ok so this company 'pccooler' has produced an air/water hybrid cpu cooler, is it as good as techpowerup.com claims? would you reccomend it?
http://www.pccooler.cn/en/index.php/products/pc/cpu/157-w120-%E6%B7%B1%E8%93%9D.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/147218/pccooler-oc3-w120-combines-tower-type-air-cooler-with-water-block.html
Err....that design doesnt seem to make too much sense.
It is basicly a radiator that you can mount on your cpu socket, it looks cool...but:
1: The CPU will run hotter than with regular water cooling, because you basicly have a shitty water block
2: The ``Radiator´´ will not be as efficient for cooling the water as a regular radiator, because it is designed to work mainly as an aircooler.
3. If you run this withouth water a similarly priced heatsink will probably perform better
4. If you run this with water you will still need a pump, reservior, fittings, tubing.......and other radiators (or else you take the heat out of the heatsink just to put it back into the heatsink)
-->so why not just use a regular water block for better performance?
Possible reasons to get this:
1. maybe cheaper than a waterblock+120mm rad --> I dont think that would be a good way to save money.
2. additional space for a 120mm radiator --> get a proper case instead
3. cooling in case your pump dies--> you can just set up an auto shutdown if your cpu overheats...or just let it throttle down
4. get this and maybe set up a costum loop later on/if you have saved money etc. --> maybe.....
5.It looks cool --> good reason!
What would make more sense in my opinion would be to
1: Make this an extra large 140mm fan dual tower cooler
2: Include a small pump in the cooler and seal it up
3: Pump the hot water to the top of the cooler
This would improve the heat transfer (to make better use of the large thermal mass).
--> a pseudo air cooler with performance superior to that of other premium air coolers for an additional 30-50 dollars
the design is to work as a waterblock and heatsink and the company claims it can cool up to 500w of heat... it still needs a pump, reservoir and radiator... so the theory is that it can work better for quieter, it looks nice, and has a decent heat sink, the heatsink works the exact same as a regular heatsink (the way it works) the only difference is that it also has watercooling, so in theory, shouldnt it have the combined advantages of heatsink and watercooling? id like someone from tek syndicate to review it to see if it is a valid idea
you would get better performance with a regular waterblock and a similarly sized radiatior...because the heat will actually be put somewhere else instead of in the area around the cpu. Plus it defeats one of the perks of watercooling, which is not having a tower cooler sticking out of your motherboard. I can't see this being any better than a noctua D-15, which will be cheaper after getting pump/res. And if you are putting out money for pump/res, you may as well spend less on a better waterblock, and get a real rad.
This looks like one of those ideas that sounded good at the board meeting, but in practice, just doesn't make sense.
i think that's a pretty cool idea, if your pump were ever to fail you still get some cooling while you repair/replace the pump. stands to reason it would cool better because now you have twice the surface area to dissipate heat
thats my thought anarekist, as the case airflow will be bringing cool air in and with a positive air pressure the air in the case will be cooled nicely and another thing is that you can still use it before you get your pump, rad, hozes and clamps, as well as if it stuffs up, and if im not mistaken, 500w of heat is a decent ammount to dissipate... i think it is a great idea, and have sent a request through to koolance to produce a hybrid unit as im pretty sure it would be better again as it would be like having a top quality waterblock and cooler tower built into one
If you looped it into another radiator, then sure. I could see it working well. On it's own, it looks like a less efficient radiator attached directly to the CPU.