Aren't you guys worried about pump-mtbf?
An air-cooled gpu will not spin below 60C, which reduces the load, slightly. But a gpu-aio solution, the pump will spin all of the time.
Ofc, "modern" pumps are rated at 5 years mtbf at 50c, from what I could gather.
A failed pump, would cause the gpu to overheat - shutdown/bsod the system. Worst case senario, I don't want to speculate this.
Yeah, there is some concern there, but so far so good (fingers crossed).
I've found that the CPU all-in-one cooling is relatively pointless. If you use 2u heatsinks or desktop heatsinks, the temperatures are excellent and the power use is low.
For GPUs, however, it can be a mission and a half to keep them from overheating. For the water cooled cards, there is zero issue with that.
Two very similar cards:
1080ti, evga, air cooled, fans at 100%, max tdp reduced to 190w, running
59c without any major obstructions to airflow. This temperature is acceptable but not ideal, especially considering I'm at <80% power limit. If 2-3 cards like this are packed closely together, all bets are off -- without monster supplemental fans, you'll hit 85c within a couple minutes and throttle the speeds way down.
1080ti evga sc2 hybrid, low power fan + pump, max tdp reduced to 190w, running
29c, and it will continue running at a ridiculously low temperature even if I pack 3 of these cards back to back with one another.
edit: Another point is that the AIO GPUs are much much quieter than the air cooled ones. So that's a big plus as well. For home use it can be a different story -- gaming doesn't throttle up the temperatures or fans nearly as much as mining or computing, and with a single gpu in a desktop chassis, the cooling is generally adequate. In a server however, only the "blower fan" models and the water cooled models have any hope of cooling adequately, and the blower-fan models are very loud.