Deepcool's air cooling vs. aio solutions

[ancienttreedweller]

Hi,

Thought I'd start a good old air vs liquid debate here. There's a lot of info on the interwebs about high end air coolers vs mid-range AIOs. But what about the budget PC builder? 

 

What's better, a cheap 120mm AIO or a mid-range air cooler?

 

I'm going to overclock an AMD FX-6300, on a fairly ordinary Asus mobo, in a fairly ordinary mid-tower case (Corsair spec-03). I've narrowed my cooling solutions down to these two:

 

1. Deep Cool Gamerstorm Maelstrom 120T AIO (wow that's quite a mouthful. Why cant pc parts have simple names?)

This is a basic AIO with a 120mm long, 27mm thick rad. Nothing special about it. Fairly easy to install, and it will easily fit into my case.

 

2. Deep Cool Neptwin V2:

This is a twin tower design air cooler with six heatpipes and two fans. From the specs, it looks like this will just barely fit into my case. I'll have to take some actual measurements to be sure. It may also cause some RAM clearance issues. Worst case scenario, I might have to pry off the heat spreader from one of my RAM sticks. 

 

Both these coolers are readily available where I live for pretty much the same price. 

 

I could go for a slightly more expensive air cooler like Deep Cool's Lucifer, or something cheaper like Cooler Master's ubiquitous Hyper 212x, if there's not much of a performance difference. Unfortunately, I could't find any other AIO within my budget. Corsair's AIOs cost a lot more than they should where I live because of damn import taxes. Besides, I don't want to spend anything more than this on a cooler for a budget CPU. I'd rather save my money for a better CPU in the future.

 

So what do you guys think? Which one will allow for a higher stable overclock? Which will be quieter under load? Which one will last longer? If I shove my PC into a suitcase and fly to another country, will either one cause any damage/get damaged? Do any of you guys have any experience with any of the coolers I mentioned? Or with the FX CPUs? I would love to hear your stories. 

[SirWendall]

I had a stable OC on my old FX6300! It was running @4.6GHz with a Cooler Master Siedon 120v water cooler

[ancienttreedweller]

29 minutes ago, GamerMan said:

I had a stable OC on my old FX6300! It was running @4.6GHz with a Cooler Master Siedon 120v water cooler

Wow that's impressive! Didn't think it would overclock this far