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Recommendations

Recommendations:

• My favorite CPU coolers are made by Thermalright.  They are all copper and you can buy your fans separately and add them to the heatsink. The heatsink accepts a variety of sizes, including 80 mm and some accept 92 mm fans. The SLK-800 is the best price/performance heatsink in my opinion. If you're an extreme overclocker, you should get the more expensive SLK-900 series.  If you don't have a lot of other hot components in your case and don't plan to overclock, the cheaper SLK-700 is a good choice.
  Now you have to find a good fan to pair with the cooler. If you're not concerned about noise, look for the highest CFM rating on a fan you can find, but beware, it may sound like a tornado! For those wanting a little more quiet, the Thermaltake Smart Fan 2 and Enermax Variable Speed fans are two options that can be controlled manually. The Thermaltake can also be controlled by temperature, so it offers 3 options (full speed, manual control, or temperature control).  Panaflo makes 2 excellent cooling fans that run at a constant speed and noise level. The 24 CFM Ultra Quiet fan only makes 21 dB of noise. The 32 CFM fan is a good choice for your CPU and makes 28 dB of noise. The Enermax Whisper fan is another good choice for a temperature controlled fan.  All of the fans mentioned here could also be used as your case fans.
  A good place to find these fans and heatsinks is Silicon Valley Compucycle. 
• Now for a few coolers that have the heatsink and fan in one unit.  Note, I prefer the Thermalright coolers with a good fan as listed above over any of these.  The Thermaltake Volcano series coolers have good performance for a good price.  They're a little on the noisy side, but certainly tolerable. Swiftech makes great coolers, but they're way overpriced and unnecessary in my opinion.  Alpha and Zalman also make some good quality CPU coolers.  Alpha is usually fairly loud, and Zalman is usually very quiet. 

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Description
What To Look For