Good AIO or Air?

[michty_me]

Yes, If I could justify the cost of a custom water cooling setup I would but at the minute, I've just gone for a 3600 CPU and will play about with the RAM and infinity fabric.
I know there isn't much to be had from overclocking the Ryzen 3000 series so felt a good air would be better suited for the job for me cost and maintenance wise.

 

[michty_me]

I've got 2x16Gb Samsung E-die sticks. I believe it is 3200 CL16 which quite a few have had it to 3600 CL16 easily. They haven't bothered tightening timings yet but I believe it's fairly good stuff. I'm currently just watching videos on how to do the RAM timing changes etc.

As for the stock cooler, i believe it's fairly garbage. That's why I went with a large air cooler.

 

[michty_me]

That's not quite true, in particular the reliability/throw away at 2 years. Yes an Air cooler over a duration of say 5 years or more is less likely to experience mttf than an Aio cooler my old titan Fenrir must be close to 10 years old and is still strong.
You can target Coolermaster seidon v1/2 as an example of an Aio with a high failure rate, maybe a few others.

However BEQUIET's Aio range have a refill port either in the pump or the rad and also feature g1/4 threads for system expansion. There are a few other manufacturers with refill port/expansion options ALPHACOOL, EK .
With regards to the fluid evaporation loss on a sealed system (no refill ports), then there's a very low chance of that occurring but if it did and you noticed the gradual symptoms, pump noise, air bubble noise, lower cooling performance then you can go the warranty route,
or if you are out of warranty then there's nothing stopping you from checking the aio loop out, or manually taking apart the aio system to refill the system.
At the same time if the pump totally failed but the rad was still good you could just buy a reservoir combined pump and reuse the coolant tubing or make up your own/ add a takeoff for a gpu block/cpu block , (7/8mm tubing etc).

So whilst I agree that there are situations where an air cooler is a better alternative, in retrospect there are situations where an aio is the more suitable solution.
I disagree with your viewpoint ''worse cooling, less reliable and throw away every couple of years?''

So if All that were to go wrong in a couple of years when your warranty is out, How much will it cost in upkeep? Fluids, Expansion, Pump, reservoir etc? Be as well go custom loop?

 

[michty_me]

A little difficult to clarify as lots of variables , but most warranties are 2 or 3 years and then if you buy the aio with a refill port, then you are looking at the cost of the coolant of say £5-£8 or just distilled water to top up £1-£3.

Say the warranty was out, then If you had a cheap thin walled 120mm rad aio and the pump failed it probably wouldn't be worth upgrading or saving. But If you had a 120 thick wall/240/360 rad then you are 1/3 the way there to going custom, a good cheap reservoir pump would be £30-40.
You might need new tubing £5-£20, or reuse the tubing, you could gut the internals out of the aio dead pump and resue the block or just put on a new cpu block (price).

edit, but as some have already said, Ryzen 3*** doesn't have any overclock headroom, so really the best solution in my opinion would be a half decent air cooler.

Yeah I believe Ryzen 3000 doesn't have much overclocking at all to be fair.
My idea was to keep it as cool as possible with little maintenance so it can (hopefully) hit its boost clocks all the time. That will depend on good BIOS and AGESA of course!