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What are the rubber circles for on the back of my pc case? Should I just leave them like that if don't have a need for them? Or are they likely to let I'm dust into the motherboard?
Edit: thanks for all the replies, so just for water cooling I have no need for.
They are external ports for water cooling. They allow you to run the pipes to an exterior location, and I have never seen anyone use them ever. I would leave the rubber grommet as it generally looks nicer than the hole.
This is the correct answer - I know because I was there 10000 years ago and had to decide between this and buying a special case from koolance. Amusingly they still sell one for the outside.
They can also be handy if you have to do anything weird like route display cables from the GPU to the motherboard like for a thunderbolt display.
Is water cooling for PC gaming still a thing? It's been 10+ years since I followed any trends.
Air cooling and closed loop coolers have gotten better, and honestly no one can afford to spend $3000 to get 3° lower temps any more.
I built a PC recently, and when researching it still seemed a large chunk went with water cooling still. AIO in particular.
Only sort of, it still exists but it's a lot more compact now. And not super common as far as I know, like the other poster said here air cooling has come a long way. I've got a water cooled GTX 1080 Ti in my rig right now, but it's basically just a couple rubber tubes coming off the GPU leading to a little square radiator that I have a fan bolted to. It all sits inside the case (or, well, it's intended to... My case isn't quite large enough for everything I've got in it so I've got the radiator and fan a little bit jury-rigged to the front of my case right now. No biggie.)
Probably for external radiotors. Outside of the case you can make them bigger and thus more silent.
Radiators? Nah, open loop. One end to the faucet, other end to the drain. If you’re on well water it goes right back down to where it came from.
I've always wanted to have to clean hardened calc/lime out of my CPU cooler!
They're also useful if you are doing weird stuff with your PC and you need to run a connector into or out of your pc
Built a computer for a guy years ago. Dual titan X, 3 radiators in a little fucking HAF tower. He bought two exterior radiator mounts
Was about to ask what one does with dual Titan Xs, but the obvious answer is whatever the hell one wants.
Yeah SLI was still a thing at the time. From what I gathered he was trying for XOC records on liquid. He only came to us because he didn’t want to spend the time building it
Years ago, I saw someone run a copper loop through this newly poured basement foundation just to use to cool his pc silently.
Yeah I remember that post on Reddit. Holy shit my mans literally ran like 1000ft of copper through his ceiling into his house's plumbing lmao. He also had a WILD monitor setup, was more like a pit than a desk.
Now that I'm home, I can find the post I'm remembering.
oh, no. It's much older then reddit. It was an old Slashdot post from 2009.
If i could show you the amount of awful 5 gallon bucket, recycled tygon and aquarium equipment "water cooling" loops i used to use for shit, you'd probably piss your pants laughing.
Found it.
Speaking off cooling and piss, I once saw a streamer experiment with cooling a pc with his piss. Well, I'm saying it was his piss. For ToS reasons, he made it clear he couldn't say it was his piss. It was ill-conceived and he couldn't get far enough to actually do a benchmark test.
Ah, it could be dubbed the Bear Grylls mod.
Ive used mine before because the rad was too big to fit internally.
I knew someone who had the MO-RA3 through those ports and had it on the other side of the room. He sold it to another person in the discord server we were in and he actually installed it in his basement directly below the computer on the floor above. Wild
The rubber didn't agree well on my old case. I poked it a couple years ago trying to figure it what it might be and the little triangles has gotten stiff and snapped off on one side, so I stopped poking it.
I was today years old when I learned what they were for though. I knew it was some kind of tube or pipe or hose, but I've spent about 0.3 seconds actually thinking about it so I never figured it out.
I used them on my old Build! Pretty neat if it got some light up the back, but I went back to air cooling, so I’ve got then holes of glory again.