Buy air cooler
Look inside
Water
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
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Porsche used to agree, until 1998.
It depends on which part of the environment the heat is being exchanged with - if your watercooling system is releasing heat to the ground under your house or a somebody else suggested (which is even more effective) a river next to your house, it’s not at all equivalent to air cooling.
Further, the heat storage capacity of a material depends on both the kind of material and its mass, so almost all liquids have a higher heat sforage capacity per unit of volume than air (certainly water does) and solids even more (much more, given their much higher density) so even in the big scheme of things (i.e. were will most of that heat end up in given enough time), even heat released by a watercoolong system to the air will mostly end up in tne Earth’s crust and oceans and only a tiny fraction of it will remain in the athmosphere.
