Octavean I've been wanting to liquid cool my build for a long time; lately though, it is more for the GPU.
I'm beyond sick and tired of these gpu's wanting coolers that are 3-5(!) slots thick and then still allowing the core to reach 90+C, and/or for the delta between "normal" and hot spot to exceed 10C. This has been the case with every factory cooler since it was possible to measure the variance, without fail. For perspective, my latest card being an RX 6800 (non-xt), was 15C variance between normal and hot spot, and rather blah on memory temps as well. Just switching to the GPU block already halved that variance; switching from thermal paste to a sheet of PTM 7950? Three; yes, just three degrees of delta between edge and hot spot temps. Unfortunately, the card itself is a silicon lottery bum, especially on the memory speeds. AMD's Auto-overclocking wants to push the vram to 2160; but FF 7 remake hard crashes if it's at all above 2060, even when the measured memory temps never again exceeded 51C.
So I very much plan to liquid cool the card. So having something that is compatible with a water block is a must. Often, the cheaper blocks don't bother include a back-plate unless it thermally warrants it. In those situations, the color of the PCB is what's going to be left visible.
There's like thousands upon thousands of closed loop coolers for CPU's, but absolutely none to attempt to help a GPU; and on the off case there is? again, without fail, its cooling just affects the core, and does eff all for the surrounding memory, power delivery, nothing. For as much as that hybrid solution wants, it's asinine how half-assed its execution is, to my sensibilities.