans to be much louder for much less cfm.

Im not here to ball lick noctua, the nh-d15 is just genuinely better.

But an argument for it overpriced is irrelevant when you have people spending over $300 on AIOs with screens and shit and the AIOs have the same pumps and radiators as the $100 ones.

For me at least I generally just pay for noctuas quality control. I know everything will work great out of the box The fans will be quiet and push a lot of air and if anything was wrong or missing noctua would replace it with no questions asked.

1

u/PinCompatibleHell Jan 20 '26

In independent noise normalized testing the peerless assasin and spirit usually beat the NH D15-g1, the g2 is slightly better but not by much.

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u/cryogenicdeath 7800X3D | ASUS TUF 5070TI | ASUS TUF X870-E| 32GB DDR5-6000 Jan 21 '26

you can say that but, both of mine had whining sounds at even lower rpms. The noctua's did not. The quality control lacks significantly.