I'm looking to upgrade pickups in my Standard Strat. I hate the pups in it, noisy as hell, especially with the gain cranked on the amp. I was looking at the Fender noiseless sets, but wanted to know what people's opinions are regarding the Vintage Noiseless and the Hot Noiseless sets.

I'm looking for a nice brite, biting tone whether overdriven or clean. I'm leaning towards the Hot Noiseless set, but wanted to know what people's opinions were. Thanks in advance.

I've never liked any of the noiseless PUs. They seem artificial, and 2 Dimensional to me. Some others here really like them, though.

I'm very impressed with the Noiseless Pups on my student's 2006 American Deluxe Strat. During the lessons, I often let him play through my heavily modified Mesa F-50. I have also had the opportunity to borrow his guitar.

There's a lot of common mode interference on the AC line where I live. It's from light dimmers, power tools, hair dryers, and so on. I had to mod my factory new F-50 from the get go because of the lousy filtering in its power supply. Poor engineering, inherent design flaws, cheap components in thermal runaway, cold solder joints, etc. Totally unacceptable. The other mods were to tame the grossly excessive surplus gain in the preamp stage. I replaced the stock tubes with JJs and lowered the gain with one 12AU7 sub, mu = 20. Anyway, back to the Fender noiseless pups:

It will definitely give you that characteristic Strat biting tone with brightness. I like the pups, because I can really "dig in" to the strings for a Ronnie Earl kind of vibe. Also, I appreciate the fact that the pups don't change or compress the timbre of the instrument.

I can go from ultra-clean to blues to "sizzling bacon" death metal tones (no joke) and the pups sound great. For the extreme gain - just for kicks - I stomped on my Fulltone Fulldrive II with boost engaged and cranked up the gain on the F50's lead channel. When I muted the strings, they didn't hum like crazy.

As an experiment, I tried various guitar-to-amp cable of different lengths and with the guitar strapped to my body, I walked around the room and into an adjacent room getting close to lamps and other AC-powered devices. There was nothing objectionable detected.

You may different results, of course. Also, the hum is many, many decibels down from other single coils that I've used. I'm not saying that these pups are miraculous or anything, just they are pretty darn good. I have not tried the Fender Noiseless on stage in a venue with flashing beer signs and overhead flourescent lighting. However, based on my personal experience, I give them a thumbs up. I have not had the opportunity to try the Vintage Hot Noiseless.

In addition to the hum and noise suppression, again, I very much appreciate that these pups don't "goof up" the tone of the instrument, squash the signal, narrow the bandwidth, or compress the daylights out of the signal to the amp.

I hope this helps somewhat.

I was about to say that I wasn't especially fond of them, but after reading this previous post by throckmorton, I'm might just change my opinion, haha.
My strat came with them, and I just couldn't find the right sound with them. They seemed to have that Strat tone, but didn't really have any distinct voice. I have since changed them out with two P-90's (i know, sacrilege) and loved it. But I did leave the option of switching out both setups of my noiseless and p-90s so maybe I'll go back and give them another go.

What about the Suhr system? That might be the best solution.

Anyway, I had Fender Noiseless Pups in my Strat and liked them. They don´t have the character of the classic single coils but, in my case, no hum and no noise were more important considerations.

I replaced the fender pickups with a set of Kinmans which are noticeably superior but far more expensive so, all in all, I found the fender ones to be a good bang for the buck kind of deal.