Should i water or air cool

rsorujlall · May 28, 2016

So as the title say i'm looking for some advice especially if someone has been in the same situation as i am right now. so i'm building by first gaming PC and and i'm on a budget for non of the parts are high end and each were bought one at time usually one part per month as i save up. so far i have the NZXT S340 case, Intel i7-4790 non-k CPU, EVGA GTX 960 SSC, Seasonic 520 Watt power supply, single 8GB DDR3 HyperX RAM with plans to upgrade to 16GB eventually, 1TB WD hard drive and currently on the way of being delivered is a MSI Z97 PC MATE motherboard (i know the Z97 was pointless since i don't have an overclock-able CPU)

Non of these are high end especially the GPU and CPU and a custom water cooling loop is out of the question because i can neither afford that neither benefit from that kind of cooling. however i do live in a very hot climate. i'm in Guyana, South American. A Caribbean country and its like summer all year long. that's the only season we have so i'm worried that dude to this my cpu and gpu will be running at high temps even without pushing the GPU. what i'm on the fence about is how high of a temp would i get considering the area i live.

My two options that i've considered so far are:

- buy a high end cpu air cooler and place two of the best 140mm intake fans i can get in the case and hope that the stock air cooler on the EVGA GTX 960 will be good enough alone with the CPU air cooler OR

- buy the NZXT Kraken X61 for now and use it on the cpu and eventually (in a month or 2 as i save up) buy a 140mm aio like the Kraken X41 along with the Kraken G10 gpu mounting bracket and use that to remove the air cooler from the GTX 960 and mount either the X61 or X41 to the GPU and the other AIO will go to the cpu

i'm looking for any kind of advice. i kinda like the second option over just a ugly air cooler however the second option is alot move expensive with two AIO water coolers, a gpu mounting bracket and not sure if its even worth the cost since i can't even overclock the cpu but i do want my GPU to run as cool as i can since it will be going most of the work in gaming and would like to even overclock it a little if i can.

Edit: i forgot to mention that non the the parts i plan to buy no matter what option i choose can be bought locally since you don't find things like these in my country. everything will be bought from Amazon and shipped to me so shipping from USA to here and duty cost and all of that will cut into my budge also

Jer45 · May 28, 2016

5 minutes ago, rsorujlall said:

So as the title say i'm looking for some advice especially if someone has been in the same situation as i am right now. so i'm building by first gaming PC and and i'm on a budget for non of the parts are high end and each were bought one at time usually one part per month as i save up. so far i have the NZXT S340 case, Intel i7-4790 non-k CPU, EVGA GTX 960 SSC, Seasonic 520 Watt power supply, single 8GB DDR3 HyperX RAM with plans to upgrade to 16GB eventually, 1TB WD hard drive and currently on the way of being delivered is a MSI Z97 PC MATE motherboard (i know the Z97 was pointless since i don't have an overclock-able CPU)

Non of these are high end especially the GPU and CPU and a custom water cooling loop is out of the question because i can neither afford that neither benefit from that kind of cooling. however i do live in a very hot climate. i'm in Guyana, South American. A Caribbean country and its like summer all year long. that's the only season we have so i'm worried that dude to this my cpu and gpu will be running at high temps even without pushing the GPU. what i'm on the fence about is how high of a temp would i get considering the area i live.

My two options that i've considered so far are:

- buy a high end cpu air cooler and place two of the best 140mm intake fans i can get in the case and hope that the stock air cooler on the EVGA GTX 960 will be good enough alone with the CPU air cooler OR

- buy the NZXT Kraken X61 for now and use it on the cpu and eventually (in a month or 2 as i save up) buy a 140mm aio like the Kraken X41 along with the Kraken G10 gpu mounting bracket and use that to remove the air cooler from the GTX 960 and mount either the X61 or X41 to the GPU and the other AIO will go to the cpu

i'm looking for any kind of advice. i kinda like the second option over just a ugly air cooler however the second option is alot move expensive with two AIO water coolers, a gpu mounting bracket and not sure if its even worth the cost since i can't even overclock the cpu but i do want my GPU to run as cool as i can since it will be going most of the work in gaming and would like to even overclock it a little if i can.

if you want to water cool do a custom loop otherwise just do air cooling Air Doesn't Leak! as cuda_cores said get a good air cooler like something from cryorig, noctua, or phantecs

glitchmaster0001 · May 28, 2016

id say get a high end air cooler like the NH-D14

airdeano · May 28, 2016

since this isn't an overclocked CPU, then a simple 212 would suffice. you could spend more for the air cooler, but fractional gains are considered.

for the GPU, spending $100+ to cool it won't yield more than 5-10fps (turbo boost)

since your climate is tough already, i wouldn't divert a lot of money into watercooling as ambient temps being high already won't do much to overall thermals.

rsorujlall · May 28, 2016

thanks your all the advice guys. i was really just looking for some opinions on what route to take and it seems that you all suggest going the air cooling route and you guys did make some good point. i think i get a decent cpu air cooler and two of the best 140mm intake case fans i can get and run that at a high-ish rpm to increase air flow in the case.

once again thanks your all the advice guys