For liquid cooling:

If you're talking about AIO, no it doesn't require maintenance, just use it until it's dead. Performance? Same as high end air-cooling, some AIO is even worse than some high end air-cooling heatsinks
If you're talking about custom loops, yes it does require maintenance, it's not cheap, it's not easy to setup & very risky if you don't assemble everything properly. Performance? Way better than anything that you could've ever imagine

This is AIO:


This is custom loop:


This post has been edited by sHawTY: Feb 17 2022, 02:26 AM

Slightly? No. The difference is night & day
You'd know that if you actually have hands-on experience with custom loop

But as I've mentioned before, custom loop is not for the faint-hearted. It's hard to build, hard to maintain & very expensive

This post has been edited by sHawTY: Sep 7 2022, 11:44 AM