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I don't really understand these water cooling setups. Surely the whole point of having a circulation system is to allow you to move the radiators away from the sources of heat, i.e. outside the case. In a building, you have the AC system outside, on the roof. Including the pumps and fans, which also produce heat.
But in watercooled PCs, all this seems to be inside the case, which seems stupid.
chez_jay-
For the same reason that, unless you drive a Beetle, 2CV or pre-996 Porsche, your car (if you have one) probably uses water as a coolant and has a water to air heat exchanger or radiator. Fluids are far more efficient at absorbing and dumping heat than air. Same reason the radiators in your house are full of water, not air. Hopefully.
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The full setups will have the radiator at the front pulling cold air in and some fans at the back to expel the warm air. Its no worse than having the radiator outside the case entirely, in fact maybe better because you benefit from the air pressure inside the case helping to expel the warm air. The main benefit of water cooling is it can be much more efficient than fans, much quieter and you can add things like the GPU without relying on the stock fans. Saying that you can achieve just as good results with the right fan based setup but it takes more finessing.
AIO water coolers, IMO, are a good upgrade to a standard CPU fan. I know some fans can get decent results but I always struggled until adding an AIO cooler and they also free up space in the case to help airflow for the GPU.
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I don't really understand these water cooling setups.
Clearly :)
Brommers
Sumo
Brun
You're not wrong, 30 series GPUs are hens teeth at the moment and you'd struggle to find an AMD one too! Would you be interested in 2nd hand? You could probably find a 2080ti second hand if you wanted, but for the amount they go for you're 2/3 of the way to a 3070!
As for water cooling it can be as gentle as you like - I also hate RGB and spinning fan crap. I had a Corsair AIO (a previous model to this) that I turned the LED colour to white and it was acceptable.