I eventually built my cooling loop with a standard copper water block, a motorcycle transmission cooler for a radiator (roughly equivalent to a 120mm pc rad) and an aquarium pump. I used a 5l copper jardiniere for a reservoir and kept a lid on it to keep the dust out and got my overclock to 4.9ghz @ ddr3 2400 and it worked really well except in high summer when it was 35c outside I couldn't ventilate the heat.
The copper jardiniere wasn't really doing anything to help radiate any heat and I found switching it for a bucket of water made no difference.
I couldn't overclock past 4.7 ghz with any stability with air coolers, an a11 or the arctic freezer xtreme which was rated at 160w. I did some math and found an estimated 180w tdp when the fx 4350 is overclocked.
I decided not to try the drinks cooler because I got it all to work simply with the loop and it would be difficult to fit things together without a machine shop to make custom parts though it would be nice to somehow hook up some sort of refrigeration I don't think I'd do it easily without being able to calibrate temp sensors so things stay above ambient and avoid condensation.
Instead I think that it might be possible to store the heat in a large water bucket of maybe 125l which could go on the floor under my desk. 1 litre of coolant per watt of cpu heat at stock levels Having the flexibility of pvc pipes I can move the radiator up to 2m away and use a desk fan to blow on it. I used only tap water for coolant in the end because it's easier to replace that distilled, & though the cpu block does get gunked up after a few months and requires occasional maintenance, as it is not part of a pre-built loop it easily disassembles.
So I've ended up with a cooling loop that works and has more flexibility than an off the shelf product. Each part is modifiable and replaceable however it wasn't ever any more ultimate than any other cooler as it still didn't help in high summer, but it did help me get a higher overclock most of the time when the 160watt air coolers I had weren't good enough.
It's possible that a bigger radiator would improve the performance more but it's now reached a juncture of deciding whether to spend to upgrade the cooler or move to a lower tdp platform. Upgrading the core system would gain far more than a couple of hundred mhz on the overclock. For a cheap shot I could try a bigger bucket and that's probably the end of that road.
An all in one water cooler might have provided similar performance for the similar money but I was reading about the drawbacks of failed pumps and leaky radiators and while an air cooler does away with all those problems I still didn't know which one might top out the overclock but it's worked out ok as I can still use the loop I made for Ryzen when eventually I upgrade.
For the fx4350 overclock I needed a min. 180watts but probably more like 250watts of cooling to get stable it's possible something like a noctua nh-d15 would have done it but it might also be close to the edge, or the cpu might have limits, so in the absence of definitive info. it's a dilemma not worth spending any more on to find out where the bottleneck is. My estimate is 300watts of cooling would produce a comfortable overclock at 5ghz or maybe 5.1. In all probability with more cooling, the cpu I have could go higher as 4.9ghz @ ddr3 2400 is pulling a vCore of 1.416 so there is 0.9volts of room to hit the limit of 1.5, but Ryzen would far surpass improving the fx overclock in any case so I might as well save the money for a new cpu board and mem.
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