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Asetek specifies a Rth of 0.124 K/W for the 570LC. While official values are hard to find, for a high end air cooler like the NH-D14, frostytech found 11.2 K rise above ambient for 125 W, which is 0.09 K/W - with (slow) stock fans. So you'll need a 240mm cooler like the H100, which is only slightly better, or something like the EPIC 180, which is not available standalone, to get better than air cooling. Or you can strap more powerful fans on the NH-D14, which is what I did.
There must be a reason why I have never seen an air vs liquid cooler comparison.

I have a (Hyper 212 Plus) which is very similar to the N520, it's the size of the radiators used by these liquid coolers and it has amazing cooling ability.

The N520 performs quite a bit worse than the Hyper 212 Plus. It was a step backward for Cooler Master. For the numbers of damn near every heatsink, see FrostyTech. They never drop heatsinks off their comparison, so the latest review always gives the full picture.

Although it's a little pricier now than when I bought, the Zaward Vapor 120 is the best under $50 heatsink by far, but the 212 Plus at $26 is definitely worth it, and makes me wonder why the $34 at best N520 even exists.

There are patents going back a decade pertaining to using microfluidic ducts as a heat transfer mechanism. Every few months now, there's another article on slashdot about one of the chip giants testing out such manufacturing techniques. Just a few links from a quick googling...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/coolers/display/20031008155430.html
http://www.electronics-cooling.com/2002/11/electroosmotic-microchannel-cooling-system-for-microprocessors/
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2424&page=11
http://www.w7forums.com/nanotechnology-delivers-revolutionary-pumpless-water-cooling-t6658.html

I've had about 10-12 nvidia cards in my personal workstation - never had a single issue with any of them drawing a single pixel wrong - currently have 2x GTX 280's in a 2x quad core xeon machine and they are working perfectly and generating a lot of heat but apparently dissipating it properly.

Now ATI cards - I had the problem documented here: http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1288 - after 6 cards (not even kidding) die in less than 24 hours of use I finally sent the last one back and told them to really take their time (I had bought a Nvidia 59xx by then) because I really didn't care about the card anymore and that one worked like a top (took them a solid month to get one that worked I should mention). Sold it on eBay to someone in Australia and never bought an ATI video card again. I'm sure they are just fine - especially as now they allow 3rd party OEM's to make them, but back in the day their quality assurance was horrible.

your typical PC heat pipe thing uses air where this one is using fluid.

What? Heat pipes use fluid that evaporates and condenses. If you don't believe me would you believe NASA? Here's one from Coolermaster just to show it's not limited to G5s and satelites.

How in the hell would one that doesn't use fluid work?

I still respond to this the same way I always have about everything ATI.

About a year ago I bought an ATI 9500 Pro because of rave reviews, and friends who liked them. I've actually only ever been able to use the card for a month - as I'm on card #4 now. Because of a manufacturing flaw in the card itself it tends to overheat and damage the card permanently. Check out this article to see what I'm talking about.

Around card number 3 I bought a NVidia 5900 and I haven't looked back - its brutally fast, 100% reliable and it looks great. ATI will never get my business again. Card #4 btw I gave to my brother died less that 15 seconds after powering on the machine - didn't even get to install the drivers. Maybe card #5 will work - but I've basically written off the price of this worthless piece of junk.

This isn't the only ATI video card though I've had quality control problems with - I had an 8500 that between the worthless drivers, and poor QA on the actual card itself was mostly unusable.

IRC, copper conducts heat better than silver...

Last time I checked, that isn't the case. Silver has the best thermal conductivity of all elemental metals (at least all common ones - I don't actually have an extensive list in front of me). Slightly, but not drastically, better than that of copper. And with respect to other to other responses to the parent, the conductivity of aluminum, while better than, say, steel, pales in comparison to that of copper or silver.

See FrostyTech, or Tom's Hardware if you don't believe me.

The use of aluminum is a consequence of price and of system requirements. You can cool a Pentium II, for instance, adequately with an aluminum heatsink because it doesn't put out as much heat. Modern processors, on the other hand, put out more watts of energy which needs to be rapidly sucked away from the cpu and dissipated, so a heatsink with a copper core at the very least tends to be the norm.

Why don't we see more silver heatsinks? Price, of course. Copper is already relatively expensive, but a big block of high purity silver is out of the price range of most people. At that point water cooling probably has a better price performance ratio.

By replacing the stock HD with a Seagate Barracuda V 120gb ($130) and the fan with a Papst fan ($15), I've made it so the the only audible noise my g4 makes comes from the PSU. Pretty quiet and pretty cheap, considering I needed a bigger HD anyway.

But I want it dead quiet, since I use it to record music, and I hate computer noise anyway. So next step is to replace the PSU, probably with one of these ($80). The only problem is, Apple doesn't follow ATX guidelines with its power supplies, but lucky for me some guy's already figured out the differences. Unfortunately, that's only for the Sawtooth g4s, those of you who have something else may be SOL. But there's no reason why you couldn't find out the pinouts of your own particular g4's PSU and match it to the ATX standard.

Only thing is, I'm never going to want to buy a newer machine, b/c my current one rocks so hard (or rather, so softly). So I started looking into g4 upgrade cards (more). I'm probably going to try and hold out till they come out with something that lets me upgrade to a g5, but i figure an upgrade card with the heatsink replaced with something more like this, perhaps with a fan controller, might be the way to go. Anyone know if it's possible to use a heatsink like that on an apple chip?

Of course, if I've got a heatsink like that, I'm going to have to cut a window into the case to show it off. Anyone know anything about how much EM shielding the case offers, and if cutting a big hole in it is a bad idea? I mean, I see all-plexiglass cases around, how do they get around the EMI problem?

"TMD fans which were used on several Swiftech models were recalled earlier this year as many of you are aware. We asked Vantec about this issue in no uncertain terms and were told that the TMD fans used here do not suffer the same defects." from this review. Also, they run at a lower RPM (~5400) than than the Swiftech's (7000+) which may have been a factor.