I’ve been building PCs as a hobby since the early 2000s, and have been lucky enough to forge a career around it for the last ten years as well. It’s a critical part of my life, and without it, I wouldn’t even have the opportunity to sit here and write for TechRadar today.
It’s radical, really: I remember sitting down and watching copious amounts of Jayztwocents content on liquid cooling back in 2013/2014, and I lusted after those builds. After all, liquid-cooled machines are just incredible things to behold. Since then I’ve built numerous liquid-cooled systems, for both personal use and for publication too.
Getting into the industry in 2015, the first thing on my mind was building my own custom liquid-cooled rig. The time was right: SLI, Crossfire, hot chips that responded well to larger cooling solutions, big massive cases with a huge amount of radiator support, and awesome liquid-cooled water blocks and particle coolant dominated the market. AIOs were commonplace, sure, but the largest ones landed at 280mm at most, and none of them provided the true guts and glory that a custom rig could get you. I even built a few of them here at TechRadar.
Today though, that landscape has changed massively. It’s changed in ways that back then we just couldn’t predict, and with EKWB and other cooling manufacturers struggling to make a dent in the market or falling foul of financial issues, among other concerns, it got me thinking about whether this might just be the end for that age-old passion of ours. Liquid cooling might just be on its way out - at least, for the time being.
Then vs Now: what’s changed?
For those not in the know, liquid cooling for personal PCs and rigs first came about in the late 90s and early 2000s, as a remedy to the overclocking attempts of the day. CPU cooling was in its infancy, and the chips themselves were easily unlocked. Apply a little voltage and a higher multiplier and you could quite quickly boost performance significantly, as long as you could manage the heat. Plumbing parts were often used as substitutes in those early days.
Over time, companies emerged from that premise. EKWB, Alphacool, and Primochill to name just a few, and with them products were developed, and that was then expanded well into the mid-2010s. Because AMD didn’t provide much in the way of competition back then, it meant that Intel’s 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th gen Core processors were typically quite undervolted as standard, and underclocked as a result, with the company leaning more on efficiency and temperatures rather than brute performance. The architectures were effectively under-utilized, and with sufficient cooling and some tweaks in the BIOS it was quite easy to get some significant performance boosts with the help of fully liquid-cooled systems.
Then Ryzen arrived, and all of a sudden the battle was on between Intel and AMD again, with each company reacting to the other, rapidly developing generations of processors, with smaller transistors, more cores, and higher clock speeds. That led to hotter chips as a result. We moved away from IHSs with thermal paste, to fully soldered articles and voltages ramped up too. Soon enough, turbo-boosts and smart auto-overclocking elements were baked in as standard across both sides of the aisle, almost eliminating the overclocking hobby for most amateurs in the process. With little headroom left in each architecture and the chips and BIOS effectively auto-volting and overclocking parts, it became almost pointless to try and eke out any extra edge manually.
Similarly, case manufacturers and cooling companies followed suit, producing chassis and coolers that could help alleviate that extra temperature for the masses. 360mm and 420mm AIOs became the norm, and are still the go-to best coolers for those looking to build a PC today, even in the smallest of ITX cases.
On the flip side, the GPU race splintered off as well, AMD lost the flagship performance fight, and as GPUs became more specialized, utilizing ray tracing and AI componentry, the cooling solutions included became even more gargantuan in the process. Find me a top-tier GPU today that, under load, runs hotter than 85 C. It’s almost impossible. I’ve got two RTX 4080s here, one an FE Super, the other a Gigabyte Aero OC. Both are practically the size of concrete blocks - and both never ramp up to more than 73 C, even under the most intense of loads.
So what’s the point?
Here’s the thing: back in the day, you could argue for liquid cooling in one of two ways. It was cooler for sure, and it was quieter too than a standard AIO build.
Today though, those arguments are pretty moot. Both Intel and AMD chips at stock run at ridiculously high temperatures already, even with a 420mm AIO or custom loop on them, and now we’ve got plenty of master-crafted fans and controllers around to mitigate that noise build-up too, with BIOS software being far more forgiving at fixed speeds.
Then there’s the convenience. The reality is that, although custom liquid-cooled builds require no small amount of skill and look incredible, they’re massively awkward in comparison to a closed AIO loop. Say you want to swap out a CPU, or a graphics card? If it’s a hard loop, you have to drain the entire system and disassemble it. If it’s soft-tubing, and doesn’t have quick-disconnects, then you might be able to get away with just loosening components, but the chance of a leak is considerably increased. Then you have to swap out the coolant, deal with rubber sealants failing, the works. It’s incredibly difficult to justify, unless you’re not going to be doing anything to your system long-term - but that includes troubleshooting or swapping out failed parts, which can happen to the best of us.
From a cooling perspective as well, there are diminishing returns thanks to some fairly hefty bottlenecks too. That CPU has a limited surface area for it to transfer heat away from the IHS and into the CPU block, and most modern 360mm AIOs will be more than enough to deal with that extra heat.
Subjectively, with some of the best modern AIOs featuring all manner of LCD screens, and GPU heatsinks now looking equally as incredible, the buzz around a beautifully crafted liquid-cooled build just isn't there anymore. Perhaps that’s the reason why companies like EKWB are struggling. No matter how you look at it, unless the market dramatically changes and managing heat becomes more of a critical issue, and we’re given more headroom in these CPUs, there’s just very little reason to go down the fully custom liquid-cooled route. Sit any hardcore long-term PC-builder down and ask them if their next rig is going to be liquid-cooled or not, I think you’ll be surprised at the answer you get.
