Never used a Noctua, but Arctic and Thermaltake have always made good sinks in my experience; neither should be terribly expensive either.

Noctua is really good, but a bit expensive.

Expensive but you get what you pay for and they are some of the best. A Lot better than the more generic stuff out there but personally I want more copper than what is in modern coolers these days.

Agree with the two posts above. I have a Noctua NH-D14 CPU Cooler with an i7 4770K CPU on my desktop PC.
No matter how hard I push it the CPU stays cool, I have a permanent 20% CPU overclock using the latest bios revision of the G1 Sniper 5 board.

Expensive CPU Cooler but thoroughly recommended.

I like their fans, but.... they are really overpriced, just because they look like a wooden air-plane prop.
But other then that they preform well as similar quality Sunon or something.

Sorry for the bump, but this is one of the cases where I have a bit of personal experience:

I own a NH-D14, and here is my take on the situation given:

Pros:
It's basically the best air cooler you can buy. It can compete with the lower end of the water cooling spectrum.
It can keep my FX8350 (an already power-hungry CPU) from cooking itself @ 5GHz.
It's not water cooling, namely I don't have to be paranoid about the coolant or whether or not the system is leaking.

Cons:
It's really expensive. If you aren't using the system 5 years from now (which is the real draw of air cooling), just get a cheapo water cooling setup.
It's flipping gigantic. You need to have a lot of open room in your case + RAM without much the way of heatsinks.