Water Cooling Kit Vs AIO?

[RubyRoks]

I was watching some OLD NCIX videos on Youtube and saw the Watercooling essentials video. I was wondering if kits like that still exist and how they perform compared to AIO coolers for the money

[Toddwjp]

kits still exist, but custom loops for just a cpu are not worth it apart from the cool factor.

[HMSTerror]

I was watching some OLD NCIX videos on Youtube and saw the Watercooling essentials video. I was wondering if kits like that still exist and how they perform compared to AIO coolers for the money

 

Hi TheQRoks,

 

      There are many factors to consider in regards to water cooling.  I am not sure where you are allowed to link but if you look at Frozen CPU you can see examples of kits. These are in no order but their differences in general and why people are likely to choose a custom kit rather than a AIO option.

 

  Aesthetics (You can google this easily and see how much better a custom loop can look) but most of all fitment, with a custom cooler you are able to route the lines to various places.  A fair amount of AIO's have short tubing so mounting options in larger cases or custom applications becomes impossible.

 

  Better components, the life of AIO's is extremely low compared to their custom friends. This is due to the fact you can use larger higher quality pumps (which also provide more flow thus keeping a lower TDP.  Look at videos of the inside of used AIO's and how the internals are, notice the coverage and design. These has a big part in holding lower temperatures due to the design and cover area the water flows over.  Look at the amount of people who have failed AIO's which cause damage to their CPU or other components before they catch it.  A fair amount of people do not set their thermal point limits in bios nor always have a Temp monitor alarm set in windows.  I have had 3 various AIO's fail on me in under 3 years time.   I no longer have a custom loop due to price but I do have an original water pump (laing dc5) that has ran 24 hours for 10 years on a small aquarium without issue (it is a common pump used in custom loops and there are A LOT better options now.)

 

  The ability to select your fans rather than add them on, a fair amount of people ask "what is the best fan for AIO XXXX" ,  You can choose the best components to begin with.   

 

   Now look again at the block internals of the AIO's they get full of sludge and oxidation which kills the cooling power you once had. If you have a custom you simply put a cleaning solution like water and lemon juice or something similar through the loop for several hours and you are once again nice and clean.  

 

   A custom loop will offer you better routing, cooler temperature at higher loads, better aesthetics and piece of mind in reliability compared to the current AIO's that are out. 

 

 

  There is the one down side which is the price, a good kit with just a single 120mm radiator will cost you 209.99 compared to the 60 bucks of AIO, 279 for Dual and around 300 for a 3x kit.   Once you pick and choose for a 3xfan kit you can easily get around 500 depending on all the options and various connections.  (These are all GOOD Kits, you can build custom loops for much cheaper but the gains will be very minimal).

 

 

 

  There is only positives aside from price and ease of use,  do you enjoy building stuff and making things perfect? then ease of use could be a negative but yeah, the price is a major factor. 

[Joshua Ondangan]

custom loop vs CLC's

 

in a way it can be similar to prebuilts vs custom build pc.

 

in some ways specially in the bling factor

[PuNkPoEtS]

For me I would choose a kit over mist aio due to the rad being aluminum which can decrease the heat dissipation. The only aio coolers I would reccomend would be the glacer 240 by cooler master or the h220x by swiftech as they are also expandable and have copper radiators over all the others