Please vote for your favoured method of cooling and share your experiences and opinions.
There is always a lot of debate over the best way to cool your CPU should you go for a high end air cooler or go down the path of proven lower temperatures with water. In the end the decision usually comes down to money (or the lack of) what you are trying to achieve and do you really want to put water into your expensive rig with the potential of a major disaster if it leaks.
In my case, I am a coward and despite some very good advice from others such as Gilgamesh, with regard to water cooling, I recently decided to stay with the tried and trusted air cooling method. I had to do something as, for some reason, my AMD 965BE CPU (140W C2 Stepping), which I hadn't over-clocked, was reaching temperatures that were way above what they should have been. Even at idle it was running at around 40ºC and once I started to actually use the system for video rendering or audio recording, the temperatures would rise steadily towards the 60ºC+ mark and over. The stated max temp for this CPU is only 62ºC so, as you can imagine, I was more than a little concerned.
I decided to buy the Noctua NH-D14 air cooler and a nice new case to house my rig in, as the one I was using wouldn't take this monster of a cooler. The parts arrived and I re-built my system and fired it up. To be honest, despite my experience of building PC's and tweaking I didn't expect to get the results that I did.
I am now getting an idle temperature on my CPU of about 22ºC - 24ºC (an 18ºC - 16ºC drop) and even at full load it barely touches 40ºC. I am not in a climate controlled environment (unless you count the fact that I can open the window) and I am, to say the least, pretty impressed by this turnaround. In fact, I actually pushed my CPU to 4Ghz without any issues or major temperature increase. However, as I don't really need to over-clock I have gone back to more standard settings. The other thing I have gained is a lot less noise from the cooler, in fact I can hardly hear it at all!
So Water or Air cooling? It is not for me to adivse on that choice but, if you are struggling to make that decision, I am hoping that this will give another viewpoint and an insight into what can be achieved with a higher end air cooler.
My Current System Specs:
Chassis: NZXT Tempest Evo
Mobo: GA-790XTA-UD4
PSU: Corsair 620W Modular
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 965BE (C2) 140W
Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 Air cooler
RAM: Corsair Dominator 2 sets of CMD4GX3M2B1600C8 (8 Gig total)
GPU: Sapphire Radeon ATI 4850x2 (1 Gig)
Monitors: 1 x Viewsonic 2216W & 2 x LG L194WT
Sound Card: M-Audio Delta 1010
HDD's: 2 X Maxtor 200 gig; 1 X Samsung 250 gig; 1 x Hitachi 500 gig; 1 x Seagate 1000 gig
DVD/CD: Liteon DVD RW SH-16A7S
Graphics Tablet: Wacom PTZ3
Keyboard: Microsoft Digital Media Pro
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
