Liquid Cooling vs. Air Cooling w/ Velox lvl. 3

Based on your pic I can save you lot of money if this is a gaming rig.

Please let us help you choose your parts.

To answer your question, noctua is a great cooler and my only choice for air cooling here.


Tell me more about your budget, what the pc is for and if its for gaming let us know if you gonna be buing a new monitor to go with this pc now or sometime in the next 12 months or if you already have the monitor you gonna use. If you have the monitor please tell us the native resolution of the monitor. If this pc is not for gaming please forget about monitor info.

I will admit I do not have much personal experience with water cooling but I believe that air cooling can cope well with most overclocks just fine and are able to last longer with less maintenance, etc  My current aircooler has 2 fans on it and is still going strong after almost 10 years. All I do is blow some compressed air through it every so often.

BTW - I also ordered a Velox!


Edited by Richieboy67 - 05 Aug 2016 at 12:37am

the only thing with big air coolers, like the Noctua, is it's so difficult to work around them.  i had problems getting even low profile ram in and out of their slots while the heatsink was installed.  even removing the clip on fans ymmv.  

the NZXT and Corsair closed loop AIO LC at least have long warranties (6 and 5 years respectively), so if their pumps go bad you can at least get a replacement.  they provide decent cooling, perhaps (depending on model) better than the Noctua D15, although they're louder due to crappy fans.   the ram sticks are clear of any obstruction.   no maintenance required of these units either since they are "closed".

get 16Gb of ram, i don't care which, just don't buy anything over 3000MHz, it's a waste of money for no gain whatsoever.  even going for a 3000MHz kit is only going to get you single digits fps gains in games.  

i'm a big proponent of ssd over hdd when it comes to storage.  you can go SATA for budget or PCIe if you really want your hair blown back and can afford it.  game files are huge these days so get something big.

cpu and chipset for gaming has to be Skylake/z170.  your choice on I5 or I7, for budget go with I5.  if you're a dreamer and think DX12 is the messiah, go with the I7 for the hyper-threading.   i have a personal aversion to Asus mobos these days, and they with me, so i can only say i might be the least objective person here to offer vendor specific advice.  i have a Gigabyte G1 Gaming GT in my rig.  i recommend a board with high end audio; however boards are very individual taste and needs specific.  

don't cheap out on a power supply.  you don't necessarily need a large wattage unit, but get quality (high efficiency, minimal ripple, etc.).  i recommend a fully modular unit to make cable management really clean. 

the two most important choices that influence your gaming pleasure are your monitor and your graphics card.  get the right tool for the job.  that means if you intend to game at 1080p you don't buy a Titan X.  if 4k is your thing, you're going to have to decide whether or not you want to take a chance with sli scaling or go with a single gpu solution.  the ONLY single gpu solution available is the newly released Titan X (Pascal not Maxwell) and it costs $1,200.  or you can try your luck with 2x1070's ($800) or 2x1080's ($1,400) with varying results.  the problem with the 2x1070's are the fps lows across the board tend to be lower than a single 1080, even though the averages are a little better at 4k (high/ultra settings).  what does that mean? it means you'll see more frame rate drops and lower dips than with the 1080s at this resolution.   this results in momentary freezes/stuttering/hitching at times.   anyway the techno babble can be overwhelming, so if you want just tell us which resolution you're upgrading to and we can recommend monitors and graphics cards for whatever you want to do.  

 

I hear you about the ram being hard to get to on noctua, but realistically speaking, most people don't mess with their ram like we do. so maybe they need to work on them once or twice in 6 years. In which case its a matter of 4 screws being undone. Again that is if they need to do it to begin with. I normally don't have ram go bad on me all the time, do they go bad yes but rarely comparing to other parts, just look at the forums, we can find way more pump failure here then we can with ram, and that is just on this forum, on the net there is way more faulty pumps.

For corsair to beat noctua the fans have to be on very high which then makes the noise level crazy, so at the lower noise level, noctua does better or matches (depending) the corsair.

For those reason and the fact that odds of pump on corsair going bad are much higher then fan dieing on noctua or ram going bad, I find noctua to be the best choice between aio and noctua.

Thats where I stand on the noctua vs aio here.

The rest of what db says I agree with, when possible single gpu solution is best, as in better to go single titan vs sli 1080 for 4k. Part of my reasoning here is pretty much the same as above, 2 gpus raises the possibility of things going wrong since now there are 2 parts that can have issues instead of one. Other reason is the things db pointed out, hitching and such, tho I'm not sure how minimum fps are impacted till we some benches of titan vs 1080 sli, but no matter what if I don't have to deal with sli then I don't, the scaling is still an issue.

yeah Noctua is boss, got a D14 in my old rig hand me down to son cooling an [email protected] going on 5+years now.   it was banged pretty bad during shipping with bent fins and it still cools like a champ!  nice acoustics.  you can hear it when it's ramped up over 50% but it's not annoying like the cheap fans on most AIO units.  but that fugly BROWN color!  oh my eyes!!  i highly recommend spray painting them to match your internals. 

of course if you wear headphones who cares about fan noise, right?  you can always change the AIO fans if it's really bothersome at additional cost.  if you leave your pc on while not present i'd worry about the pump failure point.  you don't want to fry your cpu, although it should shutdown long before damage occurs once it detects there's no cpu cooling.   still, you never know...

then there's the shipping worries with a big hunk of metal screwed onto your mobo.  Noctua has a very secure mounting system, trust me your mobo will crack before the cooler gets dislodged.  unfortunately, that very thing happened one time in my case.  UPS decided to put/drop something heavy on the side with the plexi and it bent inwards scratching the plexi, bending the cooler and breaking the mobo.  i weep for the mobo that has to carry this big sucker attached to it.  

if you want the best performance over all considerations a custom open LC loop is the way to go, which the Velox can easily accommodate.   it's gonna cost a lot more and it requires more upkeep from you.   

Originally posted by DST4ME Originally posted by ChuckyPC Originally posted by DST4ME Based on your pic I can save you lot of money if this is a gaming rig. Please let us help you choose your parts. To answer your question, noctua is a great cooler and my only choice for air cooling here. Tell me more about your budget, what the pc is for and if its for gaming let us know if you gonna be buing a new monitor to go with this pc now or sometime in the next 12 months or if you already have the monitor you gonna use. If you have the monitor please tell us the native resolution of the monitor. If this pc is not for gaming please forget about monitor info. Oh thank you so much for answering! My budget is up to $5,000 for a new gaming rig. Right now I play on an Asus VG248QE (1920x1080), but I plan on upgrading to a new monitor within 12 months! If there is anything else you would like to ask me please ask me. You are the first person that is willing to help me with building... ty in advance! My pleasure. What resolution are you planing on upgrading to when you get a new monitor? 1440p or 4k?

So after reading everyone's awesome responses... I either plan on going with the Noctua, or the HydroLux. I might go with the HydroLux, but I just do not know how much after purchase maintence I would have to do on my end. If I do have to do a lot of maintenance I'll probably just go with the Noctua because it seems like it is highly recommended! With that begin said, I really do not know what resolution I am planning on upgrading to. I really have not looked into the difference in 1440p or 4K and do not know the difference tbh. I am really just looking for a very good PC with a good monitor. Sorry again for not responding right away, and I will respond asap! If I confused you guys or did not answer you all's questions I am sorry... I do not have the greatest knowledge when it comes to computers. So go ahead and ask me anything you got though. I really appreciate all the responses you guys are giving me! Thanks

Originally posted by DST4ME Well its simple, the higher the res the more details, the more details the better image quality is. so think about for example the days of dvd vs now 1080p. 4k much higher then 1440p which means the image quality is much better. Take a quick trip to your local pc store or bestbuy and check out some 1440p monitors vs 4k ones make sure the 4k is displaying 4k programing, otherwise looking at 1080p programing on 4k is not gonna show you the difference. Basically in 2 years 4k is gonna main stream and we will be looking at 8k.

Alright will do! So basically I have two main questions. If I get a new 1440p monitor, then is one Titan X better than one GTX 1080? Also, would the HydroLux cooling that DS offers be hard to keep up with? And with that being said, is the extra performance I would get with that cooling so much better than the Noctua that I would need it? I mainly just do not want to have to keep up with the cooling if I do, so I might just go with the Noctua if it's a lot of work

Originally posted by DST4ME For 1440p monitor titan is pure waste, a 1080 will kill in 1440p. I don't advise titan to anybody below 4K res due to the fact that its way overkill for that res. You don't need lc, you do need to have some up keep with it, the lite version you just need to add fluid to and other minor up keep, the pro version you gonna want to drain and replace fluid once a year, the pro version will have better temps than noctua. With lc pumps or connections can go bad and leak from time to time. When it comes to lc you have to be ok with possibly having to work on it should something go wrong, if you are ok with that then go lite or pro hydrolux, the pro gives the real lc performance.

Alright, good to know. If I went with the pro HydroLux, would there be instructions on how to drain and replace the fluid and keep up with it? On the other hand, will the Noctua cool fine though if I do go with that? I just want to make sure that if I do go with that, then it will still cool fine and won't be hurting my PC and etc. Other than that, I just need to figure out if I'm going 4K or 1440p, and then I should be all set. Got any recommendations for 4K monitors or 1440p monitors as well?

You will be fine with Noctua.

I bought this monitor, ultra wide Predator X34..It is absolutely amazing though expensive.

Acer X34

I agree about the video being light but that is the only one Alex had posted. Looking forward to the new video.

For 4k titan for 1440p 1080.

keep in mind you may find you need sli 1080 or sli titan for some games at 4k and possibly more in the future, to be able to go sli change psu to 1000w.

based on the latest reviews, its seems like with one titan you will be between high 40s to 60 fps at 4k, which is a bit low.


Noctua is your cpu cooler, which means it does not come into play when we are talking monitor res and gpu, so yes it will be fine.

Edited by DST4ME - 06 Aug 2016 at 4:50pm