Talk to me about AIO water coolers.
I've had my Fortress FT-02 case (
https://www.silverstonetek.com/produ...id=242&area=en) for a very long time, and it's still fine, but I've kinda been thinking of getting something smaller. Gone are the days of needing many drive bays and many expansion slots.
I generally haven't been a fan of water cooling as I like the near zero maintenance of air and never having to worry about water shorting out my PC. And I've always run a near silent PC.. the loudest things in my PC tend to be the spinning disk; when it spins up it's louder than everything else. You can of course do this with huge fans running slowly, which is why the FT02 was perfect.
In investigating possible cases, a number of the ones I like lend themselves to water cooling, and it's been a loooong time since I've really dug into them.
My #1 question is can you get the near-silent operation from AIOs these days that you get with a CPU cooler with a 120 or 140mm fan running nice and slow (I don't mind if it spins up during gaming)?
I'd hate to spend a bunch of money on a Lian Li O11 Dynamic, a AIO CPU cooler to match and RGB that you can see from space and end up hating it because it's too loud...