For 75% of gaming builds water cooling doesn’t really matter. Air cooling is good enough these days that unless you’re overclocking there isn’t really a point. It is, however, much quieter if you do a custom loop, but that can easily add an extra $500 - $1000 to your build cost, especially if you don’t have the proper tools already. Stick with air cooling.

It’s definitely a personal preference, but it’s a very… strong personal preference and in many cases that’s for good reason, in both directions. Water cooling performance is typically incredible and if you are overclocking or otherwise generating a lot of heat in a small space or pursuing very high performance, it not only can manage that effectively but it can do it while being quiet, properly designed it can be pretty close to silent, that’s real nice. The downside is that it’s expensive and it’s… water. It’s not necessarily maintenance-free, unless you’re using an all-in-one (AIO) but that comes with its own limitations, but the biggest problem in my opinion is that when (not if) it fails, it has a high chance of being a computer-ending event. When an air-cooler fails your PC will start throttling, might shut down, in a rare case something might be damaged from overheating, but 99% of the time you just replace a fan, blow out some fins, and it’s happy as can be again after that little hiccup. When a water-cooler fails… it’s typically a big mess. Both practically and financially.

With water cooling, I think it’s fair to say they are either people who have regretted water cooling a PC at least once, or they are people who haven’t regretted water cooling a PC yet. Few people can ever say they’ve regretted using air-cooling in a PC, and I suspect anyone who would say they regret air-cooling a PC, probably also falls into the category of someone who hasn’t regretted water cooling a PC yet.

There’s nothing generally wrong with water cooling depending on your skill and commitment to the building process. There’s 2 ways to go with water cooling: an AIO (all in one) cooler, like this, or a custom loop, like this. The AIO you just follow the instruction manual and you’re set, a custom loop you have to buy all the parts, all the tubing, all the fittings, and assemble it all yourself. You have to really know what you’re doing.

My personal preference, however, is also to stick with air cooling. When an AIO breaks, the entire unit has to be replaced. When a tower air cooler breaks, its just the fan, which you can swap out more cheaply and easily.

OP if you live near a Microcenter, go check them out! They don’t do delivery orders, but they are a goldmine of hardware and enthusiast knowledge, and their prices are usually pretty reasonable********.

Water-cooling is more expensive and needs to be replaced periodically, where air coolers cost way less and basically just last forever because they have no moving parts. I don’t think anyone should buy them but obviously that’s something of a hot take.