Liquid seems unreliable at the ~$120 level. AIO coolers are frequently Copper+Aluminum (aka: mixed metal) and rely upon additives to prevent corrosion. Unfortunately, these additives wear out over time, very similar to how car radiator anti-freeze wears out and needs replacing every 3+ years or so. AIO coolers don't usually allow for you to easily replace the fluids however, so they just start corroding away at that point. In addition, the tiny pumps inside of the coolers and/or radiators are unreliable and are prone to breaking down over time.
Single-metal helps prevent corrosion on these longer time spans, but somehow is only available on more expensive options.
Single-metal all-aluminum kits start at
$160 at the lowest end, but require you to do some plumbing yourself. The larger external pump is an incredibly reliable design, but it does take up some space. The main "problem" with the EKIB Fluid Gaming series is that they're still relatively new and there are few radiators. Only 240mm, 360mm sizes available, and only mainstream computers like the i7 or Ryzen7 are supported (no Threadripper plate yet). You've also got an external pump+resovoir, making the setup slightly more complicated. A bit of distilled water is also needed to complete the kit (you mix and add the fluids yourself in this case). But this sort of stuff will last way longer than the AIO stuff.
Single-metal all-copper kits are more expensive due to the increased cost of copper. But they offer even greater cooling capacities. High-end computers (Threadripper in particular) have multiple heatplates to ensure the best cooling performance possible. Unfortunately, the costs for these custom-kits are $300+, making them at best an exotic option for the highest-end computers only. There's a good ecosystem of parts at the high-end from a variety of manufacturers, allowing the general community to review individual components to incredible degrees. For example, here's a review that compares three
TR4 Waterblocks. Yes, just the
water-block design alone gets scrutiny and attention.
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As such, Air cooling, which tops out at $80 to maybe $100 at the absolute highest end, is basically a different market. High-end Air like the Noctua d15 perform as good as "cheapo" $120 AIO Liquid coolers, although the Noctua D15 takes up more room and may block RAM slots.
Still: the reliability of Air cannot be understated. There's no pump to fail, there's no liquid to pour onto your components, there's no leaks to worry about. It simply works. There's a compatibility issue with regards to size (make sure that the parts will actually fit inside of your case!!), especially because Air Cooling **must** be placed directly on top of the CPU. A liquid-cooling solution's greatest benefit is the ability to move the radiator around, which often leads to more possibilities with builds.
So I suggest for most standard ATX builds to go with a big air cooler. If you're trying to do something fancy, like a smaller case, then you may be forced into AIO liquid due to the flexible mounting options.
synthtel2 wrote:32GB of memory would be nice if memory prices were where they ought to be, but as it is, that seems like a better item to leave for expansion. 16GB is still a lot; I have yet to feel seriously limited by it in image work, even when working with a dozen-ish layers and stupidly high resolutions (for SSAA).
The main benefit to gobs of memory above 32GB is for the OS to start caching your files in RAM. This is an automatic feature in both Windows and Linux, any file touched will go to RAM and stay there until the RAM is needed by an application. No RAM is ever wasted in a modern system!!
Sony Vegas, and other professional programs, also offer "Render to RAM" features. And gobs-and-gobs of RAM are needed to get this working with any degree of reliability. 8GB of RAM holds like 10 seconds of raw 1080p footage in the best case. A cheaper alternative is to get a super-fast M.2 drive for faster renders or temporary-file renders. A temporary "render folder" is an excellent case to use Optane for example.
Multiple-simultaneous renders from multiple instances of Blender can use tons of RAM. I've found this technique to be useful during animation rendering. If each instance of Blender uses 4GB to represent your scene, then 32GB of RAM can only run 8-Blenders simultaneously. Blender often becomes single-threaded at the beginning and end of renders (Hair and other complicated geometries make one 64x64 tile far harder to calculate than other tiles. So you end up waiting for the "last difficult tile", which is the last thread of execution), so increasing the number of Blender instances in parallel seems to (occasionally) lead to faster renders.
The typical user probably won't ever go beyond 16GB. But there are definitely people out there who need 32GB+.
..fortunately the build I proposed would easily accommodate the expense of the extra stick of memory (..still being below the 1500 pound threshold).