The more seasoned testers of heatsinks either include multiple fans or vary the voltage of the fan to get an idea of how it will perform with different CFM through the cooler. That is the same principle here. Blocks always perform better with increasing flow rate, but how much better is not constant. By looking at performance curves for the different blocks and comparing them to your choice of pump and radiator, one would hopefully be able to make choices in parts that would lead to an efficient system that is performing at close to optimum levels. You also have the possibilty of developing a more coherent "big picture" sense of water cooling loop design than if you just test a lot of different complete systems and try to draw no larger conclusions from them.
Just because you seek real world results doesn't mean you have to eschew the fundamentals of science. Isolate the variables of interest and then vary them one at a time while holding others constant. Build up a model that effectively includes all the observations. That is science at its most fundamental level. That has nothing to do with a laboratory either; it is useful everywhere. Any time you have multiple properties varied though you can extract nothing useful from the results.
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