Proper cooling is essential to high performance gaming PC. The cooling system is designed to cool essential components, espcially your CPU and graphics card by radiating heat away from these components.
There are many different kinds of CPU coolers on the market, but they basically fall in to two categories: air or liquid cooling. That’s why before you decide to install one on your gaming PC or pick one for your CyberPowerPC, you need to know which is the perfect cooling system that will work well on your build.
The article below will help you figure out which kind of cooling system is best for your PC:
Main Types of CPU Coolers
A PC cooling system consists of different components. You need to make several choices to pick up the right cooling system. First, you need to decide if you want to go with an air or liquid cooler. Secondly, you also need a thermal paste to apply to your processor to complete the setup. There are different kinds of thermal paste, that offer their own levels of performance.
A CPU cooler also come in different sizes with different fan speeds. The exact type of your cooling system also depends on whether you have an Intel or AMD CPU system – though most coolers come with the mounting brackets for each type of Intel or AMD CPU.
Air Coolers
Air coolers are ideal for the general PC user or gamer. They are affordable, and many aftermarket air coolers that you can use to replace stock air coolers perform very well. However, quality air coolers are typically quite large. This means that there are radiators that may not sit comfortably in your PC case or block RAM slots. PCPartpicker is great tool here to check for component compatibility so you don’t end up with a cooler that does not fit in your case.
Air coolers are usually louder than liquid coolers because they run higher fan speeds to push air through the radiator to dissipate heat out of the case
Below are some types of air coolers you will find:
Twin Tower Air Coolers
Twin Tower Air Coolers are the most commonly used cooler. They are designed with a vertical stack of heat pins arranged parallel to the base of the cooler.
These fins help dissipate heat, which then gets blown away by the fans attached to the cooler.
C-Type Air Coolers
This air cooling system is designed as a top-down air cooler with c-shaped heat pipes that curve from the heat fin stacks. These heat fin stacks are connected to one end of the heating base. This allows the fan to be installed either at the top or the bottom of the heat fins.
This air cooling system has a design that allows multiple fans to be installed on your gaming PC. Most C-Type Air Coolers can fit a variety of CPUs since they have 120mm and 140mm designs.
But when using C-Type Air Coolers, you must know that its thickness and its added fans will determine the airflow quality in your unit.
Simple Air Cooler
While the former two air coolers are commonly used in gaming PCs, a simple low-profile air-cooler will work for a simple build. This type of air cooler also works for users building a computer with smaller cases that do not have a ton of room to play around with.
Liquid Coolers
Liquid coolers are almost always supieror to air coolers when it comes to controlling the temperature of your components. Liquid coolers are the most recommended for gaming PC builds because of their effectiveness.
Liquid coolers also have lower RPMs, which means they operate quitter than air coolers. Heat is passed through a liquid coolant, which conducts (absorbs) heat much better than solids. This then circulates to a radiator which uses fans to push the hot air through fans. The best performing gaming PCs use liquid cooling.
Since liquid coolers come in various sizes, they are easy to integrate into any PC system build. However, you must also consider that this cooling system uses liquid, which can be a potential risk to your PC if it were to somehow begin leaking on the inside of the PC, though this rarely happens these days, especially when using AIO liquid coolers.
Installation of Liquid Coolers
When installing liquid coolers on your gaming PC build, you can choose to buy a closed-loop or install a DIY. A closed-loop liquid cooling system is factory assembled. This means that upon ordering and receiving them, all you have to do is to install them in your unit, and they are good to go. A good example of this is AIO liquid coolers. These consist of a heat sink that attaches to your CPU, and tubes that go to a radiator with fans. Coolant in the tubes is pumped up to circulate through the radiator, and then the fans push this heat out of your case.
You can also choose a custom-built liquid cooling system. These builds are more flexible when it comes to the needs of your gaming PC. Their parts can be arranged, combining different materials, shapes, and sizes. This is more of a hobbyist way of doing things, and is generally not recommended.
Conclusion
For our gaming PCs we recommend liquid cooling for the highest performance. However, cooling technology has advanced a lot, and the performance gap is very marginal when compared to a high quality air cooler. The important thing with cooling is that whichever method you are using is able to keep temperatures in your PC low and stable.
For builds that feature excellent liquid cooling, check out our HyperLiquid II series PCs.