Water cooling is more noisy, by a little bit. The only thing I hear on my system is my harddisk (I run a stock i7-3820 with memory at 2400 for a memory intensive application). If you want to overclock by a large factor, water cooling can do that better.
See
here for a comparison between two popular air and water cooling solutions.
I have the TPC-800 which is large and I make sure I always transport it very gently. But there are specifications for the weight it should be able to handle. Those specifications are for shipping conditions. Most motherboards have a special metal plate on the back side of the cpu mount (and it comes with the cooler too).