Air Cooling Bias Confirmed

And I’m not speaking of cars or bikes, either.

When I bought my main PC on FB Marketplace last year, it ticked all the boxes for me: Decent GPU, 32GB DDR5, mid-tier CPU, 1TB M2 (which I originally thought I’d upgrade this year, but turns out I’ll have to wait for until the LLM Battle Royale produces some losers, Hynix workers get a break after order cancellations, and component prices come down a bit). The only thing I didn’t like about it was the AIO water cooler for the CPU, not because of the particular brand (NZXT) or model (don’t care), but because I don’t trust them in general and am paranoid about them leaking onto other components.

The past couple of weeks, I was crashing in some demanding games and started down the path of reinstallation, wiping caches, and hardware monitoring. This was lucky, because it let me know something was wrong. I was hosting a “Pokemon with guns” server (normally cake for my PC) and started seeing weird lag even through restarts and changed settings. This led to a sudden shut down and a boot loop, but I eventually got to BIOS and saw the CPU at 100 degrees. I immediately shut down, removed the glass side panel, and felt both AIO hoses. One was hot and the other was cold, so I knew the cooling system was dead.

So it’s back to air cooling for me, and good riddance to AIOs. I never want to use them again.

Note: for a couple days, I’m on my laptop and phone and we are on a Palworld break.