Enough about the additional accessories, so let’s leave them aside until they are required and pay some attention to the cooler’s structure. Our case compatibility list helps you to quickly identify which PC cases offer sufficient clearance for which Noctua CPU coolers. Unfortunately the kit would not work on the NH-L9a we have, however Noctua does have a specific adapter kit for this, the NM-AM4-L9aL9i mounting kit. After that I am going to check all of the features of the product and of course at the end of the article I will give the cooler some stress by letting it cool my AMD FX8350 processor.

The fan used is the Noctua NF-A12x15 PWM, which has a minimum speed of 450RPM and a maximum speed of 1850RPM. However with the NH-L12S the air is blown upwards away from the motherboard and this is reflected in higher system temperatures with the NH-L12 recording 46C, the SBS2 recording 42C and the NH-L12S recording 49C for the same test.Use negative offset, that will shift the voltage/frequency curve so that the CPU runs at higher clocks at lower voltage.

Well, here would normally lie a bunch of graphs comparing the coolers to other models, in various use cases.Not that it really matters since the heat-sink is square but this will allow me to position the heat-pipes on the top side, which will provide more clearance towards the RAM modules and the VRM heat-spreaders. The NH-L12s however, managed a more impressive (although to be expected considering the size) 20 delta on fan control mode, and 14 degrees under 12V mode. And by mentioning the fins stack let’s proceed the article with checking the heat dissipation part of the cooler, which is actually the aluminum fins stack.