I’ve got a few parts in the attic that I want to put together; HP PL DL380 G6 motherboard, 48gb of RAM and 2x xeon E5640, but haven’t got any cooling for it - LGA1366 dual socket. Any advice? Needs to be quiet because of WAF (wife acceptance factor)
cooler master 212 evo. 20-30$ usually and rather quiet. i have one a few feet away and i cant hear it. if you’re using a actual sever case it wont fit, but then no matter how loud the cooler is you wont hear it over all the case fans.
I bought a T2 cause it was on sale dirt cheap, does a fine job on a A10-7870K
Your case and budget will determine what you can do. Noctuas stuff is all great, and the bigger the better if it’ll fit, as more heatsink means lower airflow per area is needed, or to put another way less static pressure and noise.
(EDIT) It looks like your mobo uses non-standard cooler mounting holes, so it may be slightly more complicated.
If your budget is less get basically any two 120mm tower air coolers with some kind of fan control, or if that doesn’t fit try a pair of 92mm. Honestly for the same area a cheap brand does a large portion of as well, the big difference is the range of PWM and fan tone. I use a Raijintek Themis Black on my Lan\webbrowsing rig and while its been totally fine the PWM range is only like 1100-1450rpm in real life and its a more noticeable sound (even though only similar volume) than the Noctua 140mm fan I’ve got on an H90 in my workstation.
Really though making something quiet is much harder than relocating it to somewhere it doesn’t matter as much.
noctua is great and all but these are non overclockable xeons and thats a bit much.
No overclocking, just cooling - and case has not been decided yet - won’t be a rack cabinet is all I know so far. My budget is “within reason”
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I am a fan of be quiet! coolers.
They are just as good and quiet as Noctua cooler, just as expensive as a Noctua cooler and look 10,000 times better than a Noctua cooler.
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Looks like they’re going to be my choice as well… found them here in Norway almost as cheap as Amazon - and that’s including 25% vat 
Make sure you check this out! I brought an AIO cooler a while back with the intention of using it in a new system when I upgraded, by the time I upgraded Ryzen was out and the cooler wasn’t compatible. Just gave the AIO away to a friend with the old mobo and CPU which it was way overkill on but hey quiet as a mouse.
I found a new motherboard with standard mounts, which also provided me with the opportunity to use one of the cases I already had in storage.
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