Your graphics card largely determines the performance of your gaming PC. Modern graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD often include powerful heatsinks and cooling fans to keep your GPU cool under load. But liquid GPU cooling offers an alternative to cool your graphics card and prevent throttling. Whether or not you should cool your GPU depends on what you intend to achieve and the level of complexity you’re comfortable with.
Liquid GPU cooling provides huge benefits to GPU temperatures, audio, and performance. If you’re willing to invest the time and money into this endeavor, you can even get a PC that looks like a work of art.
But liquid cooling isn’t perfect either. Choosing a custom cooling card, AIO cooler, or custom water cooling loop is quite challenging and requires many considerations.
First, you’re investing more money that could have been used to buy a more powerful graphics card in the first place.
Second, you need to remove your graphics card to install the AIO or custom cooling loop. Technically, this doesn’t void your warranty in most cases, but it’s still a complicated process that can damage some components of the card if you’re not careful. In such cases, the manufacturer’s warranty will not cover damages caused by this process.
And you end up creating additional potential failure points in components like pumps, radiators, water stops, etc.
If you don’t intend to overclock your graphics card or don’t particularly care about temperatures and fan noise as long as performance isn’t affected, water cooling your GPU doesn’t make much sense, either. financially and in other aspects.
For those aiming for the best audio, thermal performance, and aesthetics, water cooling the GPU makes perfect sense, as long as you can accommodate the cost and technical work required. .