Well you are still limited by air a little bit. You'll need a big enough radiator or a chiller system in order to remove the heat from the water. Observe&report did a water cooled cab using CPU components. Worked decently well.
I've always wanted to drill holes through the heatsink base so that water could be ran through the heatsink itself. Just to aid cooling, plus have backup cooling of the heatsinks themselves in case the water pump failed.
Hmm, I wonder if .25" diameter passages would be enough to remove heat.
The pores on your skin are large enough to remove heat. Air is fluid, and there are even better fluids than water for some things. For example in extraction we are concerned about maintaining a low temperature. And alcohol trap before the vacuum pump, needs to be around -30F or less. You take dry ice and mix it with acetone. That stays a certain temp in the same way water and ice stays at 32F, as long as there is ice. And the dry ice won't sublime in acetone, it melt first, into the acetone.
I see you all thinking correctly about "just in case." Passive-active hybrids, water-air hybirds. But they seem to want to keep the system up and limping instead of shutting it down to be fixed.
So, to me correctly is to figure out the failsafe. Limp home? My motorbike does that. I take another course of maxing up the system so it cannot run without cooling. So for that I need shutdown fail safe techniques.
About drilling an existing heat sink, you would be much better off I think, flooding the heat sink fins, somehow in a flow through container. Maybe it is similar to air flooding a heat sink in a forced air channel.
Very good thoughts.