When it comes to cooling your desktop PC's processor there's two main options: air cooling and water cooling. Air coolers are the simpler and more popular option, but can be noisy, where as watercooling can be near silent with a good pump while allowing you to push your chip harder.
But what about combining both? YouTuber Major Hardware decided to find out if such a thing would work.
As Tom's Hardware reports, James, a mechanical engineer by day and owner of the Major Hardware YouTube channel, wondered how well an air cooler encased in a water block and attached to a pump would work. He chose the Hyper 212 EVO air cooler and constructed a tank to surround it using aquarium-building techniques.
The video above shows how well it worked using a container of ice-filled water and a cheap $10 pump. The ambient temperature of the processor initially dropped from 45 degrees Celsius down to just 33 degrees. Then, after overclocking the Core i5 he was using and running a full CPU load for 11 minutes, the temperature increased to 44 degrees, which is still a degree below the original air cooled ambient temperature.
James' experiment proves watercooling an air cooler works really well, but it needs some additional work before this could be used in a system. There's no radiator at the moment, meaning the water would eventually become saturated with heat and temperatures would spike. The setup also need a better pump.
The good news is, the size of the water block doesn't limit access to slots on the motherboard, which means in theory this could be setup to work inside a desktop case. And as James points out, adding RGB lighting would make this quite a spectacle to see in action.