Water Cooling vs Air Cooling

Water cooling is cheap when made by yourself but require regular maintenance which can go wrong and may fry your equipment in case of leakage. If you buy pre-made solution it's going to cost you absurd amount of money for a mere noise reduction if you are not after overclocking.

I'd say not worth the hassle

Only worth the expense if you are planning to overclock the computer - overclock = more heat, requiring a faster way to move heat away - to be honest most air cooling heatsinks are very good these days - I aircooled heatsink on mine and it is overclocked just fine :) and still stays cool

which cpu do you want?
a EKL Alpenföhn Olymp or a Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro 3 is more than enough to cool a i7-7700k

I water-cool for both overclocking and to keep the noise down (and because I already have the radiators, pumps, and fittings, so all I have to buy every time are the blocks, tubing, etc). My PC runs damned near silently.

The downside is the expense. For a water-cooling set-up (and no, I don't count all-in-ones as "water-cooling), you're looking at several hundred dollars for something decent. Depending on your budget, is the decrease in noise worth the extra expense?

IMHO, if you're not overclocking at all and want to save some $$$ - stick with a good air cooler or an all-in-one.
If you think you might eventually want to overclock and have the extra $$$ laying around, water-cooling can be a good investment, as many of the parts can be carried over from one build to another (again,excepting the blocks).

As above, unless you're pushing some heavy overclocks or live in an abnormally warm environment you'd typically be fine with just air cooling. As a compromise, you can combine a sealed liquid system for the core (no maintenance) and standard air cooling.

too expensive </3

wait i don't even have a pc to cool down </3

Remember that even with liquid cooling you'll still be using air fans in your case for hdd/mb/mem, your PSU also has fan and your liquid cooling radiator is having fans too!
So good 120+mm CPU cooler is not much noisier (~1k rpms) than liquid cooling setup and modern GPU stop their fans in standby and you can still overclock your PC.

Liquid metal cooling ftw!

A decent air cooler is most efficient and easiest to maintain ... i'd see Water Cooling more useful for GPU's
but even those have managed to lower their thermal dissipation by a lot, with smaller chip size (14nm).

I've never OC'd my hardware, and I've never used liquid cooling. With a good case and a few fans, it's quite easy to maintain good temps as a result of good air flow. That's my opinion at least.

What is it about water cooling that made you think it is worth the extra expense? From a technical perspective, the main benefit is actually lower weight and structural loads on the components than comparable thermal capacity air cooling systems. This might be a factor if you have a small form factor machine for transporting to LAN parties. If you just want it because you think it looks cool when people put colour co-ordinated systems together and run fluorescent coloured coolant, that's a perfectly valid reason. Some gamers modify their PCs for fashion the same way others modify cars or motorbikes. Your passion and hobby doesn't have to be the ideal engineering solution to be justifiable - you can do it because it makes you happy. If you don't display your PC (for yourself or others) or this isn't important to you, then there are probably perfectly suitable air-cooling solutions available at a substantially lower cost. Try to visualise air flow through the case as a whole, bearing in mind that hotter air will naturally rise, so it is sensible to draw (cool) ambient air from low on the front, over the components with minimal obstructions (e.g. tie cables together and/or out of the way), and out through the top rear of the case, as directly as possible. Use the largest fans that you can fit into each position, because smaller fans need to run faster to move the same amount of air, so larger fans will run more quietly for the same airflow/thermal capacity.

If you want to go the water cooling route, buy a Closed-loop, something from Antec , CoolerMaster or Corsair. That way you get the benefits of liquid cooling, but only require the maintenance of air cooling.

I bought a $40 Antec loop for my latest PC and my 6700K idles around 20c, and doesn't hit 55c at full load on stock clocks.

If you have never done a custom water cooling loop before I would definitely just get an AIO. It will for sure do the job keeping your pc cool. If you do plan to do a custom loop just make sure to get yourself educated first. Soft tubing loops aren't too hard but they aren't as reliable. On the other side, working with PETG can be a pain if its your first time. Good luck making your choice.

Air, even if you Overclock. Why risk your PC with potential leaking if it will work all good with air?

Water seems only useful i you are going 2-3 gpus with extreme OC.

Go for a Cooler master Hyper EVO 212 or Noctua DH-14/15 for CPU if you want good cooling. Just make sure you have the space.

If you go for 2 GPUs a good air flow in the pc case should be enough, yes they may work somewhat at higer temps but nothing the GPUs can't handle.

AIO Water coolers are safe but their main cause of death is a dead pump, while with tower coolers you only have to worry about fans and even then some big tower coolers can run fanless.

I personally prefer tower air cooler because of the noise, not only they are as good as AIO coolers but they are more silent, keep in a mind that a good AIO 240 radiator requires 2 fans, not matter how low their rpm is a spinning fan ALWAYS adds noise, the only way a fan dosent add noise to your PC is by not spinning at all, my brothers PC has a fanless Deepcool Lucifer v2 with a 6500 and keeps it temps under 80C do keep in mind that is running fanless, and my PC has a Noctua NH-D14 with 7700k(was a gift :,D) running with just 1 fan in silent mode.

oh yeah, tower coolers are not 100% compatible with all cases, they do need a spacious case.