Is water cooling worth it?
Is water cooling worth it?
When you increase the speed, you aim to go beyond what the air cooler can handle, making water cooling necessary until you hit the desired performance or risk damaging the mainboard and CPU. Not always the case. You're more likely to hit a voltage limit than a thermal one, though both are linked. Stability often comes first for overclockers, usually fixed by boosting voltage, which in turn adds more heat—often more than needed. Also, CPUs from the 6700 and 7700 series generally stay cooler than older models. Many people have successfully overclocked i7s with effective air cooling. The main challenge usually lies with the user, not the hardware itself.