I have always heard such positive things about water-cooling in general, but the thought of running water inside the pc seems really questionable to me. I always figured its better to keep the simplicity of air-cooling and avoid a potential disaster, let alone the money savings. Are there any real upsides to water cooling for the average build? or is it really more about flexing?

Pros: Lower temps at lower noise levels.
Cons: dusty rads kinda suck to clean.

bob16314
- Intel

What a great resource, thanks for sharing! Love how it really goes into detail without going over my head ,lol.

Hoggle
If it’s your first time I would start with an AIO. Water cooling in general does have advantages in that the water carries the heat to the radiator and then pushed it directly out of the case. With air you are pushing hot air around the case and getting it to exhaust out but it means the heat from the GPU is making the CPU hotter.

Thanks for the explanation! I had never really thought about how the radiator can move the body of heat out of the way, a very intuitive reason to go for water cooling. AIO's have totally piqued my interest, seems like the best of both worlds!

If you just want less noise/lower temps, AIO cooling on the CPU can give you that without any worries about leaks or any of that non-sense.  As someone that only recently went full open loop again, I can say that going full custom liquid cooling has it's advantages over air or even all-in-one cooler cards & CPU coolers, but in the majority of cases, for Intel in particular, there's less reason to go for open loop over AIO cooling, because you're not going to get much higher in terms of clocks on the newer generation CPUs, from an open loop vs a high end AIO cooler.  My 9900K didn't clock any higher going from a 280mm AIO to an open loop setup, it did run cooler by about 10-12C though, which given the 9900K is notoriously a hot-box, is pretty good. 
 
If you're going the route of AMD, open loop definitely will get you further than AIO cooling or air, on the 3000 & 5000 series, because they run pretty warm & having a full open loop can keep them much happier.  As a for instance, at stock, all core loads, my CPU never hits 60C, pretty sure it doesn't even go past 55C unless my ambient is up at 72-74F because of how hot it's getting here during the day.  Running at 4.7GHz all core, I'm still not hitting 90C on either die temp under very heavy stress loads.  But my loop is also overkill, with push/pull for particularly high overkill. lol

supercrazyman

hashmeir70
Pros: Lower temps at lower noise levels.
Cons: dusty rads kinda suck to clean.

A wonderfully simple response! Right to the point! Thanks for the help!

Dust filters helps solve the radiator dust (not entirely but pretty good)...keep the filters clean...
Defintely the biggest advantage is twofold and go hand in hand....WC = extremely low temps vs air (45c Max temps) and no screaming GPU Fans trying to keep that fully loaded GPU below 75c !!!

I've been gun shy about water cooling for years. I just assume I'm going to screw it all up.

AIOs are a good choice, custom loops need to be bled and cleaned once in awhile which is annoying. I do it for the noise reduction in my ITX build but big coolers can do as effective job in large builds. Thermal siphons seem to be a good middle ground if your case has the space.

hashmeir70
Pros: Lower temps at lower noise levels.
Cons: dusty rads kinda suck to clean.

When on the subject of rad cleaning, I have an air compressor at home which I regularly use for case fans & cpu cooler cleaning. Is radiator harder to blow out with compressed air or there is some other issue that requires probably a toothpick and a lot of time? hopefully not
 
I've just bought my first AIO (Artic Freezer II), but haven't used it yet. If it's going to be a pain to clean it significantly more than air coolers, I will ditch it while it's new. I like my builds when they are easy to clean. From time to time blowing air is not enough to remove the dust, so I have to clean manually which takes some time, but it's not the often, so I don't mind.

more quiet system and fancy looking but needs more maintenance

Lower temps will make your lower overclocks more stable.

I only changed the Noctua tower fan a few months ago. If I have a chance, I will try it with water cooling next time.