What are your goals for liquid cooling ? As for as 'worth" goes... while it is certainly worth it for some, it won't be for others.
1. If your goal is to improve performance of your CPU or GPU, then you have more chance of not getting anything out of it than getting something out of it. With modern GPUs / CPUs, you are somewhat more likely to hit a voltage or firmware limit wall than a thermal wall.
2. If you goal is to reduce noise, then you can certainly do that will liquid cooling with a proper design.
3. With the 10xx series, I have yet to a see a 1070 or 1080 (other than EVGA SC / FTW) that would benefit from liquid. here's the deal ... the AIB cards don't throttle.... the FE / reference cards do. If the card never throttles its performance due to temperature than dropping GPU temps simply can not do anything for you.
4. With the 1060's ... they just don't draw enough power to get hot enough to throttle whether or not you have a AIB or reference card.
5. Now of course all we have talked about is nVidia cards, AMD cards will still benefit from liquid cooling as they can run hot.
5. Now it must be said that CLC type liquid cooling aka "faux liquid cooling" is a very difficult animal. There is no instance I have seen to data where a CLC type liquid cooler ever outperformed an equivalently priced air cooler.... not one ... ever.
Here you see the $55 H55 from Corsair getting thrashed by a cheap $25 air cooler.
Here you see (17:20 mark) Corsair's flagship, the $100 H100i, unable to catch the $80 Noctua NH-D15 air cooler (losing by 2C ... and to even get that close, it has to get 12 times as loud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TivNOgQqW-M
In short, custom liquid cooling will still bring you significant reductions in noise down to completely inaudible. As for as performance improvements, these are as likely to be obtained as not subject to the variations in the silicon. lottery. With GTX 970 cards, getting a performance increase is iffy .... as far as the 10xx series cards go, we can't tell simply because current BIOS limitations just don't let us raise voltage to a point where a) we might see some improvements and b) liquid cooling would help. Until someone come sup witha BIOS editor that cracks the 10xx series, we simply won't know if this is possible and even if it does, likely will only be worthwhile on the 1070 / 1080 / 1080 Ti
As far as "faux liquid cooling" or CLCs on GPUs or CPUs, the only reason to 'go there" is that you want to spend more to get less thermal performance and more noise.
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