Thermals are absolutely fine in my situation. I stopped monitoring them after the first week of heavy use and crushing burn-in, so IMO issues with thermal figures are grossly exaggerated out there, or they must be excessively overclocking. My numbers were well within safe margins under heaviest burn-in load. Seriously, for stable DAW use, I see absolutely NO reason to overclock – it’s plenty fast as-is. I’m interested in 100% stability, so I’m not overclocking at all. (But good to know I can if I ever want a little more horsepower.)
I don’t like water cooling systems any more TBH, the last build I did was actually too noisy for me and the numbers weren’t that great… so this time I went with the NOCTUA NH-D15S air cooling. So far I’m happy with it. Note that this Noctua model is designed for high-compatibility with motherboards – the other version of this cooler, the NH-D15, doesn’t fit on some motherboards, but the NH-D15S has an interesting shift in the design that clears more space. Works great with the Gigabyte Z390 Designare.