Water Cooled Computers - How good are they?

If you want my personal opinion, building a water cooled PC is a real pain in the behind for the improvements it makes.

The main reasons why enthusiasts choose water cooling are for the nearly silent noise level and the increase in cooling performance with the respective decrease in temperature.

But, here are my reasons (a person who usually doesn't build computers worth more than $1200 for himself) on why I think fan cooling is better.

1. CPU Overclock-ability

With a good fan cooler, like the Cooler Master Hyper series, you can still overclock your chip a bit. Light overclocking may not require a voltage increase (voltage basically equals heat) and a moderate voltage increase will still be stable with a good fan cooler. Don't get me wrong, for the best overclocking, you should get a closed loop CPU cooler. These are nice and cheap ($60 for a nice one from Corsair) and work great (you'll probably miss the capabilities of a custom loop by 1 GHz or something, without pushing it a little far.)

2. Noise Level

Custom water cooling brings only radiator / radiator fan noise into the machine, that of which is pretty quiet. In my opinion, unless your speakers are quiet and your fans are really loud, there is not a need for liquid cooling, plus, a nice headset is just $50 from ma boi Corsair. Also, the loudest kind of fan is a stock CPU fan... I found my Hyper 212 evo to be really quiet as compared to an AMD Wraith (wasn't my build, FYI)

3. Cost

A good custom water cooling setup, from what I have seen, is around 300 dollars. 300 dollars that could be used on an Intel CORE i7 6700k. An AMD Radeon RX 480. An all fan machine costs $50 for all the cooling (assuming you buy like, 3 or 4 case fans, they might even come stock) A closed loop CPU cooler for a CPU overclocker + fans would cost $90 for the cooling setup.

4. Maintenance

A good water cooled PC owner knows that you should drain, clean, test, and refill your system regularly. Fan cooled / closed loop owners? You probably only need to worry about any dust getting inside your system, infrequently.

5. Accidents

Question : What happens when your water cooling pipe has a crack in it that you didn't know about?

Answer : Water gets all over your components.

(cough : This is a water submerged PC, it's a joke )

An experienced builder won't make this mistake often, but the possibility is there.

Final thoughts ; Water cooling has it's niches, but personally I think it's not worth the time and money for a person like me. For a real PC enthusiast? You bet.