To aircool or to watercool

[sikonawt]

I'm starting to prepare my first homebuild and am likely going for a i7 920 setup. I've never built a PC before and have never overclocked, but from what I hear it's silly now not to at least dabble in OCing. Of course, a key ingredient is cooling, and I'm not sure whether I should air cool or water cool.

Water cooling is obviously better, but also more expensive and seemingly quite a bit more complicated. I'm not sure if it will make enough difference to me to be worth the trouble.

I may be wrong about this, but one potential point in favor of water cooling is the fact that I have a cockatoo which generates a lot of dust. As such, my case gathers dust rather quickly and unless I cleaned the filters all the time it will be difficult to keep the airflow optimized. I'm planning on being better about this with my new rig, but might this be a reason to go with water cooling?

Of course, a point in favor of air cooling is that I'm a noob at this and water cooling may just be over the top and more complexity than I should really worry about. I can always air cool now and switch to water later on if I want to try for a bigger OC....

Thoughts?

PS: I personally don't care too much about noise, but my girlfriend does -- so going for something on the quieter side is probably a good call.

 

[Conumdrum]

Watercooling still involves fans on the case. The Mobo and associated parts still need airflow. You also have fans on the radiator. So the dust option is moot.

Watercooling an i7 CPU with a quality setup is over $200 easy, closer to $300. Many WC to get rid of the screaming GPU fan noise. WC a GPU chip and using air heatsinks on the ram and mosfets is $80+ on top of the CPU loop cost.

It's great to watercool. Please don't try it on your first do it yourself build. Build the PC, play with it, you'll spend weeks to learn to overclock. Add a few more weeks to learn about WC. Water in the PC done wrong will ruin a mobo or GPU in a second.

High end air cooling for the CPU and GPU is less than $130 total. Focus on that first.

So, read this link and take your time. Scroll to the bottom, it's updated.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/127565-29-introduction-watercooling#t1801345

 

[sikonawt]

Perfect, that's about what I expected and your advice sounds dead on. I'll read up on WC in more detail if I decide to switch to that somewhere down the road. Thanks a ton!