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Shirley 8955HX/cousins are right around the corner by now?
Is watercooling quieter? I want the legit fastest quietest thing now (so if it's quieter I wouldn't care about overnerding). I get quite a lot of noise after 3 or so years of going with my current machine. Am sure it's largely dust build up and when I have headphones on to play I don't notice it. But if I'm working I'm usually one headphone off and it's a bit of a low grade nuisance.
CYOA-
There's always something 'right around the corner'. "If I was buying now"...
Any form of cooling is only as quiet as the fans that are fitted. With watercooling, you've got pump noise to contend with, and pump impeller development has nowhere near the level of resources chucked at it as fan R&D does. Also, sealed heat pipes/vapour chambers are incredibly effective, and from my experience in order to achieve similar levels of performance between a good, large heatpipe air cooler and a compact closed-loop watercooler, the watercooler will need to have more/larger/faster fans and be louder.
Obvs you can spec and fit a MUCH larger water radiator inside a PC chassis, so watercooling can scale far further than air, but again that only starts to make a practical difference if you're using Intel chips made of magma or 0vErCl0KxXiNg.
If you really want 'quiet', then limit your CPU TDP (losing maybe 7% peak performance) and run your 140mm Noctua fans at 500rpm.
ectoplasmosis
Deffo not Threadripper for gaming; @CYOA just needed a metric fuckton of PCIe lanes.
If I was buying now, I'd get a Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, or the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D for £60 more if you're gonna be doing actual work with it as well.
Motherboard depends on your peripheral demands. Expensive fast 'gaming' RAM is a waste of money. Invest in a decent cooler (I'd avoid watercooling, another waste of money unless you're overcl0xXing).