The ice-pipe cooler certainly lives up to its promises. I bought a pre-built system from
http://www.quietpc.com/ a year ago (i7 2600K, Vertex3, 4GB ram). The only moving component in the system is the dvd drive; cooling is entirely passive. Running the prime95 torture test, 100% load on all 4 cores, the CPU temp holds steady in the high 60's, degrees C (ambient temp around 25 degrees C). In normal use it ranges from mid 30's to low 40s depending upon the time of year. It *is* a big cooler though so probably not an option if you want a high end gaming rig.
A year on and it's still performing as good as the day I bought it. Of course, having a silent PC means I can hear the hum from my cheap monitor - but, I recently fixed this by getting a new monitor (ZR2740W) that doesn't use PWM for dimming the backlight.