Question about the use of watercooling?

[Tyrosen]

I m not questioning it, since I've seen it work really well before, but how does water cool your system that fast? I'm not very good at physics and stuff, but in watercooling the water takes the heat from the CPU/GPU and the water gets cooled in the radiators right? I remember something from last year's freshman physics that water has the highest specific heat capacity, which means the water should very slow at taking heat from the GPU, then it would take a long time to cool it, bt why isnt it? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I'm just curious

[shadowbyte]

Liquids are much better at transferring heat from hot areas and carrying it to, for example, a radiator compared to just a heatpipe and a fan.

Which is why people watercool. Lower temperatures, higher overclocking headroom, and quieter cooling.

[Maccat123]

Specific heat capacity is the amount of energy required to change the temp by 1 degree Celsius in 1 gram of liquid.
On the flip of you saying it should cool very slowly, it would also heat very slowly due to the energy being absorbed at a lower rate, this means cooler water can run past components and to cool them.
 

[Glenwing]

7 minutes ago, Tyrosen said:

I m not questioning it, since I've seen it work really well before, but how does water cool your system that fast? I'm not very good at physics and stuff, but in watercooling the water takes the heat from the CPU/GPU and the water gets cooled in the radiators right? I remember something from last year's freshman physics that water has the highest specific heat capacity, which means the water should very slow at taking heat from the GPU, then it would take a long time to cool it, bt why isnt it? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I'm just curious

Heat capacity affects the rate at which temperature changes when absorbing heat energy at a given rate. It doesn't affect the rate at which the heat energy is actually absorbed. The material property that affects the rate of heat transfer is thermal conductivity, not heat capacity.

 

Then again, if you look up the thermal conductivity of water, it is several hundred times lower than copper, so that doesn't really explain much either. In short, the reason water cooling is so much more effective, even though water has a much lower thermal conductivity, is because it relies mainly on thermal transfer by convection, not conduction. The rate of energy transfer by heat is affected by travel distance as well as surface area and material (thermal conductivity). In a heatsink, the heat needs to travel through several centimeters of copper (increasing with the height of the heatsink). In water cooling, the heat only needs to travel a few millimeters, through the cold plate on the water block, then into the water. From there, the heat no longer needs to move; instead we just move the water with the heat inside it. Once it gets to the radiator, again it only needs to travel a few millimeters through the walls of the radiator into the fins. When compared to the centimeters heat has to travel through in a heatsink, the hundred-fold advantage copper has in thermal conductivity is quickly cancelled out and overtaken.