If money was no object then liquid cooling is absolutely worth it. Keeping the temperatures of your components down is a great way to keep them running efficiently and could prolong their life. Pros: Better thermal performance.

According to Mark Gallina, liquid cooling more “efficiently distributes heat over more convection surface area (radiator) than pure conduction, allowing for reduced fan speeds (better acoustics) or higher total power.” In other words, it’s more efficient, and often quieter.

Liquid cooled systems require maintenance, you may have to periodically top-off the fluid levels. They’re extremely heavy, and much more difficult to ship safely. It’s also worth noting that a liquid cooled system is a fair bit louder than most of our systems.

Open-Loop liquid coolers, or coolers that you build from scratch, suggests that you’ll have to empty the system and refill it with another coolant when needed. Most setups can last over 12 months but it’s recommended that you at least do an inspection every 6 months.

Liquid cooling is the best way to cool a CPU because water transfers heat much more efficiently than air. Liquid cooling also makes your PC run quieter because you won’t have fans constantly running at a high RPM. However, liquid cooling a PC can also be dangerous if water leaks onto hardware.

Since the 9900K is basically Intel’s current top of the line CPU, I’d go with water cooling. If however you don’t feel comfortable with water cooling, absolutely don’t force yourself to do it.

Almost all water cooling issues boil down to user error. Pre-built, closed units have been known to leak, but very rarely—and your warranty should cover damage caused by a leak (look for this kind of warranty when you buy a closed unit like the Corsair H100).

No it doesn’t. Your CPU and GPU might in fact use even more power since they are cooled down better. In fact water cooled PC will use more power also because you need to have pump powered, and you even have more fans plugged in than usuall.

Susceptibility to leaks:Poorly implemented liquid cooling system is likely to result in leaks. Note that water or liquid coolant can accelerate the corrosion of metal parts and damage electronic components. Pressure inside tubes can also build up due to too much heat absorbed by the liquid resulting in leaks.

Water cooling can potentially use less power if it is keeping parts like the GPU significantly cooler. Transistors will use less power at the same switching speed if they are kept at a lower temperature.

You’ll be fine with a top air cooler unless you want to be squeeze everything out of your CPU. I run my 9900K @ 5GHz with 1.3V since last October without any issues on my NH-D15. First, look for a Noctua tower or water AIO, and see how your CPU runs.

240mm is enough. You will always be able to further increase it’s cooling performance by setting a push-pull setup and/or using better static pressure fans.

Intel’s i9 10900k Processor is an exceptionally powerful CPU. The cooler dissipates the heat from your i9 10900k processor over a large surface area and uses an air- or liquid-based system to cool it and keep it operational.

When running the Intel i9-10900K at stock settings, it isn’t a scorching hot CPU at 125W so decent air cooling will suffice.

You can easily find an air cooler on par with 240MM AIOs for a fraction of the price. Also, 240MM AIO cooling power is sufficient enough to cool an I9 9900K. If you want a mid-high overclock to get a reasonable amount of air or AIO cooler, then the NH-D15, & Dark Rock Pro 4 comes with great overclocking ability.

With more cores and higher clocks than ever before, you would sort of expect the 10th Gen Intel Core processors to draw more power and thus put out more heat. Well, it seems that you would need more than a mere 240mm cooler to run the Intel Core i9-10900K at stock with reasonable temperatures.

Air coolers can be great for overclocking. Cheap aftermarket air coolers, like the CoolerMaster Hyper 212, can handle pretty big overclocks just fine. And other air coolers, like a Noctua NH-D15, can handle almost anything.

It is possible to overclock a CPU without a liquid cooling system if you have aggressive enough forced air cooling and heat pipe heatsinks; likely also a large enough tower case to provide some additional convection cooling. Yes, of course!

Almost certainly not. But water cooling is very rarely about “need”. Air cooling also dumps all the heat from your CPU and GPU onto other components before it is exhausted out of your case. Water cooling lets you get it out to radiators much more directly without heating up the inside of your case.

Overclocking the CPU is oftentimes overrated unless you NEED max performance. For the most part, by the time you NEED to overclock, your hardware is obsolete and needs to be replaced.

At the end of the day, if you think overclocking is a waste of time, then don’t. Also, CPU overclocking is usually worth it, since you can usually get much more noticeable benefits, even in gaming.

To be clear, the matrix is much more complicated when we take into account multi-core frequencies and voltages, but the margin between stock and overclocked frequencies is definitely shrinking. On the surface, that looks like the slow “death” of overclocking.

CPU overclocks are useless though unless you have specific needs for single core IPC. Something like emulation would benefit greatly from it due to how hard it is to sync threads to accomplish the same task.

Single-core overclock is the fastest for Rocket Lake yet. Famous overclocker Hicookie has achieved the highest frequency overclock so far on Intel’s new flagship Core i9-11900K.

Binning is a term vendors use for categorizing components, including CPUs, GPUs (aka graphics cards) or RAM kits, by quality and performance. Thus, it’s possible your desktop’s i3 processor was meant to be an i5 but failed to meet performance standards, so Intel disabled two of its cores to turn it into an i3.

You do need to go beyond air cooling. If you want to go higher (including with other types of components), you need to upgrade your cooling, a milestone for serious overclockers. To be highly competitive, you’ll want to get into liquid nitrogen (aka LN2). But you don’t have to start with LN2.