Is liquid cooling necessary for high CPU performance over extended periods?

I'm planning on building a system for high CPU and memory performance. Graphics performance is not a major concern, as I do not plan to use it for gaming. I noticed that liquid cooling seems to have become common since my last build, and I am wondering if it is needed in my case. I do not plan to overclock any of the components.

The intended use for the system is primarily development and occasional compute-intensive tasks that will run on all cores continuously for several days to a week. The system will not normally be in continuous usage like this, but it needs to be capable of occasional extended periods of continuous use at full capacity.

I have included the main components below.

CPU: i7-5960X

Memory: 64GB DDR4

Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce GT 730 2GB

Drive 1: 1TB SSD

Drive 2: 4TB 7200RPM HDD

Power supply: 700W

Is liquid cooling needed for the above build? If not, is there any advantage in using it? I have read reviews that mentioned liquid cooling unit failures that resulted in leaks, so I would rather not use it if it is not necessary.

Thanks!

Solution 1:

In short, no

Liquid cooling is still mainly for bragging rights. Getting those extra MHz from hardware and pushing for extra benchmark points.

Will you need something aftermarket to cool your system? Absolutely.

Of course keeping temperatures as low as possible is always a thing we strive for, but you have to weigh up the costs and risks to the performance benefits.
Pumps, radiators, reservoirs, heat sinks, fans, tubing and coolant add large amounts to a build's cost.
Even All-in-one's are quite pricey (and can cause problems, boil-off, pump fail's etc).

Another downside with water cooling is that it is difficult to tell that anything has failed. They can operate near silently and leaks can go undetected until something blows up.
This is not to say they are less reliable than fan-cooled systems but at least you know if your loud fans have stopped working and there's very little chance of them taking anything else out with them if you are around monitoring.

Basically I would get a beefy heat-sink with at least a 120mm fan, something like a Noctua or Zalman (I am not affiliated) and then an intake and an exhaust to keep cool air moving. RAM cooling is rarely necessary but solutions are available from companies such as Corsair.

Get quality assured names with plenty of reviews. This PC sounds fairly mission critical so invest wisely to keep it running.

Solution 2:

For reliability, you may want to look into passively cooling the CPU with an oversized heatsink and install extra large fans in the chassis.

The reason is having the CPU fan fail tends to cause a much longer downtime than replacing a chassis fan. If you run the chassis fan directly off the PSU instead of the mobo, you can even change them out without turning off your computer.

Larger fans also last longer because it doesn't need to spin as fast to push the same volume of air. It will also naturally run quieter for the same reason.