Water cooling vs Fan coolers..

Hi everyone, i have very limitted information on water cooling, and therefore have no idea as to whether its effective or not so whats more effective, liquid cooling or fan cooling? I also want to buy a new chassis and i have set my eyes on the Armor LCS (Liquid Cooling System) chassis which has a pre-fitted water cooling system, question is, is this better than lets say a normal Armor chassis with lets say a Zalman CNPS9500 cooler?
Lets say i decided to buy a water cooling system, would i need to re-fill the liquid and if yes, after roughly how long, thanks.

 

unless you're going to be doing some serious overclocking then water cooling is overkill. a zalman 9500 will do u just fine while saving u a bundle of cash

 

Hi viper_boy, i was planning on using water cooling on an AMD 3500+ that has been mis behaving of late with a bit of overheating, idling at 51'C when ambient temps are around 25'C. you dont think water cooling would be a good idea, is it because its much more effective than fan coolers?

 

Water cooling is more effective than air cooling but if you're idling at 51C in those conditions then I would guess that your air cooling is not working well anyway (you should be able to get it under 40C).

I air cool my AMD 3700+ with a Sythe Ninja and idle at 35C in ambient temperatures of 22C (and the CPU cooler doen't have a fan on it at all) so my guess is either that the contact between your CPU and heatsink is poor (either because the compound is dried out or because the heatsink isn't attached properly) or the airflow through your case is dreadful (and therefore hot air can't escape turning the case into a nice warm oven).

First question is what fans do you have on your case? Best is at least one intake fan (cool air in) and one exhaust fan + your PSU fan (hot air out). I recommend more. You'll also want to see what could be blocking the flow of air across the case, cabling, lots of hard drives blocking airflow etc.

Hope this helps.

 

Orbital57 is right. Your cpu shouldn't be idling at that high of a temp anyway.

Remove and reinstall the existing heat sink using a quality thermal paste like artic silver 5 and see how that effects the temps.

My amd 4000 cpu idles at 34c using the stock HSF and the amd 3500 in my son's computer idles at around that same temp - mid 30's.

If new thermal paste doesn't bring temps down then check into replacing the fan on the HS.

It's probably one of the two causing the problem.