That was a long and rambling post with a lot of... oddness in it. It's not weird if people feel cold next to a source of airflow - wind chill due to perspiration and the general water content of human skin (not to mention the temperature differential between human body temperature and most indoor air) explains that. This will obviously drop the temperature of your skin, but not below ambient unless said ambient is extremely hot (and if not, then you're looking at hypothermia if your skin temperature is anywhere approaching ambient).
Cooling anything below ambient temperatures with airflow alone, though, is impossible. Period. Thermal transfer works by thermal energy moving from where there is a lot of it (something hot) to where there is less of it (something less hot). The bigger the difference the faster the transfer, generally. If two things are the same temperature, there is no thermal transfer between them. And if your CPU was indeed colder than ambient (say you had it in the freezer and took it out) putting lots of airflow across a heatsink connected to it would serve to heat it up faster, not keep it cool for longer. So while what you're saying about feeling cold next to your PC is entirely plausible, your tale about it being colder than the air in the room is pure nonsense.
Beat me to it! I was at work trying to wrap my head around these statements all day. In my mind it was like "CPU temps under ambient without LN2 or dry ice? Okay... where should I start?" I mean, all I did was ask about how he could be getting sub-ambient temps, only using... the air in the room. What I got was a bit... unexpected
I know all about what fans do. In very hot, desperate times, I've learned about what arrays of BIG box fans do. My conclusion... they move the air around. And they dry things... like puddles and sweat.
I mean, I have lived in south florida all of my life! I only WISH it was true that the air coming out of the fan was cooler than the air coming in! That would be amazing. You can ask anybody who's been stuck with no AC in subtropical south florida what their opinions on fans are, and most will say "Eh, they mostly just move the air around." No joke, it's basically a down-home saying, passed on for generations. Because when the air in the room is a literal 90F and you sit in front of the fan, it's really hard not to notice that the air blowing over you is still hot. Obviously, YOU feel a little cooler because it's helping the sweat evaporate and pull a little heat off of your skin, but you don't need to be a physicist to understand that all it's doing is blowing that same hot air over you.
I could also add that it's a little off to assume people here don't care about airflow, when most people on here's number one criticism of cases today is that many of them completely ignore airflow for style. It's also interesting that he assumes budget is why people don't want giant, desk sized cases for their gaming/general-use machines. Most people just favor something practical that cools effectively enough and does so quietly. You don't need a massive case for that. Good coolers on your CPU and GPU paired with a decent airflow setup will do that... with 4-6 fans max, a lot of times. I cooled my 2600/2060 build with just two intakes and it was dead quiet with very good temperatures running sensible overclocks. And to get there, it took some planning, testing, tweaking, and swapping... just gradually trying to get everything working together as effectively as possible.
People actually do put some time and thought into balancing it, you know? There's some skill in taking a case that's not built ONLY for airflow and setting things up to still keep it running quiet and keeping everything cool enough to not throttle. It's not so bad to have a well-performing build that cools good, and looks good doing it, with a low footprint! The only downside is that the air coming will be hot, because there's not a lot of volume for the heat energy to disperse across, so it won't cool the ladies' legs off at all when they wear skirts. Personally I don't consider that a downside but to each their own. As long as the heat is moving out of the case I am happy.
I'm sorry... that was too weird for me to not say something. Why would you mention that in a serious way, ever? I say some weird stuff, but man...
If you wanna go ham overclocking, that's one thing. I can give him that... not many here are doing that, though I can think of a few who do and have for over a decade. Most others adapt that same knowledge to their own needs. But that's kind of always been the case, pretty much everywhere. People mostly just want to build nice machines with hand-selected parts that run in an optimal and balanced way, with a nice compromise on performance and stability. The idea is to avoid overkill, not dive-in head first. To equate that goal with a lack of knowledge is... interesting in that I feel like it takes a decent understanding of how things work to even want to do that in the first place. But I guess in this case that somehow translates to "Everybody just mindlessly throws their builds together."
I also find it hard to believe there are actually that many people out there who only buy fans for LED's. That's more because they're prevalent. You see them everywhere, because they ARE everywhere. The more prevailing opinion here seems to be that LED fans are overpriced. A lot of Noctua lovers here. I mean, yeah, people like making their builds look nice. Count me in on that, but it doesn't mean nobody cares about actually building a good machine and setting it up properly lol. I mean, what's the point if your build sucks? Nobody's gonna care about that! They're just going to point and laugh.
The idea that the best air coolers will beat out a real custom loop is... well I guess there's some room for debate due to the variation. But it's not hard to build a loop that significantly outpaces air. That's not exactly new. AIO's might be a different story, but even some of those can give the widely-regarded best a run for their money, and can even be more favorable in certain airflow-limited situations, where you can't rely on air moving through the case getting where it needs to go, but can still get plenty of good air through the radiator. It's just a different way of solving the same problem.
It all just reads to me like "You guys just aren't obsessed enough with air cooling to get sub-ambient temperatures in a gigantic case, like I do! Geez, times have changed!" Just seemed to come out of nowhere.
