I watercool my PC because it’s a ThreadRipper with a couple of AMD Radeon 5700 XTs, and the latter is known to have overheating issues, so I opted for watercooling. Watercooling can be bourgeois decadence, but it can also be practical and necessary.

Nevertheless, I didn’t have great airflow in the case, so all of the heat that remained stagnant inside a room without air conditioning (which I had bought an air conditioner for but it took me 3 months to get the equipment and resources necessary to screw a piece of wood to the window so the air conditioner wasn’t slanted towards the apartment) during the heat waves last year killed one of my SSDs that was part of a contiguous LVM partition among 3 SSDs (I wish I learned about RAIDs earlier). I have been without a desktop for nearly a year now and have been in a slow process of building a couple of new machines.

I managed to successfully watercool my pc safely and follow recommended procedures to make sure my pc didn’t leak while running. I had to replace a water block that was leaking during my initial setup of the pc. I had towels and a couple of extra hands to help. You need to run the machine for a day with towels placed around the case before running the computer (this can be done by inserting a bridging plug to only run the watercooling system) to ensure no leaks are occurring. As long as you do diligent research and you are careful, it’s usually safe to watercool. The worse that happened to me is that I screwed in a fitting on a $700 distribution plate reservoir + pump system too tightly, and it created some cracks around the hole, but it hasn’t became much worse.