Watercooling for the PC has been around for years
in some form or another, for at least as long as Scan have been
in business, with basic physics defining why you'd want to use it.
That means for air cooling, to cope with increasing temperature
in the heatsink you need to move the air across it faster. That's
why thermostatically controlled fans in your PC will turn faster
the hotter something gets. The increased rotational speed of a fan,
depending on the heatsink it's moving air from, produces more noise
due to the airflow and physical movement of the fan. It's also obvious
that an aircooled heatsink is exchanging the heat in-place, rather
than moving it somewhere more suitable before getting rid of it.
Alternatively water simply has more capacity to store heat than
air, as a transport mechanism to move the heat from the source to
where it'll be exchanged. So you pass water across your heatsink
instead, obviously in a closed environment so the water can't escape,
using that to carry the heat to an exchanger that can release it
to the atmosphere, usually outside of your case. There's no spinning
fan required depending on the size of the radiator, so there's less
noise, the only needed moving parts in a watercooling loop being
the pump moving the water around, and the water itself.
A regular aircooled heatsink has form factor requirements to comply
to, limiting the size, weight and space it can occupy. Therefore
watercooling, using blocks that fit into the same space as the heatsink
and satisfy the same form factor requirements, solves most of the
problems inherent to aircooling.
You can cope with more heat output, often from multiple heat-producing
parts in your system using the same cooling loop. Everything is
quieter due to less moving parts, even if you use fans on your radiator
to exchange the heat. Lastly, the site you exchange the heat from
can be placed optimally, often outside of your case. Overall, the
only downside is cost, watercooling costing more financially and
more in a time and maintenance sense than aircooling.
Basics out of the way, let's get specific.
