You need to cool your PC’s processor no matter what, but you can do so in different ways—with a heatsink and one or more fans for old-school air cooling, or with an AIO liquid-cooled setup as seems to be the trend for any high-end PC setup. But which is better?
PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray cornered Nick from Gear Seekers on the show floor at Computex 2025 to finally have a knock-down, drag-out debate. Or at least a friendly chat.
If you’ve tried both regular air cooling and liquid cooling, you can probably write the list of pros and cons yourself. Liquid cooling has a small edge in performance for high-end setups, while a solid air cooler will beat any cheap or poorly installed AIO easily. Liquid cooling is generally quieter, but a noisy cooling pump could be a nuisance. AIO setups take longer to install, but offer easier access to the motherboard for complex builds. Air coolers are easier to clean, but cleaning out your desktop is infrequent enough that the time savings aren’t huge.
At the end of the day, your personal preference is going to weigh into this decision a lot. But I think I can say with confidence that if you want value, you go for air cooling every time. The complexity of a pump, coolant, radiator, coolant lines, and fans versus just spreading heat across metal and blowing it away with a fan, means that an air cooler will beat out an AIO at the same price point pretty much every time.
For more talk on the ins and outs of PC building, subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube and watch our weekly podcast The Full Nerd.
