What’s The Difference Between Air Cooler and Water Cooler?

When it comes to coolers, there are generally three attributes you want to consider: price, performance, and size. While there are a wide range of both air and liquid coolers to choose from, each with specific pros and cons, there are fundamental differences between air and liquid coolers, and each offers distinct advantages and have different drawbacks. Here’s how air and liquid coolers compare to each other.

The key difference between air and liquid cooling

Despite having very different performance profiles, air and liquid coolers are largely similar when it comes to how they work. Both types will come with a mass of thin, metal fins called heatsinks, which is where all the heat from a chip ends up. Fans are then used to bring cool air across the fins to transfer the heat from the metal to the air, allowing more heat to enter the heatsink from the processor. Air and liquid coolers usually even use the same fan sizes, often 120mm or 140mm. Though, liquid coolers exclusively use 120mm or 140mm, a handful of air coolers will use smaller or larger sizes, it just depends on the model.

The key difference is in how these coolers get the heat from the processor to the heatsink. Air coolers use metal heat pipes, which are thin and full of fluid that is constantly changing from liquid to gas and vice versa, which helps heat traverse the pipe and into the heatsink. Liquid coolers instead use water or another coolant, which is pumped through tubes to draw heat away from the heat-generating components (such as the CPU) into a specific kind of heatsink called a radiator. Since water can hold so much energy, it’s a big performance advantage on paper.

Air coolers are generally more affordable and offer better performance compared to liquid coolers, making them a cost-effective option for lower-end and midrange builds.
Liquid coolers can provide significantly better cooling potential, especially with larger radiators, making them ideal for high-end CPUs that require efficient cooling to avoid thermal throttling.

summarize

• Air cooling is cheaper and gets you better bang for buck
• Liquid coolers can perform much better than air coolers