Recently a customer of mine found himself in a small bind. Some time ago, he invested a good deal of money into a great gaming PC, with a gorgeous water cooling system. Unfortunately, due to events outside of his control, he was unable to keep up with a scheduled maintenance for flushing the coolant, which allowed for some growth in the coolant and on the water block fins and the system had begun to lose some fluid over the course of a few weeks. He had growth and a slow leak on his hands!

At this point, the swiftest and most cost effective solution was to drain the system, remove the water cooling parts and replace them with air cooling heat sinks and fans. In the end, the components chosen for this conversion, left the system with very similar levels of cooling, quieter operation, as there was no more pump and the new fans added on both the GPU and the CPU came with very low decibel fans.

For the CPU cooler, we chose the Noctua NH-D15, a very beautiful and very large heat sink and silent fan system that in his system is providing the same level of cooling for his CPU as the water cooling system had been. When running his favorite games, the CPU maintained the same, steady 36 degrees Celcius.

For the GPU, the only readily available aftermarket cooling system available was the ARCTIC Accelero Xtreme IV Enthusiast VGA Cooler. With triple fans, coupled with an application of Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut thermal compound, the GPU is seeing higher temperatures than under the water cooling system, but this increase is still well before the danger threshold for the GPU.