CPU cooler: air and water cooler, tips and market overview

CPU cooler

PC and CPU cooling

In the last few days, the beginning of summer has finally been announced - sooner or later one or the other gamer will focus on the topic of cooling. Of course, cleaning the inside of the PC or replacing the thermal grease can help - but maybe a new CPU cooler is required, maybe as part of a CPU upgrade.

Table of Contents

Page 1 CPU cooler: Air cooling 1.1 Air cooler Page 2 CPU cooler: Water cooling 2.1 Water cooling Page 3 CPU cooler: Tips for buying and PC cooling 3.1 Buying tip: Air or water cooling? 3.1.1 General tips for cooling Page 4 CPU cooler: Before buying and market overview 4.1 Measures before buying a new 4.1.1 Market overview: CPU cooler Page 5 Image gallery for "CPU cooler: Air and water cooler, tips and market overview" Aufklappen For this occasion, we have created a special about CPU coolers for you, in which we also offer a market overview with 40 CPU coolers each based on air and water cooling. First we explain the principle of air and water cooling and give some general tips for cooling a gaming PC.

Air cooler

With an air cooler, the heat sink heats up by making contact with the one to be cooled Component and absorbs its heat. It then gives off the heat to the surrounding air - this explains the name of this principle. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to CPU coolers from here on. A distinction is made between tower and top blow coolers. The latter has nothing to do with dirty films, but rather describes a design in which the cooler is rather flat and a fan usually blows onto the CPU from above. This format is only recommended for PCs that require very low coolers. Otherwise, tower coolers are the better choice.

Almost 40 lamellar levels: The Scythe Mugen 5 Rev. B Source: Scythe Tower coolers are comparatively high and consist of a massive lower area whose underside is in contact with the CPU surface. The heat moves upwards very quickly via so-called heat pipes. There is then a construction made of several slats. The warm air that collects between the fins is blown away by a fan attached to the cooler. Because of the fans, one speaks of active air cooling. There are also passive air coolers - but these are only suitable for PCs with little waste heat, or you need case fans that generate a very strong air flow. In our special, however, air cooling is exclusively about the active variant. The fins on the cooler are also very important in order to create a large contact surface with the air. A cooler that is just a cube-like block would be hugely inefficient at this task. Just as a small (somewhat simplified) calculation example: A cube-like cooler with an edge dimension of 10cm would have an outer surface of 600cm². Instead, let's take 20 plates, 10x10cm in size and 0.1cm thick, which we arrange on top of each other with a distance of 0.4cm each. This also results in a cube with an edge length of 10cm, but with 20 lamellas (which would be very little for a real CPU cooler for this size).

Side view of the Alpenföhn Brocken Advanced Source: EKL Alpenföhn It is created 2000 cm² outside area, actually even 4000 cm² if you count the top and bottom of each slat as a single area. Even if you subtract a little more area, since the fins are connected to one another via the heat pipes, that's a big difference. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the cooler, the better it can cool, as it then potentially has more fins than smaller coolers. Of course, this also ensures quieter operation or, in the event of overclocking, that the CPU does not get too hot. Nevertheless, there are also coolers that are slightly smaller than others and still cool better - because in addition to the fins, the material and subtleties also play a role in the construction. The fan is of course also important for the volume of the cooling - there have also been progress here in recent years. Even cheap fans can now move a lot of air without being loud. Coolers from around 30 euros usually have a reasonably quiet fan in the scope of delivery. Of course, the mix is ​​important: A very good heat sink ensures that even a not-so-good fan only has to work at 50 percent speed and the result is quieter in the end than if a moderate cooler is equipped with a top fan but has to work at 100 percent speed.

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