Tag: tech

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Liquid or Air cooling a PC, what makes You happy?

How did we get here?

Noise. Honestly, that’s it. It came down to how much noise my rig was making while I was trying to stream. End of Blog, right? Maybe not, I may actually need to explain a bit.

The original configuration in a Montech King 95 case was two 140mm fins blowing in from the side and a Corsair H100i, with the radiator top mounted. There was nothing wrong with this configuration, and as the temperature testing showed, it worked quite well. The problem was that keeping that nice cool temp meant the fans ramped up and even during moderate loads, would get loud. It wasn’t unbearable, the placement next to my mic meant extra noise in my streams. Again, my mic didn’t pick a lot up, but every bit helps when you are streaming.

What was my solution?

I chose to go with a tower air cooler and rearrange the fans. Specifically, I installed a Thermalright Assassin air cooler and changed the airflow patter with the fans. Instead of the top fans all blowing up and out, the top front fan blows in and the rear top fan blows out. My hope was to assist in bringing air in to have fresh air across the CPU.

There have been many videos made and blogs written about airflow and what is proper, but all seem to point to a diminishing return after so many fans, so I kept it simple. The top would have one in and one out, and the back fans was exhaust. I considered adding a fan at the bottom pushing in to feed clean air to the GPU, but during tests the GPU temp went down, so I scrapped the idea until later. It’s still an option, but for now it’s fine.

Speaking of tests, I ran several ten minute passes of Cinebench 2026. I won’t give my opinion of the new app, or the difficulty finding the old ones, yet. Cinebench R23 is one of my favorite CPU tests and Maxon chooses to hide it now. The 2026 version does allow you to test CPU single core, Multi core and GPU, so for this test it worked well. The important thing was to get a lengthened load test for the temps.

And?

The All in One kept the CPU cooler. It was also louder, as discussed previously. There were two surprises, though. The first and biggest, was that even without a fan blowing air on the GPU, the temperature went down slightly. It was only from 65C to 63C, but it was a measurable and repeatable change.

The other surprise was just how quiet the Thermalright fans were. TL-C12C fans come in a set of five, and I’m sold on them. Not convinced that a ten minute test was enough, I also sat down for an hour long gaming session and was very pleased. In the associated video, I do a comparison, and the difference is noticeable.

The temp was higher on the CPU with the fans, but well within a comfortable range at around 63C. The noise level more than makes up for it and the inconvenience of a noisy stream is averted. This won’t meet everyone’s standards, but that’s the reason for the title in the first place. It’s very subjective.

What’s next?

For me, I will consider placing a fan on the bottom to introduce more clean air to the GPU. I may also decide I don’t need it, after all, GPU temps went down. I’m definitely staying with the tower cooler and will eventually use the H100 for another build. I may just stick with the Air Cooler, though. its much cheaper. AIO’s are less expensive, now, but a good tower cooler still beats it.

There is also the lack of maintenance, I have had my fun cleaning All in One coolers, and I am just fine only cleaning fans. Actually, a lot of my channel has to do with fixing things and learning lessons, including this last one with a Z97 motherboard. I’m also sure this won’t be the last visit on this subject.

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It’s not failure if you learn something. The important Z97 lesson.

How Did We Get Here?

That part’s easy. Computer component prices are ridiculous and people are looking anywhere they can to save money. This includes PCs and systems with older parts. In some cases, much older, as in ten years old.

One such case is trying to revive PCs that use DDR3 memory instead of the current standard DDR5. The problem there is that the dominant Operating system for these PCs no longer supports finely aged hardware. I won’t dwell on the details of the many different work arounds or the options, I’ll just say that those products are still in demand, and in some cases fetch as much as newer budget motherboards and components.

My plan was simple. I have a B85 motherboard that supports 4th gen Intel CPUs. It was suggested that I try thew Z97, which is the full feature version of that generation. I found one for a reasonable price, ordered it, received it, and set up to test. At this point I was happy, I found the board for a reasonable price and it came in beautiful shape. My happiness didn’t last.

It’s not failure, it’s learning.

The set up went well enough. I have a known good test bench and known good components, so I went to work. After setting everything up I hit the power switch and noticed my first issue. The signal initially come from the video card, then stopped. Luckily the i5 4670 has on board graphics, and I was able to get into the bios.

I though the RX480 I was using finally gave up the ghost, so I switched cards. Not only did I get a signal, but I was able to set up in the BIOS and on the reboot went straight into windows. Success! Except for about an hour later, the PC wouldn’t ‘wake’. The following reboot, didn’t boot.

I set about testing all of the component’s, the power switch, power supply, reset the BIOS, everything. Nothing. I even went back and tested the RX480 that I though might have dies and it works fine. There was only two possible culprits. After swapping the 4670 into the B*% motherboard, we were down to one.

What Did I learn?

The first thing I learned was that my troubleshooting process was sound. I also learned that even with a bad deal, something good can come of it. I made YT content and this blog. And, I learned, or relearned, that used parts fail. They don’t always fail spectacularly, like the RTX 2060 in the blog here , but eventually they do fail. Knowing that keeps me from being upset, but I am disappointed.

What do I plan to do next? I’m already looking for another Z97 board, but as I mentioned I’m trying to find a good deal, especially now that the investment has another seventy five bucks tacked onto it. When I find one, I’ll do more testing. Until then I will just do more learning, like not matching modern components with much older hardware.

If you are curious how this experiment went, feel free to check out the video here.