Heatsink VS Liquid Cooling

Traditional Air Cooling:
- Can get surprisingly good performance for cheap, with something like the 212 EVO, which allows for basic overclocking for $30
- Fewer moving parts than all-in-one coolers, therefore is more reliable
- Large coolers like the Noctua D14, while they give the same performance as good all-in-one coolers, are bulky and heavy, and are therefore not an option if you want a small form factor computer, and could damage the motherboard if the computer gets moved on a regular basis.

All-in-one Water Cooling
- Cheaper than custom loops, are significantly easier to install, and aren't as heavy as the big air coolers that compete with its performance.
- Uses cheaper parts than a custom loop would, and therefore has a higher chance of failure - and when your pump fails, unlike if a fan on your air cooler fails, there isn't a large metal heatsink to give the CPU time to downclock safely, meaning your computer crashes and there's a bit more risk of serious damage.
- However, it doesn't require assembly like a custom loop does, meaning that AIO water coolers are the easiest to install and least likely to damage the computer during installation.
- The downside to all this, of course, is that they're more expensive than evenly-competing air coolers and way noisier than either other option.

Custom Water Cooling
- The most expensive option, because everything is custom... but that means that the amount you spend is up to you, and you can adapt your cooling to suit your exact needs -- making it compact and powerful, or huge and totally silent.
- You can include every other part of your computer in your cooling, instead of only being able to cool your CPU. This means you can cool your graphics card(s) and even your hard drives and motherboards if you so please, meaning you could eliminate every source of loud noise in your rig and just have the whisper-quiet cooling loop.
- Can be both the quietest option and the best performing option, or even both at once, if you so please. Can achieve cooling capacities many times beyond what the other two options give you.
- As either a pro or a con, it requires assembly on installation. While it is possible to mess this up, if you do your research beforehand, you won't, and it will introduce you into the world of modding.
- Gives you bragging rights. You'll have a real watercooled computer that's totally custom... and if you have the reservoir and/or some tubing making loops outside your computer, you will get complements on it. (And any girl with a drop of nerd in her will think it's awesome, even if she doesn't understand why you would want to do it.)