I'd go for it, including the cooling. I guess in theory the fear of liquid cooling is if the pump ever breaks then there goes your CPU but I'm not sure it's any riskier than a CPU fan failure on a conventional setup. And the liquid cooling really is way better and does open up overclocking as an easy option later if you choose. There's no maintenance to them beyond the usual dust because it's just a closed loop system anyway.
The last rig I bought was one of those nice pre-built machines and the cooling it came with was utterly insufficient. I upgraded it to a larger heatsink and fan because the case doesn't really have a place for a liquid cooling setup but my previous case and previous setup (with a liquid cooling system) was great and I actually got a lot more life out of it because I could overclock it with no heat problems. Next rig, I'm paying a lot more attention to the case and making sure liquid cooling is in there.
Good call on 64 GB RAM too. I think 32 GB has come to be the new minimum. I'm not sure but I suspect with higher end graphics cards and just game engines in general doing more, they try to keep a whole lot more in memory than they used to and 16 GB means you're just stressing your Windows paging file that much more.
The last rig I bought was one of those nice pre-built machines and the cooling it came with was utterly insufficient. I upgraded it to a larger heatsink and fan because the case doesn't really have a place for a liquid cooling setup but my previous case and previous setup (with a liquid cooling system) was great and I actually got a lot more life out of it because I could overclock it with no heat problems. Next rig, I'm paying a lot more attention to the case and making sure liquid cooling is in there.
Good call on 64 GB RAM too. I think 32 GB has come to be the new minimum. I'm not sure but I suspect with higher end graphics cards and just game engines in general doing more, they try to keep a whole lot more in memory than they used to and 16 GB means you're just stressing your Windows paging file that much more.