Heat Sink or Liquid Cooling?

Don't know if this qualifies as advice, or words of wisdom, but here goes.

Having designed thermal control rationale and materials and processes for electronic equipment that is now operating in a vacuum, directly exposed to the orbital hazards of space, I can tell you that we always strove to remove heat from the entire package, not just a single component. We didn't have the luxury of having air to help us. We relied on conduction and radiation.

If you can take the heat outside the enclosure, do it.

I guess this would be a _{(long winded)} vote for liquid cooling.

heat sink is time tested. let someone else do the testing with liquid cooled

You need a bit more? Use a heat sink + heat pipe assembly, with or without fan. Liquid cooling has not much over it, and cannot spill.

If you are knowing the delta time of tempreture and if it is faster then it is batter to

use water or liquid cooling. Otherwise it is batter to use heat sink with fours cooling

with fan.

Liquid cooling?
What could possibly go wrong...
Del

Liquid is a more compact media for moving heat around. On the other hand, air coolers rarely spring leaks or corrode.

Unless you are planning to boost the speed of your computer by overclocking your CPU I would use the standard air cool design, its cheaper and does not leak and with temperature monitoring programs you should have no problems.

With a new chip set and up to 8GB of ram capability I would have thought you would have plenty of speed, I would not want to try overclocking a new expensive CPU.

According to Intel, the new chipset provides more speed and performance while consuming much less power. While liquid cooling can transport more heat away than air, a good forced air cooling method should be more than adequate for normal operation of these newer CPU's. If you plan on overclocking your system, pushing boundaries for the main CPU, chipset and system ram, you can get very good results with a liquid cooling system. It really all depends your intended use of the equipment, and the complexity of the system you want to put together. Just remember that more complexity is usually a disaster waitng to happen.

Finned Heat pipes with forced cooling, designed for exact wattage may be your solution too.

I appreciate everyone's comments. Based on the general consensus here and from the opinions of computer aficionados, I think I'm going to just go with the heat sink, and maybe look into fabricating some heat pipes. I might OC a little bit, but not enough to warrant the risk of having the rest of my components die out from an accident "just waiting to happen".

Let me know in case you need any help in that.

There is no need to fabricate. Heat sinks with built in heat pipe are available on the internet. Best regards.

We've got two last generation intel machines (i5-760; i7-930) both bought with liquid CPU cooling.

The cooler in the i5 began failing (circulator? radiator clogging?) and was replaced with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO, with two fans (push/pull). This air cooler performs noticably better than the replaced liquid cooler ever did.

The i7 liquid cooler has twice the radiator, and performs well for this hotter chip. I did need to vacuum the dust off of the radiator recently, and it reduced the CPU temperatures by 10 C at full load!

i7-2600 chips produce less heat than the i7-930.