Are custom liquid-cooled PCs even worth it anymore? Why we’re fast approaching the end for bespoke cooling

The battle for CPU supremacy has left liquid cooling in the lurch

Features By Zak Storey published 12 October 2024

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.

Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox

Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.

Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors