An advice: get a decent cooling for 3900X, stock Wraith Prism can't hold it.
Just get the biggest honking Noctua fan+heatsink you can fit in your case and call it good. It's silent, simple, reliable, and if the fan does fail the heatsink will save your CPU.
Also not sure if you're counting AIO coolers in with water cooling but they are very reliable.
In my experience air cooling with a sufficiently large heatsink is simple and very reliable. Water cooling is more expensive, trickier and can fail catastrophically.
Source: Been rocking Corsair AIO coolers for around a decade now. I did have have the pump fail in one of them after around seven years of use.
On the other hand, a heatsink provides a decent amount of passive cooling all by itself, so when the fan fails there's a buffer that slows the rate of heating to a safe margin.
If one of the two fans fail i’d guess temps may raise a few degrees and that’s it. I could even manually test it with one fan and light loads to check one fan performance.
Furthermore, you are supposed to use distilled water or non-water based coolants with high electric resistance.
https://www.leonroy.com/oldsite/img/IMG_1802%20(Large).JPG
Regarding distilled water, it is indeed not very conductive at all but it is also quite reactive and if it touches electrical traces and PCBs starts to leach ions from the surrounding until it starts to conduct at which point the machine will short circuit (speaking from first hand experience alas).
Seems like it would be easier to make a "never disassemble" system not leak.
Perhaps if you don't forget to activate the BIOS CPU warning at high temp, you shouldn't worry about this .
I recently fixed a PC where the pump died without anyone noticed, and the only evidence, was that the BIOS was powering off the computer when the CPU gets too hot.
Do I need to panic?
Also modern CPUs have internal temperature sensors of course and don't 'burn up'.
This sounds like someone who is afraid of water cooling, not someone familiar with it.
The first rule of plumbing is that it's guaranteed to eventually leak.
(I don't know if this is actually a rule of plumbing, let alone the first one, but it sounds like it should be)
Also, FWIW: integrated liquid cooling solutions are if anything simpler and more reliable devices than fans: smaller motors running at lower RPM last longer.
I've got a custom loop with my Ryzen system (420 + 280 rads, mostly EK kit including a D5 Glass XRes) and it's been enjoyable putting it together, and if you're not totally incompetent easy enough to make leak-free with the latest generation of fittings.
As for a pump failing, as others have said the CPU will thermally throttle before damage is done, but for added peace of mind I'm running my setup with an Aquaero which will shut the computer down if the coolant temp breaches a set threshold, or it senses the pump has failed.
The biggest thing for me is that my computer is EERILY quiet unless I'm pegging all 8 cores, and the GPU, at 100% ... which makes for a nice peaceful environment.
Bought the thiccest Noctua I could find on Amazon and haven't looked back.
Although you can buy the CPUs in TRAY format without the cooler, the prices are almost identical to the BOXED version and your warranty is lower since they're designed to be sold to businesses not consumers.
My own Wraith Prism is just sitting in the basement, and I don't see myself ever using it, unless something happens to my high-end cooling system and I need to install something while getting it fixed, at which point it'll go back to the basement again.
It would be interesting to see statistics on how many Wraith Prism coolers sold together with 3900X CPU:s actually end up being used. I expect the number to be quite low.
I think this is exaggeration. I have 3600 with stock cooler and at full load clocks doesn't seem to fall below 3.8GHz, 86°C (well, I tested on linux make -j12, maybe on some AVX loads it is worse).
Funnily enough, siege has recently released a vulkan based build that runs at a cool 74 degrees.
The wraith stealth is just an incredibly anemic and disappointing heat sink. It's "functional"but only at average loads. This is in comparison to the previous generation's cooler for the midrange CPUs that was about twice as large. It's not a deal breaker, my 3600 is still miles above anything I've ever run previously, and it isn't dying under the heat, but it might just run one year less than it was initially designed for at those temperatures
It can, just fine. A better cooler keeps it cooler, and you might get an extra 0.1 mhz from it. With the Prism, if you have had/having trouble with it keep in mind two things:
1. there is a switch on it for a higher or lower fan setting 2. you have to crank that little lever HARD all the way over to properly clamp it down. Lot of people miss that.
It can't handle it in the sense that it's very loud in doing so, and the CPU will boost more with a better cooler, even with no other changes.
I bought a 3900x and planned to use the stock cooler initially, but that lasted about 3 weeks before I replaced it due to noise primarily (I got a be quiet dark rock pro 4).
At idle with default fan curves, it was on the knife-edge of max-speed not just loud but continuously revving up and down so incredibly distracting. It would continually grab my attention even with headphones on.
I barely lasted a day before ordering a Dark Pro 4 and now it's silent.
Maybe you just got lucky... or perhaps double-check that you aren't accidentally under-volting :)
As the other comment says tho it is subjective.
A friend of mine recently asked if my PC is okay in a very worried tone, I said that’s how I build a PC and he now makes remarks of his annoyance every time the afterburner kicks in, all while it’s just a cruise flight to me.
I have been feeling like there's an issue with the board/BIOS/AGESA's PID control algorithm.