Air is better than water
It’s a fun thing to do. I like my setup (O11 dynamic XL, two 360mm rads, dual pumps, both CPU and GPU blocks), but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone. It’s a lot of effort and expense for a little gain. But it’s a hobby on top of a hobby, and that’s fine if you want to go for it.
I think it depends on the use case. Personally, I simply don’t jive with the idea of conductive liquids swirling inside my expensive PC.
You’re supposed to use distilled water which is not conductive. At least that used to be the case last I saw liquid cooling.
In the end it’s simply not worth it for me. You still need to radiate the heat out, which usually means a big fan, which most air coolers nowadays have anyways.
Liquid coolers are by definition just an extra heat exchange step unless you’re venting heat into the ocean or something like a nuclear plant. Otherwise, the atmosphere is your final heat sink either way.
Unless a liquid cooling radiator is significantly larger than the air cooler that would fit directly on the CPU there’s no point whatsoever.
there’s no point whatsoever
I’ve been building my own PCs for a looong time, and I’ve been skeptical of using water cooling in any of my machines.
This changed recently for me, when I got my first 4000 series nvidia gpu, that fucker is huge! And it runs hot, spewing all of its heat directly into the middle of the case. I had serious concerns with this gpu + massive cpu air cooler getting in the way of positive airflow through my case.
And this is where water cooling made perfect sense to me: transport the heat away from the cpu, thus clearing a ton of space from the middle of the case, then have a radiator at the top of the case dissipate that cpu heat.
This allows for a ton of air to go through my case, evacuating all of that heat blowing out of the gpu. This also allows for other heat sinks on the mobo and other components to passively cool better
