PC Upgrade, Crossfire vs Custom Liquid

[Dblkk]

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/dblkk/saved/38qd
Here the link to my system, just wondering for my next upgrade, about $200 to spend.
Should I get a second Radeon hd 7870 and crossfire mine, newegg has it $200 - $30 MIR.
Otherwise, have been looking at custom water cooling, found a few good kits on frozenpc for $250ish.
Which way do you recommend and why?

 

[someguynamedmatt]

I'll make two arguments against myself. Maybe it will help you decide... I know that feeling all too well.

Unless you're having heat problems, plan on doing a LOT of overclocking, or have a lot of time and money to kill for little to no performance gain, go with a second GPU. It's a nice thing to have if you plan on showing your system off or will be doing constant benchmarking (again, to show your system off), but it loses a lot of practicality after that. Buying a second GPU will give you an actual performance return for the money and won't threaten your system by literally serving as a sealed fountain. Especially for $250+, you have to ask yourself, is it really worth that much for the knowledge that your system is running a few degrees cooler than it was before?

I'm not entirely unreasonable, though... if what you want is a project, and are dedicated to see it through, then go ahead and buy yourself a water-cooling loop. I'm sure people think the same thing of my building an 80Mhz 486 system with 32Mb of RAM - it's something fun to do that I happen to enjoy, even if it costs a good bit of money to track down every little part. So, if you don't actually need any more graphical performance in the first place and are looking for something more entertaining to do, a WC loop can be a very satisfying thing to work on.

Of course, that's just my opinion, but you asked for it.

 

[Dblkk]

Performance wise, I think the crossfire the best. But as people will say card would be better replaced that crossfired, but im not selling mine at a loss not having one for a week or so and buying a card just a bump up from this.

But I just bought the corsair 540 case, with a huge side window and not only thought a liquid setup would look sweet, but I do overclock my 8350. Right now i'm at 4.4 ghz and after 4.5-4.6 thermals get 50 c while idle. I have a corsair H55 on my cpu now. If I do water cool, it would start with just the cpu block, and reason im looking at $250 kits is I want to add gpu and mobo chipsets into the loop.

I had just asked myself this question a few days ago, and tiger had intel 530 256gb ssd's on sale for $110 a piece, I picked up two for raid.
But now rebate cards have been coming in from my initial pc build, so im pretty much back to the same question.