There are sooo many reports about failing AOI coolers at the moment.
The pumps die, they leak, they clog...
There is just too much stuff that can fail in such a cooler. And they are not even guaranteed to be silent. They need fans on the radiator anyway, and some pumps can also be noticable.
Yup. That's my point after years of experience.
As I said, actually the only leak I experienced was with an AIO from one of the major brands. Was that a quality issue? Sure. They used rubber tubing, and rubber is known to dry up and crack over the years, especially when submitted to heat. Nothing new here. And that's exactly what happened: when it leaked, after inspection I noticed that the tubing had developed cracks around the fitting that connected it to the radiator, which was the "hot point" in the system. And it's still pretty common. Of course those AIO things have benefits and are easy to install and are supposed to be maintenance-free, but...
The custom loop I built (from Alphacool parts) has never leaked. The tubing is of way higher quality, I used "real" fittings (not the crap Corsair uses on their AIOs). But it still requires regular maintenance, and I had some issues with the pump sometimes failing to start - usually due to air bubbles. It's extremely hard (or even impossible) not to had a few air bubbles form over time in a custom loop, however well you have built and filled it. I should probably drain it more often, but that's a PITA. And to understand what makes a typical watercooling pump fail to start, you just need to take a look at how they are built.
Give me a decent air cooler any day. Fit as many case fans as you can in addition to the CPU cooler, set up a proper temperature controlled fan control, and the thing will be silent in many circumstances.
Well sure, that's kinda the point of this topic. Unfortunately, while there are many air coolers on the market, many of them have the drawbacks I mentioned: compatibility with a given system is most often a headache, or you need to resort to using the smaller ones which are just not enough to cool down some systems. Yep. Some of the higher-end Intel CPUs can generate a LOT of heat.
For future systems, I'm probably going to reconsider things, including the kind of processors I use, and more recent CPUs also tend to dissipate less power. But for now, this will have to do. The workstation I'm talking about is working plenty fine and is pretty powerful, I'm not gonna throw it away and buy new gear just because I have a hard time finding a proper air cooler.
What would be pretty cool is a cooling solution that would give the best of both worlds. A relatively small CPU block with heatpipes running up to a distant place in the computer case, then going through a big heatsink with a fan or two would be nice. Of course, the problem is that heatpipes are not flexible, contrary to watercooling tubing, so while this kind of solution works for laptops and for completely custom cases, it's impossible to make one that would adapt to a variety of motherboards and computer cases...
For instance, on the other end of the spectrum (or almost), I have built a small headless box for running Linux, a completely passively cooled system with a mini ITX motherboard, a Core i7 4790T with 16GB of RAM, in a case that has a buit-in heatsink connected to a CPU block with heatpipes. The case was not cheap. It gets warm after a while, but the CPU never gets over like 65°C under full load and there is absolutely no fan, no noise, no failure point. Of course it doesn't perform as well as my workstation, but the difference is actually just in the order of 30% which is significant but not huge. The only downside is that it has no decent GPU, only the builtin one in the CPU. Doesn't matter for a headless box, but would not cut it for a workstation.
But I'm definitely considering something in that vein for a future workstation. Proper cases can be expensive, but if you add up a decent, classic tower case plus the cooling system for the CPU and the additional case fans, add it all up, and a dedicated case for passive cooling may not be that much more expensive...