Is liquid cooling quieter than air cooling?

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Let’s say you’re in the middle of a gaming session and you enter a graphically demanding area (Saint Denis in RDR2 is infamous for this). After a minute, boom: your PC’s fans reach uncomfortable speeds in a desperate effort to dissipate heat. Every gamer with an air-cooled machine has been there, and those moments when the PC gets so loud you could swear it’ll wake the next door neighbors are frustrating. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do right now to fix the problem, as it’s an inherent fault with air cooling. And water cooling is not without its flaws.

A system like this is much more expensive and complex than a series of rotating fans. But in the majority of cases, liquid cooling is quieter than air. Air coolers are generally not known for their cooling efficiency. It’s pure physics: air isn’t as dense as water (or other liquids), so it simply can’t move as much energy. Therefore, when your GPU or CPU starts working harder, the fans reach their maximum speed to overcome some of that extra heat. Now compare this to how liquid cooling works.

A small pump circulates water from the tanks through tubes passing through metal water blocks located on chips. The liquid absorbs some of this heat, which dissipates into the radiator, much like an HVAC system. Of course, a liquid cooling system also uses a fan to help cool the radiator a little faster, but that fan can spin much slower because it’s not shouldering the entire “cooling load,” so to speak, making it significantly quieter.

By raw numbers (noise level varies between systems), you can expect a high-end liquid CPU cooler to stay around 20 to 35 weighted decibel dB(A) under load. To put this into perspective, a whisper is about 30 dB(A), which means a quality system lives up to its reputation. You can also find audio examples on sites like Reddit. For example, even in a scenario where air is likely still flowing through the pump after installation (as others were quick to point out), the attached video remains pretty quiet. In another post on Reddit where users showed off their custom water-cooled build with the pump running at high capacity, the noise level is tolerable.

Most commenters advised the Redditor to keep the pump running at around 50% to extend its life and reduce noise. Either way, the noise level is much lower than what most people are used to with air coolers. In fact, unexplained noises like humming usually indicate that there is a problem with the cooling system. So when you think about it, liquid cooling is a really easy sell if your main goal is to build a near-silent rig.

If you stack a random set of fans against a random AIO, a liquid cooler will be quieter than an air cooler. But this is not a rule, because there are fans designed to be quiet. For example, the Noctua NF-A12x25 G2 sells for $34 on Amazon, and reviewers point out that it may be the quietest air-cooling option available. The main reason for this is the design itself. The Noctua fan runs at a low RPM but also packs a lot of punch in the airflow department.

Noctua isn’t the only brand promising premium performance. Many on Reddit say that Scythe Fuma 2 is a CPU cooler that gives Noctua a run for its money. Some experts (via Hardware Canucks) even claim it’s slightly better in terms of overall noise-to-performance ratio. Either way, you have options that don’t require redesigning your entire PC.

It is easier to change the fans than to acquire a liquid system. However, noise levels are only one layer. High-performance air cooling systems using fans like the aforementioned Noctua can help you control temperatures as well, if not better, than liquid coolers, and at a significantly lower price. After all, if you were just looking for quiet operation, you’d go for a mineral oil-cooled PC, which is virtually silent, but it doesn’t perform any better than a bare-bones AIO, and you don’t see many machines doused in mineral oil, do you?