Reviews - Noctua NH-L12

[HEXUS]

The ultimate low-profile cooler for your small-form-factor PC?

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[aidanjt]

Was the bottom fan strictly necessary? It looks like it chokes airflow, and certainly narrows airflow which could have spread out over socket surrounding components more freely, one of the biggest advantages of top->down cooling arrangements.

[DeludedGuy]

Pretty good performance for a small unit.

[Big Adam]

If you have space around the socket, the sensible upgrade seems to be to change out the 92mm fan for a second 120mm?

[blade1010]

quite good. But still i won't change it my Ninja 3 for that

[EzioAs]

I don't really think you should say the looks are bad. They are subjective and differs for each person. Anyways still a good review

[scaryjim]

Was the bottom fan strictly necessary? It looks like it chokes airflow, and certainly narrows airflow which could have spread out over socket surrounding components more freely, one of the biggest advantages of top->down cooling arrangements.

I'd guess it helps provide additional cooling to the area closest to the point where the heatpipes enter the fin array - that would make sense as this will be the hottest point on the fin array and keeping that cool will help the heat flow away from the contact plate. It shouldn't affect the outward airflow that much as the air will still be free to spread along the motherboard in any direction...

Wonder how it would perform if you reversed the fans so it was blowing upwards...?

[alwayssts]

I think the bottleneck with these Noctua coolers is typically the surface area of the heat sink which is designed for very good performance with low noise fan speeds, rather than the fan orientation. I have a C14 in a pc-c50b (literally the shortest htpc case it will fit in and only barely does so) and love it, but when xbit reviewed it they tried many fan configs and none really made a difference in temps (which realistically are already good enough for typical overclocking)...others have shown the second fans also actually do very little. The L12 seems similar for 3U (110mm wide for desktop or tall for htpc) cases. Noctua setups seemed designed around fitting the best possible quiet air cooling per standard form factor in a per-configured package...that's what you pay for...and welcome for HTPC setups where there is actually very little options (but slowly getting better as the market is growing.)

Not to take away from Hexus' very comprehensive review, but a must-see page for anyone that may need a htpc/sff cooler like this is this page at frostytech:

http://www.frostytech.com/top5_lowprofile_heatsinks.cfm

[ladcrooks]

I have a NOCTUA SE1366 NH-U12P - brilliant! Qiute and keeps cpu cool and using 1 fan only!

The remarks about looks etc - well you must be a sad person who has to look inside their computer every 5mins, ha!

Never gone for the looks - inside, only on the outside. Their fans are top notch.

[Tropi]

What in heaven's name has "aesthetics" got to do with a cooling fan?
It's buried inside a case where no one can see it.
It has one job to do - cool the CPU adequately.
Secondary, important consideration is NOISE.
Followed by ease of fitting etc.
The colour is about as important as it is for sewer pipes, ie, totally irrelevant!