Liquid Cooling - What are the advantages and disadvantages?

[aspire]

The fluid is defiantely not non electrically conductive!

In fact many additives that are used in water cooling are actually highly corrise towards pcb.

 

[reggie_da_man]

Liquid cooling is a waste of money if your not into overclocking as posted above.

 

[aspire]

Again, technically not true.

Water or liquid cooling is great for ultra silent or near silent cooling that simply cannot be achieved using conventional fan based methods.

Zalman has made quite a name for themselves in this particular area.

 

[cwiz]

the advantage to watercooling lies in the physical properties of using a liquid instead of a gas fluid to cool.
a) the viscosity to density ratio is lower for water. Air @20*C, 1.516x10^-5 m^2/s. (Saturated) Water @20*C, 1x10^-6 m^2/s.
we will denote this ratio (the kinematic viscosity) as 'v.'
the equation for Reynolds number (which is directly proportional to heat transfer, aka the higher the reynolds number, the higher the heat transfer) is Re=VL/v (fluid velociy * Characteristic length/kinematic viscosity)
In other words, for all things being equal, water's Re number will be a full power of ten higher than air.
b) water can hold much more heat than air. Water's Specific Heat Capacity is 4186 J/(kg-K) and air's is 1012 J/(kg-K). So water can hold about 4x more heat.

thats all the detail i feel like getting into right now... it gets deep.