Quote (King Atrhur @ Jul 19 2018 06:33am)
Temps will be down initially but they will climb, It in no way will passively cool a cpu at idle for any extended period of time.
Being as such the rad requires fans to operate functionally. Otherwise not having a cooler could be argued to work as well just for a shorter duration but still theoretically work.
It isnt ever passively cooling, anyways. The pump constantly cycles water through from cpu through rad, and back to cpu again. You are turning 1 square inch of cooling surface to hundreds of square inches of cooling surface as well as the thermal loss from cpu heating water. The rad alone would prevent the cpu from ever reaching critical temperature. Cpu + gpu doubles the heat generated.
Airflow is good to plan for, but these coolers are designed to be foolproof. Theres an old saying in this situation "so easy, even a Ghot could do it"