ive thought about water cooling mine, but as someone who's always changing something, I really couldnt be bothered with the extra pipes and maintenance.
I changed the heat spreaders on my G.Skill kit to Iceman copper heatspreaders which I got from china, cost about £70 with shipping and tax for both, I used GEILD Ultimate extreme thermal pads, the stock heat spreaders are rubbish and G.Skill dont put a thermal pad on the PMIC making things worse, the temps never go over 50c now under stress tests and with me overclocking the shizniz out of them, 8000MT/s (which is the max speed for ryzen 7000) at CL34 with very tightened sub timings, 1.55v VDD and VDDQ, 1.38 VDDIO and 1.17v SOC.
I used the Mrs hair dryer to remove the original heat spreaders and gently with a plastic spludger tool to prize them off, the glue they use is extremely sticky, and a nightmare to remove the rest off the PCB, but plenty of 99% IPA got there in the end, I did the side without the chips first, this then made the side with the chips easy to do, then cleaned them up, snipped off the LEDs and fitted the new heatspreaders and pads.
The beauty of running at 8000 over say 6400 is because it runs in 2:1 mode, it needs a lot less VDDIO and SOC voltage giving headroom for the CPU to perform better as it runs cooler.
At 6400 CL28 I needed 1.55v VDD and VDDQ, 1.45v VDDIO, and 1.28v SOC, on top of that, performance is better at 8000, especially where read, write and copy are concerned, latency is about the same as 6400.
So no if you use decent thermal pads and heatspreaders, then water cooling them isnt worth it, as you've got the Gene (same as me) you know too well that the RAM and GenZ card are all sandwiched tightly together, so 50C under stress is good, you'll also struggle to water cool them if you're using the GenZ card, I think its only possible without the card or if you remove the heatspreader and stand-off's off the ram side of the Gen-Z card.
