Air Cooled vs. Liquid Cooled Electronics Cooling

It is necessary to properly cool the high power consuming electronic components in order to maximize performance, just like any powerful piece of PC hardware.

A processor’s transistors convert electrical energy into thermal energy (heat) when it’s running normally. As a result, the medium gets hotter. If there’s no efficient allegedly effective way for that heat to escape, then the CPU will overheat.

However, how can you keep your electronic piece running at its ideal temperature with minor residual heat? Using an air- or liquid-based cooler is usually the best way to cool an electronic component.

Let’s talk about liquid cooling vs air cooling: how they work, the pros and cons, and which might be right for you.

A liquid cooling system is very similar to an air cooling system in that both work on the principle of absorbing heat from a component that consumes a substantial amount of power, and redistributing it away from the hardware.

The heat generated by the hot component itself of a personal computer, for example, is distributed to the metal lid of the computer (if the computer has one), which acts as an integrated heatsink to dissipate the heat generated by the hot component itself. As soon as the heat is transferred to the baseplate of the cooler, it is removed from the cooler. There is then a process of distributing either the liquid coolant or the heat pipe heat to an exhaust fan, where that heat is exhausted from the cooler and eventually from the computer by being blown away.

There are a few minor things that differ between the two methods, despite the fact that the underlying mechanics are quite similar.

First of all, let’s take a look at an air cooler.

Air Cooled System

As the heat is transferred from the heat spreader of the chip, through the applied thermal paste, and finally into a conductive baseplate made of copper or aluminum as part of an air cooler, the heat is transferred from the heat spreader of the chip. During the thermal transfer from the baseplate to the attached heat pipes, that thermal energy is converted into heat.

A heat pipe is a device designed to carry heat from one location to another by conducting heat through it. Traditionally, heat is directed to a heatsink that sits atop the motherboard, which allows a greater amount of room for other components, such as RAM, to be installed on the motherboard. There are pipes that carry the heat from these heatpumps to the thin metal fins that make up the heat sink in the form of heat. A fin’s design is to maximize its exposure to the cooler air, which then absorbs the heat from the metal once it has been exposed to the cooler air. A fan connected to the heatsink pushes the warm air away from the heatsink using the force of the attached fan.

Air coolers can be effective in a variety of ways, depending on factors such as the materials used in their construction (copper, for instance, is more conductive than aluminum, although aluminum is cheaper) as well as the size and number of fans attached to the cooling fins of the die. In light of this, it is easy to see why the sizes of and the designs of air-based coolers vary from one another.

Liquid Cooled System

It will mostly be all in one set type of coolers that we are going to be talking about, but the fundamental principles of how liquid cools the hot component are the same for both types of coolers.

This process is similar to that of air cooling in that a baseplate is attached to the hotspot’s heat spreader with a layer of thermal paste that acts as a conduit for the air. There is a greater ability for heat to transfer between the two surfaces as a result of this. It should be noted that the metal surface of the baseplate is part of the waterblock, which is intended to be filled with coolant as it is designed.

During the course of moving through the waterblock, the coolant absorbs heat from the baseplate as it moves. Once the water is pumped through the system, it continues to move upward through one of two tubes to reach a radiator in the top of the system. A radiator exposes the liquid to air, which helps it to cool, and fans attached to the radiator move the heat away from the cooler as soon as it is exposed to air. This process is repeated until the coolant is recycled throughout the system, which repeats the whole process again.