Water cooling gives you two things. One, huge thermal capacity for absorbing short bursts of massive heat. Two, the great flexibility of not hanging the radiato

Water cooling gives you two things. One, huge thermal capacity for absorbing short bursts of massive heat. Two, the great flexibility of not hanging the radiator directly off of the heat source – which means you can spread the heat across (many) long radiators and they can be cooled by fans running at much lower RPM (that IS quieter than running 1-2 fans at high RPM which is what you get on a tower cooler), you can share the cooling capacity between CPU and GPU, you can have lots more capacity (and without putting stress on PCBs).