My ears may not be top notch, but I'm sitting next to two compaq's Intel powered machines with stock Intel cooler they are noisy and it's the CPU fan, unplugging the fan drops the noise considerable. Inside a hot enviroment, read case with single or nor exhaust fan, and no in-take, the Intel HSF underperforms, as much as the AMD alu heatsink does, only if you are comfortable with high CPU temperatures and tweaking the CPU fan speed manually, can you get silence with stock cooling; in all other cases (literally and figurativly speaking) you will have a noise PC once the CPU is loaded.

If your case features good ariflow I'm sure your system will run silent, and the fan on the Intel heatsink doesn't spin too fast to become noticeable. I've tested in extreme situation to see what the HSF is at its worse; if I were to to run the CPU at stock speeds ALL heatsinks would be DEAD silent at low fan speed without overheating; the idea of the OC was to create the heatload seen with QuadCore and DualCore CPUs, and afaik the heatsinks included the Q6600 are not too good either ( http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=get...&articID=5 96 ) .

To end the rant, I'm going to bed, in Croatia :) will include the latest Intel (with copper insert) HSF in the next roundup to please the masses and my curiousity , but I'm not expecting much ;)