Yesterday, I replaced my ancient Celeron with a brand new (all right, two years old) Core 2 Quad. My enthrallment with my new processor lasted for about twenty minutes; then, I noticed that my ears were hurting rather badly. I had discovered that tiny, noisy, useless piece of copper and aluminum know as the stock heatsink (the Celeron's heatsink was tiny and useless, but at least it was quiet). So, as you can see by the title, I would like to get a replacement heatsink. Most importantly, I would like it to be, if not completely silent, unobtrusively quiet. Good performance would be a plus, but it's not essential (it has to be better than the stock heatsink's performance, but I doubt that's asking a whole lot). I would like it to cost less than $20, but I could probably stretch that budget a little bit.

Any suggestions?

Which CPU exactly are you using in which case? What kind of video card are you using.

Hi, yes the case will determine how much room there is for a new cooler and the CPU model will tell us how much heat we're dealing with.
Q6xxx are the older series and significantly warmer than the Q8xxx / Q9xxx series.
If you have room in case for it I suggest Cooler Master Hyper 212 as large effective and cheap, probably one of best bang for buck coolers going.
I not got room in case smaller brother the Hyper TX3 worth a look. I used it several times and the stock fan is fine, PWM control and can be slowed down to <1000rpm which is respectably quiet.

Check you are controlling the stock cooler fan speed properly, either with settings in motherboard's BIOS or software, eg in Windows Speedfan.
I had a stock E6600 cooler that was OK ish at minimum speed, ~800rpm and cooled ok, for idle[ish] CPU at least!
CPUID's "hwmonitor" program can report all temperatures and fanspeeds if need to get idea what's going on in your PC.

Seb

(I thought I had already posted this, but apparently not. I'll type it up again.)

Hi guys, thanks for your replies.

How quiet are those two coolers? This site's review of the 212+ said that the stock fan was a bit noisy. A couple reviews of the TX3 said that it was "quiet," but I have no idea if that is quiet by SPCR standards. I don't think the 212+ would fit in my case, but the TX3 probably would.

Hi, the Hyper TX3 has 92mm fan and the last one I used winds down to 900rpm and is pretty quiet. It's cooling a 2500K at that speed too! Unless you are looking at very quiet PC I think you'd be just fine with it's noise. Often in Scan's "Todayonly" list ~£10 so dirt cheap
If want quieter I would purchase a pair of Arctic Cooling F9 PWM fans (£10~12 off eBay) and mount them on it, comes with two sets of fan clips by default! The AC PWM fans come with splitting system so can plug both in to one fan header. I have pair on my GTX260 and they are excellent. Very nice accoustics and wind down to 600rpm and up to ~1800rpm, I think a pair at 1800rpm would extract all the TX3 can offer, even if it's stock fan can get up to a loud 2800rpm.

Seb

I use the TX-3 quite a bit on many builds. The PWM fan is fairly quiet at slow to mid speeds audible not annoying so though at high speeds very noticable I tend to replace them anyway, I've started using the Gelid 92mm Silent 9 fans (they do PWM ones too) as an affordable replacement to the CM blade master stock fan. It's quieter and simply put a better fan you'll not have any concerns with noise using that. But you could swap it out for quite a few 92mm fans on the market.

But I might be a bit more fussy than most sound wise so you could be entirely happy with the CM fan that comes with it. It probably won't ramp up that high even on load. For the money the TX-3 is really a bargain it's fine on all CPU's bar the high end hot i-7's so you'll have no problems cooling that processor with it.

Give it a bash and see how you get on with the stock fan..one thing I like about the TX-3 and Hyper 212 is that they're very easy to remove/change fans on. IMO there is no need to mount 2 fans on this cooler or the 212 either you're simply asking for more noise. These coolers are more than able to handle it with one fan.

I had a stock E6600 cooler that was OK ish at minimum speed, ~800rpm and cooled ok, for idle[ish] CPU at least!

212+ has a noisy fan. I would replace it with a 600-800rpm fan. 500rpm might even work, I recommend Scythe slipstreams.

Coolermaster seem to have updated the 212 and TX3 now adding EVO at the end of them.
They look the same (Bar the fans) and they are quoting "lower" noise levels in the specs.

But they are still not as good as they should be. But even so for the price and replacing a fan they are a good deal and perform well.
I've done some more builds using these coolers and continue to use Gelid fans to replace the CM ones and I'm delighted with the quietness and cooling performance.

CM can make some nice stuff, they're just not that great when it comes to fans (some are ok though)

The 212EVO has no gaps between the heat-pipes on the processor contact side, unlike the 212+, which has some gaps; result: more surface for heat transfer.