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.
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 3ยฐ 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.)