PC water cooling

Willid1

Willid1

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David Williams
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Hi Everyone

Looking to replace my very slow PC so that I can actually use LR and Photoshop without it going very slowly or locking up.

With the help of my teenage son I think I have arrived a spec but have a question.

The PC I'm looking at has water cooling, not something I am familiar with.

So my question is for one of these processors :-

Intel® Core™ i7 14700F (20-Core, 61MB Total Cache, 2.1GHz to 5.4GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0)

being used for LR and Photoshop but not anything intensive like gaming or video editing, would there be any benefit - either performance or reliability wise to using water cooling vs air cooling.

Also a bit concerned about pumps and leaks, just seems like a few too many more things to potentially go wrong, given the insides of PC's don't tend to get much maintenance

Thanks in advance

David
 
In my opinion, no, ultimately you can keep the processor cool with good airflow. Personally, I'm of the opinion that water and electronics shouldn't be mixed and if you get a leak, you know what will happen. Choose a case with good inlet and exhaust fans and upgrade the stock fan that comes with the processor. I have a Ryzen 7 in my PC and simply upgraded the stock fan for a lot less money that water cooling would have cost. Overheating has never been an issue.
 
Santafe2000 said:
In my opinion, no, ultimately you can keep the processor cool with good airflow. Personally, I'm of the opinion that water and electronics shouldn't be mixed and if you get a leak, you know what will happen. Choose a case with good inlet and exhaust fans and upgrade the stock fan that comes with the processor. I have a Ryzen 7 in my PC and simply upgraded the stock fan for a lot less money that water cooling would have cost. Overheating has never been an issue.
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This. ^^

I built a PC last year, it has 3 fans in the case and a dedicated, upgraded fan for the processor. Even with Lightroom, PS open and browsing the web/playing music at the same time my PC runs stone cold.

Much safer than water and less worry IMO.
 
Just get something like a Dark Rock cooler and forget about water cooling. It will be more than capable of keeping the CPU cool for what you are doing. Water cooling is mainly for those that like to overclock to eek out the tiniest bits of performance of the CPU.
Oh and it will save you a few quid as well, water cooling systems are not cheap.
 
Thanks for the replies - looking forward to a fan cooled 2024 spec PC soon
 
I have an older PC, and at times during intensive processing - say building 1:1 previews in LR when importing, the load on the CPU can be quite intensive for a period of time. Despoite playing around with the fan controler profile, I found the fan noise to be quite intrusive, especially under high load. On advice from my local PC shop, I switched to a Corsair All-in-one water cooler, and in normal use it's almost silent. It does get noisier under extended periods of full load, but not as bad as the air cooled fans, and it also recovered back to normal temperature more quickly.

Having said that, my cooler is now about 5 or 6 years old, and I believe some of the Noctua and similar air coolers can surpass the performance of the older water coolers and still run near silently. I've not had any water leaks nor needed to fill mine, so it's been excellent in terms of both performance, reliability and overall quietness.
 
A tip for the future - replace your thermal compound every 2-3 years, because it dries out and becomes less effective.
 
The i7-14700F is a 65W CPU and really does not need water-cooling. With decent airflow through the case it's possible to run it passive. I ran an i7-3770 then an i7-9700F with just a honking great heatsink and no fan for years without any problems.
 
You don't really need an i7 processor for photoshop but you do need plenty of ram and a decent graphics card. Forget stuff used for gaming!
You only need two fans in a case: one to blow the air in at the front and one to take it out at the back. Having umpteen fans is a waste of time.
 
I have a Noctua NH-D15 on a Ryzen 3900x (105w TDP I think) which has worked well as it's quiet and has no problems cooling the processor under load. The only issues with it over a water cooler is it needs quite a bit of height so the case needs to have enough space for it and it needs to clear the ram as well, it's fine for low profile-ish ram but I don't think I'd have the clearance for ram with RGB lighting on top.
 
Willid1 said:
Hi Everyone

Looking to replace my very slow PC so that I can actually use LR and Photoshop without it going very slowly or locking up.

With the help of my teenage son I think I have arrived a spec but have a question.

The PC I'm looking at has water cooling, not something I am familiar with.

So my question is for one of these processors :-

Intel® Core™ i7 14700F (20-Core, 61MB Total Cache, 2.1GHz to 5.4GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0)

being used for LR and Photoshop but not anything intensive like gaming or video editing, would there be any benefit - either performance or reliability wise to using water cooling vs air cooling.

Also a bit concerned about pumps and leaks, just seems like a few too many more things to potentially go wrong, given the insides of PC's don't tend to get much maintenance

Thanks in advance

David
Click to expand...

The faster your computer work, the more electricity it use, and the more it use, the hotter it becomes, thus heat is the waste. You need to get the heat out of your machine.

But water cooling options is only useful for an extremely fast and busy computer that is processing gaming games, like Call of Duty, and stuff like that. The computer is processing non-stop as the gamer keeps moving around and shooting at enemies. Chances are, the computer hadn't had a break for a while, and it's overheating.

For using Lightroom and Photoshop, you're not going to be doing non-stop extreme work. Chances are, you open one of your photos, and you're thinking "Mmm, I think it got too much highlights, need a tad adjustment." While you're thinking, the computer is just idling, waiting for your commands. When you make adjustments, it barely take much processing power to do that. Therefore it's not extremely busy, thus not generating massive heat.

So for your needs, air-cooled is good enough.

If you're worried, just get a tower with plenty of fans, preferably for good airflow.

And make sure you keep your computer clean. Airflow clogged up with dust is like a warm blanket for the computer. (Maybe your slow PC is full of dust, causing it to overheat, and thus slowed down?) I always spring clean the inside of my computer every year.

Unless your teenager son wants to use your computer for gaming, I believe you would only be better off with an air-cooled kind.
 
In the 5 years I've had my current "gaming" PC with a water-cooled i7-8700K there's no sign of leakage. The whole CPU cooling + pipes + radiator assembly was supplied assembled and filled. I don't overclock as I have no need to.

The fan speed required is so low that even the people complaining about a CPU fan sounding like roadworks or a CNC router in the other thread would be happy.
 
Thanks for all the replies

D
 
Willid1 said:
Hi Everyone

Looking to replace my very slow PC so that I can actually use LR and Photoshop without it going very slowly or locking up.

With the help of my teenage son I think I have arrived a spec but have a question.

The PC I'm looking at has water cooling, not something I am familiar with.

So my question is for one of these processors :-

Intel® Core™ i7 14700F (20-Core, 61MB Total Cache, 2.1GHz to 5.4GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0)

being used for LR and Photoshop but not anything intensive like gaming or video editing, would there be any benefit - either performance or reliability wise to using water cooling vs air cooling.

Also a bit concerned about pumps and leaks, just seems like a few too many more things to potentially go wrong, given the insides of PC's don't tend to get much maintenance

Thanks in advance

David
Click to expand...
For your usage, I'd go air cooling. It's quieter and don't need to worry about potential leaks if any. You can get decent air coolers nowadays for relatively cheap. Thermalright have some good coolers that compete with water cooling. You don't need water cooling as your CPU won't get hot enough to justify it.
 
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