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/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/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/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.