BonzaiDuck
Lifer
- Jun 30, 2004
- 15,867
- 1,540
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Any Air cooler will not even approach a Corsair AIO H110.
Not true -- unless you're talking about totally-stock deployment of the cooler. We compared our numbers months ago. My NH-D14 could only keep up with your H110, and I had to build a duct for it and use an uncommonly beefy fan.
But I found another air-cooler that beats the D14 by 6C degrees in a comparison of conventional stock deployments. The benchmarks in the reviews proved it; I replicated their proof. Put it another way, though.
Those benchmark differences fairly well translate into comparisons of "enhanced" cooler configurations that are identical between the two coolers being compared. If I could improve the D14's performance by 6+C with just the "mods" -- ducting -- fan-choices, and if my current cooler offers 6C improvement in the review benchmarks, than I score a 12C improvement overall above the stock D14 installation.
And I can measure it. I can also understand why you water-cooled your graphics cards: air-cooled graphics throws off any comparison. I put a second graphics card into my system, and load temperatures on the CPU increase by 4 to 5C, even as the cards aren't being stressed themselves. So with that aspect thrown into the mix, comparisons can be less accurate. Either less accurate or more troublesome.