Personally, I'll disagree a bit with AigoMorla on this, but it depends on your "level of enthusiasm" and what you're trying to achieve. If I could buy a decent cooler for $10, and $30 fan would improve cooling dramatically while maintaining low noise -- I'd buy the fan.
If you're just looking for less noise and equivalent cooling, there are plenty $15 fans to be had from resellers, and I have no complaint with any of the recommendations so far. I can only tell you what you can achieve with a 212 EVO under certain circumstances. And I can tell you which coolers would best it and by how many C degrees under those same circumstances.
Frankly, I'd even explore the possibility of using something like the EVO with no fans attached to it. Performance-PCs is selling the classic ThermalRight blue-rubber 120mm duct for about $4 each. Get a decently "beefy" case exhaust fan -- even a 3-pin Panaflo 120x38mm 2,300RPM 0.5A fan for the case exhaust, control it thermally and have it do all the work pulling the air through the cooler, through the duct and out the case-rear.
You could add a pusher fan to that configuration, but for stock CPU settings or mild overclocks, I'm pretty sure the exhaust-fan-with-duct would do the trick. Instead of the Panaflo, I might get something like the 3K-RPM Noctua IPPC -- that's $30 clams, I know! But you'd have only deployed a single fan to do it all.