(August 3, 2014 at 6:00 pm)ignoramus Wrote: I've had custom liquid cooling for about 10 years now.
I have it for one main reason. Quietness!
Liquid cooling is cool, yes (see what I did there?).
There are ways to quiet noisy fans, however. The system that houses my RAID array sits in my bedroom a few feet away from my head when I'm sleeping. Can't hear a peep out of it. The secret is to have a solid case with no ill-fitting panels to rattle, a little sound dampening foam, and running high-cfm fans at low speeds. In addition to the CPU cooler and the power supply fan, I have three big variable speed fans gently pushing high volumes of air through the case. It's very cool, and very quiet.
I notice the front panel LED a lot more than the fans (and a piece of electrician's tape solves that problem).
With that build, the problem with liquid cooling is that I have to keep four drives cool as well, and there's nothing like moving air to do that. A typical desktop isn't going to have that problem unless you're doing something sick like running 15K rpm drives.
