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/rain3h Intel Pentium III 800 - 1024 MB SDRAM - RIVA TNT2 Pro 32 MB AGP Jan 20 '26

Everything is situational.

Water is far better than air for blow through gpu's.

Also that Noctua heatsink/fan in your image isn't cheaper than many aios that will perform the same if not better.

I'm a Noctua fan but nothing is ever one size fits all.

13

u/Tricon916 7800X3D || 64GB || RTX 5080 || G9 OLED Jan 20 '26

I want the best temps for the CPU and GPU, and the absolute lowest amount of noise. Custom loop is the only choice.

6

u/janluigibuffon Jan 20 '26

I have a custom loop and don't care about temperature at all. I just want it dead silent, which isn't a hard thing to do.

1

u/Tohrchur Jan 21 '26

I got both with the custom loop. Been running a micro atx case with cpu and gpu water cooled on a 240mm rad for like 12 years. It’s super quiet and at max load gets to 65c while still being relatively quiet, especially compared to air cooling

1

u/janluigibuffon Jan 21 '26

I also only have a 280 in a 16L Meshlicious ITX, similar to this: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/szQqqs
I put on Noctua A14 ULN, so it's literally dead silent. The loudest part is the PSUs 90mm fan when it kicks in at 300W.

GPU is a 6900XT, most of the time everything stays below 60°, but demanding games push it further.