Water cooled CPUs, worth it or over hyped?
There is a quite heated debate over on overclock.net's forum right now about Closed-Loop Coolers vs. Tower Coolers.
The author of the thread does not like CLCs. He claims that they in general do not have any performance advantage over tower coolers - when comparing watts dissipated / dB.
He also finds them inferior to regular water-cooling - where you would hook up the reservoir, pump, waterblock and radiator yourself.
But I would look up tests results and compare them myself.
I'd agree with the argument, as I've dealt with CLC and custom loops myself.
CLC is only worth it in space constrained locations where you need the cooling but don't have the space for a traditional tower heatsink. Quite a few SFF (Small Form Factor, > 20L volume) cases can benefit. I'd still rather use a smaller air based heatsink though. If I want to deal with pump noise or additional points of failure that come with introducing liquid to the system, I'd rather build a custom loop so I have full control over those variables and better performance. There are, however, some fairly decent all in one expandable units these days that could be a nice point of entry for those that are overwhelmed by diving straight into a custom loop.
A lot of this stems from the fact that overclocking is relatively pointless on the consumer chip Intel rigs for most usage scenarios. They already have relatively high base clocks and excellent IPC. My 6700K runs 4.0ghz / 4.2ghz boost stock - at 4.6ghz there is a minuscule benefit from overclocking. The HEDT platform - where Hypershere's mentioned 5960X comes from - is a different story.
As an aesthetic preference, there's no conversation to be had, since that is entirely subjective.
