Is it worth liquid-cooling your PC in this age of non-overclockable chips?
WE OFTEN DESCRIBE PC building as Lego for adults. For the most part, modern systems are incredibly easy to construct. There are, of course, certain pitfalls that you can encounter, but most of it comes down to cable management, clearances, and hardware compatibility. Graphics cards, CPUs, DDR memory, M.2 SSDs, and even the very connectors that power them, are designed to make the build process as simple as possible. Even modern cases encourage users to build their rigs in a certain way to avoid the pitfalls and errors that used to be commonplace.
On the one hand, this makes our hobby incredibly accessible. There’s room for refinement, of course—cabletidying tricks, design choices, hardware combos—but at its core, it’s an enjoyable recreational pastime that with enough knowledge is fairly easy to accomplish. On the other, for some, it lacks the thrill, panache, and knowledge of implementing a skill set you might find in other hobbies.
That’s where custom liquid cooling comes in. It is the absolute pinnacle of PC building, giving you an unprecedented amount of freedom in creating something that’s unique to you. In an age of auto-overclocking and temperature-dependent CPUs and GPUs, pulling as much heat away from these as fast as possible leads to far better performance. Because of that, liquid cooling has never been as valuable as it is today.
But where do you start? How do you make that step from off-the-shelf products to custom bespoke designs? Let’s slide into the pool and take a look, shall we? You won’t regret it.
A HISTORY OF LIQUID COOLING
Where it all began
FOR AS LONG AS there have been computers, cooling has been a problem, particularly as CPUs have continually increased their transistor density, clock speed, and power draw. In the early 1950s, machines like the UNIVAC1 and IBM’s System 360 famously utilized liquid cooling to alleviate the excess heat build-up in their machines. In fact, IBM saw that this problem was only going to get worse all the way back in 1965, and invested heavily in researching solutions for the issue, developing its own ‘Thermal Conduction Module’, which acted as a rudimentary water block, built with thermal pins surrounded by helium gas to accelerate heat transference into the block and away from their machines.
Most famously, the Cray-1 was also one of the first to use a liquid-cooling-esque style solution, utilizing a refrigerant coolant design to cool the machine itself. This very much acted like a large-scale traditional air-cooled heatsink, however, with the refrigerant being channeled through pipes connected to cooling bars, which directly made contact with copper cores attached to the modules within the machine. That coolant was then circulated back to a condenser, where the heat was
