It was supposed to be a battle between noctua air cooling and kraken water cooling.
But instead I'm looking for your opinions on water and air cooling? How does the case affect cooling? What is more effective? Anything else that you would like to add?
i personally run a corsair h100i (its a 240mm rad with 2 120mm fans) it keeps my fx8350 under 30oC even under full load. case will always affect cooling more so on air cooling then water cooling do to the fact u really only need cool are to hit the rad and no have to cycle through the case itself. obviously water cooling is going to cost more but i have had no issues with mine and the fact corsairs h-series come with corsair link so u can monitor temps
Water vs Air
Depending on how big the case and how well ventilated it is; you can go either choice. But if you have a small case with a fast processor, finding an air cooler that can fit inside of your case AND can cool off the CPU can be challenging. You may be able to use an internal AIO liquid cooler such as the Corsair H60 (or the H100i that mufforz stated), this is more than adequate if you have the room to mount the radiator and fan (for the two coolers, 120mm fan mount/s). There is also an external cooling solution by Zalman called the RESERATOR 1 V2 that has the pump and reservoir outside of the case (if you want to spend the money and build it). If you plan on doing any overclocking the air coolers will do a good job at keeping things cool, but they might get loud (of course it depends on what cooler you get). Liquid cools will stay pretty quiet even when the CPU is overlocked. It all comes down to costs. A good internal AIO liquid cooler will cost around a 100 USD and a good air cooler can cost you around 30-60 USD. Some high end air cooler can cost as much as AIO liquid coolers.
I am currently running an Corsair H60 (their older version) with my Intel Core i7 930 at 2.8GHz (stock speeds). Depending on how cool my room is I can get temps around 18-25C idle. While gaming or doing anything extraneous 45-50C. My stock Intel fan was loud and temps went as high as 60-68C when playing some games (cough Unreal Tournament 3).
IMO if you're not building a custom liquid cooling loop (which isn't too easy), then just get a good air cooler. You can get very similar results from a high end air cooler vs all-in-one liquid coolers.
water cooling is basically, at it's core, air cooling too. cooling the radiators, with air. haha.
the only difference is you are using water to transfer heat to the heatsink (watercooling radiator)
where with an air cooler, the heat is transferred directly from the heatsource, to the heatsink.