Water cooling rigs are relatively noisy by modern standards. A really quiet pump produces about 19dBA@1m. That's about the upper limit of "quiet" these days. On

Water cooling rigs are relatively noisy by modern standards. A really quiet pump produces about 19dBA@1m. That's about the upper limit of "quiet" these days. On top of that, you have one or two fans blowing through a radiator. A good air cooler will easily handle 125w TDP at acceptable temperatures while producing as little as 11dBA@1m. A Noctua NH-D15 or a be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 will match or exceed the performance of a 240mm AIO, with considerably lower noise in a decent case. There aren't a lot of applications where water cooling really makes sense. If you're cramming a very high performance rig into a tiny ITX case, you might be better off with an AIO. Competition-grade overclocking rigs will naturally benefit from a custom open-loop watercooling system. Otherwise, modern components just don't put out enough heat to stress a good air cooler. The performance of water cooling can be deceptive, because of the relatively high thermal mass of the water in the loop. If you fire up Aida64 on an air cooler, the CPU temperature will climb fairly rapidly before levelling off. A water-cooled CPU will see a much more gradual increase in temperature, taking up to an hour to reach a maximum. Water coolers look really impressive if you only stress them for a short benchmark run, but they're far less impressive under sustained load.