tl;dr High volume low speed airflow rocks for cooling a home desktop computer.
I just did a mechanical service on the home build I started just before all the caching issues broke out last year. Overall performance is quite good but it is the servicability issues which worked out the best. This was my first water cooling system and I went with push pull cooling for the radiator. By far this cooling setup outperformed my expectations. I had really only expected to reduce the ambient noise when the heat and p/s load issues would spin up the various cooling fans. Its the secondary effect of passing the air through the box at a constant low speed which surprised me the most. Not only is this the quietest home PC Ive ever had, its the cleanest. Interior environments differ across the board in terms of heat, dust and humidity but the home environment is the stickiest due to the higher concetrations of cooking oil particles in the air. We've all seen the pictures of dust encrusted neglected power supplies and box cooling fans. I certainly saw enough of them in my time and generally keep a small assortment of fans around. I had fully expected that after one year I would have to pull the interor radiator fans for cleaning and swap them to the exterior and vice versa I was happily surprised when I opened the unit up completely for a service. Not only did it appear to have less than typical (for my place) dust adhesion around fan blades and hubs, the planar surface was almost pristine with the usual hotspots conspicually absent significant buildup. The fan for cooling the vidio card was fine and so was the p/s. A few swipes with 99% isopropanol swabs cleaned the fan blades and the interior side of the radiator. I didn't have to touch the exterior ones. Those fans tended to blow the settling particles away and they land on the inside of the exterior grill vent. Once and a while, if I listen carefully, I can hear the cpu cooling pump or the video card fan but I actually have to listen for it, instead of being bothered by it. All in all I'm quite sure the additional expense at build time for water cooling and extra indirect ventilation will pay off in the long run. If not in actual extention of serviceability til EOL but in ease of service. TODO,s I have to construct an adapter plate for the exterior radiator fans. Currently I am using a Canadian Red Green fix as opposed to the tradional IBM blue wire fix. ie. One screw and a couple of strips of duct tape hold the pull fans to the frame. The optical audio cable doesnt seat properly. I think the tiny flap on the mb connection side has some dangling chad dross I have to take care of. All in all a fun robust build with better than expected results considering all the meltdown suff that started just after I comitted to this particular form.
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