Or you can combine these by putting the desktop in a closet and ducting the exhaust outside.
I don't like the idea of maintaining an open loop myself (changing the liquid every 6-12 months), but there are also half-measure options like all-in-one (AIO) coolers. Most of them aren't serviceable (can't refill them), but they should still last for five years or so. That mostly for CPUs, though, AIO GPUs are somewhat rare (but they do exist!).
edit: confused open and closed loops
Bar some extreme cooling requirements liquid cooling is about showing off.
One could go really fancy with glass panels, solid tubes, colored liquids and such - yeah, that's where you start showing off (or geeking out, it doesn't always have to be negative). But an open loop can be done in much simpler manner while still providing benefits of better performance and, consequentially, considerably lower noise levels.
Hide the loop in a good noise-oriented case. For instance, I like my Fractal Design Define C [0] with thick steel walls with additional layer of noise-dampening foam. Use soft tubing and some quick-disconnect fittings for the ease of maintenance. As a result you get relatively simple to maintain yet effective cooling setup.
[0] https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/define/define-...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alphacool-Quick-Release-Connector-Kit...
Without water cooling.
I have Dark Rock Pro 4 installed on top of a 120+ TDP CPU. The fans surely speed up under extensive load, and, although they are fairly quiet, I wouldn't call them inaudible. The post is about CPUs which could in fact utilize the efficiency water-cooled setups offer.
Also, water coolers have a lot more thermal mass (because, water), which means that the fan noise that remains can be less annoying as it doesn't ramp up and down as fast with CPU usage, assuming you're driving your fan curve from water temp and not CPU temp.
So it's not fair to say they're just about "showing off" IMHO. There's actual quality of life benefits if you care about noise.
The larger Be Quiet coolers are far quieter than the best water cooling solutions out there and the only maintenance is vacuuming out the crap once a year.
Edit: also as a friend found the air coolers don’t pee all over your RTX2060 and blow it and the power supply up.
I have a PC on my desk with a GPU which already comes with the largest air cooler that will fit on it. I wanted to make to it quieter. Water cooling accomplished that.
I have servers in a closet where I don’t care about noise and I don’t want to maintain them. I use air coolers there.
Use the right tool to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.
Ultimately I moved to M1 because it did the same workload with less watts.
Either way you’re paying money for compute. Do you want to spend that on compute or heat as a side effect?
Why wouldn’t you?
My server, which is old and probably somewhat power-hungry, uses ~125W. A house-sized AC unit is in the kilowatts range, that's 10x more (of course, the AC is only on for parts of the day).
If I operate that 125W computer for a year, that's ~1,000 kWh. EVs use around 0.3 kWh/mi, so running that computer for a year is the equivalent of driving an EV 3,333 miles. (Most people drive 10,000 miles a year or more.)
And if your gas gar gets 34 MPG, then it gets (via MPGe) about 1 mile per kWh. So using the 125W computer for a year is like driving a gas car 1,000 miles - and that ignores, of course, that the gas car spews pollution, while electricity can be gotten from renewables or nuclear.
So it's not like the energy usage of computing doesn't matter, but it's somewhat insignificant. Like someone else said above, it costs energy to manufacture new chips and computers too, so you might be better off just staying on old ones.
My MacBook I’m typing this on is sitting here at 9.2W (battery full, running off mains).