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Yeah… they call it that cuz the same principle applies to vehicle engine cooling.
Air cooling is not as effective as water cooling, but just take a look at beetle engines made more than half a century ago, they’re all air cooled and still up and running. It’s all in the design, if it’s good and overengineered, it will pracatically run forever.
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
they had a tendency to overheat in hot conditions, and when stuck in traffic. this is because they need a certain amount of air flowing in order to cool properly.
they also weren’t very good for heat in the winter.
air cooling is a simpler system, and as such has less to go wrong with it. that doesn’t make it better or worse. there are pros and cons to both systems.
VW and Porsche engines area really oil cooled. They have oil cooling radiators inside fan shrouds with thermal expansion baffles that open when it gets hot and close to prevent overcooling in winter.
They didn’t really overheat very often of all the shroud and engine compartment seals were in place and the baffles were in good working order.
The reason you can often go start up an ancient air cooled engine is mainly that they don’t have any water pumps (and water) to sit in them and rust up. That any that there’s no crazy fuel injectors or fancy electrical systems to fail. Just a Carb and distributor to clean/adjust.
Those problems can be easily fixed with aditional fans.
Really strange that it’s so easy but I don’t see any new cars for sale that do it that way
Maybe it’s because air cooling was abandoned a long time ago. All new cars are water cooled.
You’re almost there. Keep going
Too bad nothing nowadays is meant to run more than 5 years.
Where do people keep getting this from? Cars today tend to last far longer anywhere where winter is a thing.
As for air cooled vs water cooled engines, the power output (and vehicle mass) has to be part of that conversation. Yes air cooling works on on a 25 HP motor, but it doesn’t work so well on modern engines making an order of magnitude more power.
Honestly people give old vehicles (or old anything) way too much credit. It’s survivor bias, only the good stuff lasted this long. The shitty products have all been recycled multiple times by now. I mean think about it, 100,000 miles used to be an old-ass car back in the day, but for anything post 1990 or so that’s just getting started. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the simplicity and repairability of old vehicles
You have clearly never lived with an old air cooled VW engine and dealt with it overheating in traffic.
Or going uphill
If you genuinely think that those old engines are still running on original parts. Then I don’t know what to say, because you wouldn’t understand any of it.
Of course not, but they sure as hell require A LOT less maintenace than our “modern cars”.
They really don’t.
Keep up with services, fluids and treat them with respect. You won’t have a problem.
When was the last time you had to replace a distributor cap on a modern car?
I replaced it on my Vauxhaul Meriva 2006 about 6 months ago, why?
Air cooling is a lot less complex than water cooling, so there are fewer points of failure. If both can do the job, I’ll pick reliability over efficiency every time.
My thoughts exactly.
Similarly it’s actually easier to fuck up the design of a water cooler than an air cooling system. Notably motherboard warp can happen from an improperly set up water cooling.
Didn’t know this, thanks for the info 👍.
Air cooling is not as effective as water cooling,
It’s not that simple because air cooling in pcs today means a heatpipe. A heatpipe uses fluid (such as water under a vacuum) that boils at a low temperature. The phase transition of liquid to vapor transfers hundreds of more times heat than simple conduction of cold water running over the CPU.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
It’s how refrigerator compressors work to cool things so effectively. The genius of a heat pipe is it works without an electric compressor ( this limits it’s cooling ability but it’s still genius).
So a heatpipe CPU air cooler with a 120mm radiator will outperform a water-cooler with a 120mm radiator in almost every situation. The advantage of water-cooling is you can make that radiator huge (280mm is typical today), and place it on one of the side/top panels of the case where air is cool instead of deep inside where the air is hot.
Yeah but VW engines were pretty small, carrying pretty small cars.
It got you from point A to point B, didn’t it?
Cars built today will outlast most of the old Beetles. There is a big survivorship bias at work. A percentage of them were built to slightly tighter tolerances and quality than all the others off the same line. A percentage of those will end up in the hands of owners that are meticulous about maintenance, never get in a major accident, and keep it going for decades. The handful you see left are the ones that went through several rounds of small percentage chances. There were a bajillion of those old Beetles made, so a few were bound to get through.
What cars have problems with today are things that rarely have to do with making the wheels go. They get into accidents. Their auto-dimming back windows no longer work. The GPS doesn’t get updates and thinks you’re three counties away. The engine and transmission, however, will probably go to the junkyard in perfect working order, even with shitty maintenance on the part of the owner.
Two problems with the drivelines of modern cars: sensors, which can cause some pretty spectacular mechanical failures; and cost-cutting engineering. Trimming parts to use less material and that kind of thing, but also less investment in QC (looking at you, Kia engine recalls).
There’s truly more to go wrong in modern cars, and the electronics can fail and cause mechanical failures, too, especially in the combustion cycle.
The fact remains that most cars today will go to the junkyard with perfectly good engines and transmissions. Those sensors tend to kill themselves before killing other parts of the car, and then you just replace them.
I beg to differ, I was an owner of a Renault Megane which had a screwed up onboard computer that somehow managed to mangle 3 timing belts and a cylinder head. I spent more reparing it than the ammount I spent to buy the car… all because of a screwed up onboard computer.
And not one mechanic listened to me, I told them the computer was acting up, throwing errors left and right, then silence for a month, then errors again, they said it’s the sensors 😤… I mean, come on, all of the sensors acting up at the same time, then they go in deep sleep for a month, then the same shit again… excuse me, but you’re either dumb or just wanna squeeze money out of me.
Buy air cooler
Look inside
Water
If you live somewhere that’s consistently 98-100% humidity: Air cooling is simultaneously liquid cooling.
And wheres that, in the occean?
Florida
So basically, in the ocean then.
Another decade or two and you can lose the basically.
Tennessee
Many places in the South. Swamps. Farmland. Etc.
They mean 98%-100% relative humidity. 100% relative humidity is the maximum amount of water that the air can hold at a given temperature and pressure as vapour. Once you get to 100% then you can evaporate any more water / was will start condensing out of the air (especially if the temperature drops)
Personally I just like the lack of difficulty in air cooling. And air cooling can also be very quiet. I have a case with soundproofing inside, and my PSU and GPU fans only spin up when they get hot enough to justify it. The noise level is so low as to be imperceptible. My dog breathes louder.
You have my attention. Tell me more about your dog
- His name is Sherlock.
- He’s a year old.
- He weighs about 70 pounds/~32 kg.
- He’s a mix adopted from a local shelter. Google Lens calls him a Dutch Shepherd. Might have a little pit in him. Gonna get a DNA kit for him.
- He has XXXL ears. Everyone comments on how oversized his ears are.
- He gives the softest, sweetest kisses.
- He does not like walks or new people or new places.
- He loves other dogs.
- He doesn’t understand the cat. Or his boundaries.
- He pooped in the car once.
- If left to his own devices, he will eat all the grass in the yard. The concept of not eating too much fiber at once is one he can’t digest.
- Despite not loving new people, he does warm up to you fairly quick. It took 20 minutes of my in-laws being around before he got lovey dovey on them.
- He doesn’t like bones that much. He’d rather have a cloth toy he can pull apart thread by thread.
- His two favorite places in the world are 1) Daycare, and 2) Wherever mom is sitting. I’m the spare lol
- I wanted to name him Rye Bread because of the color of his coat. My sister in law has a dog named Tater and my brother’s dog is named Biscuit so I thought going with the theme of carbs would be cute. But he responds to Sherlock and that just makes handling him a million times easier so we stuck with that.
Here he is peeping out the window with the aforementioned cat:
10/10 quality dog content
More Sherlock please!!
Your wish is my command
But that’s it. Not gonna overstay my welcome on this lol
Oh my god he looks so much like my family’s dog (rip Lady) some years back. Mix of German Shepherd, American pitbull and amstaff.
Take good care of Sherlock, he seems like a very special and good boy <3
Can you tell me more about your case and noise insulation? I’ve recently been unhappy with my PC’s noise level and I’m looking for upgrades.
It’s the windowless version of the Fractal Design Define R5. The panels are all lined with padding to reduce noise. I have a single Noctua NF-F12 moving air through it. It’s capable of spinning to 2,000 RPM if needed, but it never gets hot enough inside to ever spin faster than 1,200. Even at full speed, the fan is still very tolerably quiet. I only bought the ippc version because it wasn’t brown and brown.
Also, the CPU is a 4790K cooled by a Noctua NH-U9B SE2. It’s a 92mm cooler that fit nicely in my old “Optimus Prime we have at home” case. It has two fans on it that run at a constant 900 RPM. It does a great job keeping heat in check at stock clock, but I wouldn’t trust it in an overclock situation on this CPU.
4790k, one of the longest living processors out there. Still running one in one of our guest machines!
I use a Fractal Design Meshify C myself, and a Noctua D15. Whatever the quietest Corsair fans are, got five. It’s completely silent.
My partner has the same setup, but their machine is quite a bit louder. I think it’s cuz we went with that 35USD ninja… blade… whatever cooler that people recommended for its similar performance to the D15, but 100 less. That thing is quite loud, though.
Before I redid my machine I was using an AIO, a nice Corsair platinum one, and three LL120s. MF was loud as shit. When the AIO spun up, I had to turn my volume up.
When I made all of my changes I DID also put a completely unnecessary 1KW Platinum PSU in there, which has a “fan doesn’t run” mode.
Not OP but I went on my own crusade against noise a few years ago. I had a ryzen 1600 and a 1070 in an NZXT S340 case using the included case fans. I wanted to get rid of noisy components entirely instead of using any kind of sound isolation or insulation because I thought it would be easier to get rid of the problem at the source than to try to hide it. I replaced both case fans with be quiet shadow wings 2s and got a be quiet dark rock 4 to replace the stock CPU cooler. My CPU never used more than 100w but the new cooler was rated for 200w. I thought it would be quieter to have an oversized cooler for my CPU since a bigger cooler would need a slower fan speed to get rid of the same amount of heat as an appropriately sized cooler. I also got a 850w power supply with a mode that turns off the fan completely if it’s using less than 200w. My whole tower used around 300w when playing the games I normally played and around 100w or less while doing light work. I tweaked the fan curves of everything so temps stayed under 50C with light loads and all my fans stayed at about 900rpm. Every fan got faster and louder while gaming but I didn’t notice or care since it was quieter than the sounds and music of the games. After I got all my new fancy fans my 8TB internal HDD became by far the noisiest thing in my whole set up so I built a NAS with hand-me-down hardware and put all my spinning rust storage in a different room. Since then my only upgrades have been a bigger SSD and a ryzen 5800X CPU.
In the dead of night when the whole house is quiet my own breathing is louder than my PC 2 feet away on the desk if I’m not gaming.
CPU AIO’s are awesome, all the benefits of water cooling with none of the hassle.
I fully agree, except my Corsair Platinum was mega loud, until it died. They gave me an upgraded new one under warranty tho!
But I put a D15 in instead.
Edit: side note, the AIO cooled amazingly, worked for over three and a half years, and no liquid escaped. It just got janky.
Air cooling is just radiative cooling with extra steps
nah, radiative cooling means that radiation is the only mechanism for heat exchange in use. I’m pretty sure most modern air coolers use forced convection as one of their heat exchange mechanisms.
The heat released into the atmosphere has to go somewhere. The only place it can go is to be radiated into space
Every type of cooling is just entropy
How does heat get from the water radiator to the air?
Radiation.
Atoms don’t physically touch. The electrostatic force that both binds atoms into molecules and keeps molecules separated is mediated by photon exchange.
Counterpoint: at the boundary layers, right where the air touches the fins, the main mechanism for heat exchange is conduction. Ultimately, convection is just conduction, where the medium undergoing heat conduction is a moving fluid, which massively amplifies the rate of heat exchange.
Air is kinda shit at taking in heat through radiation, but fine at doing so via conduction and convection.
conduction
The metal atoms in the fins don’t move into the air. They stay on the fins. The fins’ atoms have to transfer their kinetic energy via photon exchange to the atoms in the air.
So conduction is radiation at atomic distances.
Ah, I see we’re getting to the point where it’s hard to tell if we’re being philosophical or pedantic.
How does heat get from the water radiator to the air?
Radiation.
The fan blowing on the radiator: Excuse me?
The fan blows air on the radiator. Those air molecules can’t physically touch the radiator. The electostatic forces of atoms keep everything separated. When you touch something, you are feeling the electrostatic force of your finger’s atoms pushing against the electrostatic force of the object’s atoms.
The electrostatic force (that is the electro magnetic force that electrons radiate) is actually photons. The particle of electromagnetism is the photon. When you touch something you are feeling the photons exchanging between the electrons in the atoms of your fingers and the object.
The definition of radiation is photon emission/absorption.
and in convection, at what point are photons being exchanged?
How about in conduction?
I’m pretty sure both of those are just ripples of heat in atoms & molecules spreading to nearby atoms & molecules via more nano-mechanical means, with the former case having that amplified by the fact the atoms & molecules are in motion at a larger scale.
Loosely couple two identical oscillators and excite one, and the second will move as well, no photons needed. At a nano scale, that is how conduction works. And again, convection adds to that the fact that the oscillators can freely move around each other
Loosely couple two identical oscillators and excite one, and the second will move as well, no photons needed.
At the atomic level, nothing physically touches. Electrons do not physically touch each other to transfer momentum. When two atoms get close, the electromagnetic field pushes the electrons away from each other before the electrons touch.
The electromagnetic field is made of photons.
This. And what heat exchange mechanisms are in play when you have a moving fluid? That’s right! Convection!
(And a bit of conduction at the boundary layer, but I already shut off a different fork of this thread by limiting pedantry)
Well yes. It is. Liquid cooling does have merits. I won’t say it’s better than air cooling in a general sense; at the end of the day, the heat ends up in the air.
With liquid cooling, you can transport it further, use larger radiators… The list goes on.
My key point is that as long as the components get cooled, who cares which you use? Do what you want.
Water cooling at what kind of scale? Since you can engineer a system with the final heat exchanger to the environment stuck in a river. Is that air cooling with extra steps?
If we’re talking PC’s though, yes. You’re right.
Some guy once built a geocooled system back in I think 2010, just to cool quad SLI 580s. He had some crazy 6-screen Sony FW900 setup with a fresnel lens.
LinusTechTips has a cooling system that uses a water loop under his backyard pool to water cool an entire home server rack.
Granted uptime seems… less than ideal. They keep not hiring a plumber to do/inspect it and effectively re-jury-rigging it for videos. But solid (liquid) idea.
Air cooling is just vacuum cooling with extra steps.
I get the joke, but the vacuum is usually before the fans, inside the heat pipes.
And it’s the fluid inside the heat pipe doing the cooling not the vacuum,
Yes and no. Remove the vacuum and the heat pipe no longer works. I mean, it works, but it’s no longer a heat pipe.
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The whole point for AIO water loops is that you have more flexibility in radiator placement. For advanced systems you can beat static copper tubes pretty easily by moving more water.
Idk, needs more steps, put a Peltier in it, a heat exchanger with a second loop, and don’t forget the compressor for extra chill.
And also make it so that the end radiator doesn’t radiate heat into the air but into the ground instead, so that it won’t be just air cooling with extra steps.
Unless you’re in a boat, in which case you’re likely using a water to water heat exchanger.
Have you seen what Linus did with his pool lmao
Shit in it?
Common mistake, you’re thinking of the goodwill he used to have with his audience that he shit in.
Oh, so that’s what I taste whenever I watch those videos now…
It’s shit.
… Never ate shit before, so I had no idea that is what it tastes like.
The one where he complained about the cost of running a pump and tubing out to a fucking swimming pool? Like, yes, this is going to cost more than a very good gaming PC.
Bought water cooler when I built it. That was five years ago. No problems so far.
I am not a gamer so my fans only spin up when the vents clog with dust or I am doing some high end rendering. I’d never do water cooling because a leak could kill everything. I have lived through floods.
You can use oil or other non conductive fluids instead.
