I can get much more surface area of radiator than can reasonably be reached by the heat pipes on an air cooler. There are limits to how many radiators you can e

I can get much more surface area of radiator than can reasonably be reached by the heat pipes on an air cooler. There are limits to how many radiators you can effectively leverage in a cooling loop. Additionally, a loop with a large volume of liquid offers much more thermal buffer before reaching a steady state temperature. Most air coolers will be heat saturated within a minute or so. A water cooling loop may maintain lower temperature for minutes to tens of minutes. So even with two solutions that otherwise reach the same steady state temperatures (and therefore throttle equally), you may see better real world performance out of the water cooling solution. I'll note, I would be building an open loop, not using an AIO/closed loop cooler. My case has room for 7x140mm of radiator in a couple of configurations. I would probably use 5x of that in one 420mm radiator and a 280mm radiator. This should offer much more cooling capacity than any tower cooler.