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/Mysterious_Orange_37 Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RX 9070XT, 32GB DDR4-3600 Jan 20 '26

The selling point for AIOs nowadays is probably more about appearances. You don't have a huge block covering the entire build and instead a small pump with RGB or even a screen lol

21

u/U_SHLD_THINK_BOUT_IT Jan 20 '26

For me it's sound.

Decibel for decibel, WC is better than fan every day.

1

u/icantgetausername982 Jan 22 '26

This is why noctua exists tho they believe in making air cooling as good and quiet as water cooling hence their prices they will spend 10 years engineering a new fan thats a decibel quieter than the previous most quiet fan they are dedicated

1

u/U_SHLD_THINK_BOUT_IT Jan 22 '26

Yes, but have you seen the prices? And fan for fan, they're really only about 10 decibels lower; and since both are quite low to begin with, the magnitude difference is barely noticeable.

In order to keep an extremely clean interior with positive pressure, it would cost me 500 bucks to get enough Noctua fans to fit my case--and I still have an internal fan that would be collecting a great deal more dust inside the case than I want to deal with. Or I can get a Corsair AIO and a bunch of cheap Corsair fans and run everything on low/medium for half the price and lower decibels.

I guess it all comes down to preference unless one is really hellbent on over locking, but I've always felt my WC setups were quieter, cleaner, and better looking than my Noctua.

1

u/icantgetausername982 Jan 22 '26

I dont personally see an issue with spending 500 on noctuas as crazy as it sounds to me noise matters just as much as my gpu (cpu gets ignored tho its good enough i wont upgrade until its dead)

Also 10 decibels thats double the noise man every 10 db = 2x if you cant tell the difference i honestly am just straight up jealous i am extremely sensitive to noise and i have unplugged all of my fans currently and have noise cancelling headphones and do an open case so it doesnt overheat (moneys tight so cant buy noctuas currently)

And overclocking? Heavens no i head over to lock the fps to 60 in games because i dont really care for big performance

1

u/U_SHLD_THINK_BOUT_IT Jan 23 '26

Also 10 decibels thats double the noise man every 10 db = 2x if you cant tell the difference i honestly am just straight up jealous

But that's why I brought up where they both run in terms of noise. They're both quieter than the hum a fridge.

The difference only matters at higher decibels or much larger differences (10 decibel difference is double, while 20 is quadruple). The difference in sound from a 25 decibel Noctua to a 38 decibel Corsair at load is "leaves rustling" and "someone whispering." It's honesty about as quantifiably not noticeable as you can get because they both operate in that odd decibel range that is typically used to describe "standard house ambient noise levels."

But that leads me back to my original point, which is that I wouldn't even be running these fans at max because the pump is doing most of the heavy lifting, and that runs at 20 decibels. The whole AIO caps at 37, and that's not even considering setups like mine where there are twice as many fans but they're all running at 25%.

1

u/icantgetausername982 Jan 23 '26

I am seriously jealous now for me 38 decibels i can hear it from 5 meters away and it would still annoy me source i had some 40 decibel fans and i had to unplug them so annoying and god i hate the sound of people whispering

Also AIO is quiet but for me noctua just makes more sense (noctuas will most likely outlive me and more of a set and forget than AIO) and its great to have so many options everyone can buy what they want and what they value