From the top of the NH-L12 you are mainly greeted by the dominance of the Noctua’s world famous NF-F12 fan.
Underneath you can see more clearly that Noctua have very impressively managed to snuggle a 92mm fan in between the CPU contact plate and main heatsink.
The four heat pipes feed into a very dense aluminium heatsink stack. This compact and neat construction just oozes quality.
Here is another shot at the height when you use the full product, from the base to the top of the fan the NH-L12 is only 93mm. If you remove the top NF-F12 fan you can chop the height down to 66mm and sacrifice some cooling capability.
The base uses a flat nickel plated copper plate, you can see part of the mounting mechanism is already affixed which is great as it saves time. The four heatpipes extend quite a bit out the side of the cooler so think carefully about which way around you want to mount it.
Noctua are a premier brand hence the premium price but I feel it’s still too harsh on the back pocket for what you’re getting. Also you can only take this heat pipe technology so far before there’s nowhere else to go & it looks like they’re there already. If only Noctua would also do something about their god awful colour scheme…
Well if you consider its about 50mm smaller than the Shadow Rock TopFlow and is only 1 degree worse on an overclocked CPU I think that’s impressive indeed. The colour scheme is one of those age old debates, You either love it or hate it I guess. You’re right it is expensive, but lets face it, it really is a niche market and its a niche market product done very well.
are all the comparison heatsinks non-pwm? how is it that they’re oc fan noise is pretty much unchanged from stock fan noise?
“Fans are always left to operate at PWM speeds, if this is not supported then 100% fan speed is used” To my knowledge every heatsink on the graphs uses PWM. So all these comparisons are PWM. If it was non-PWM the stock/load acoustics would be identical.
it would’ve been nice to throw in some top performers like the silver arrow extreme or nh d14 just to see where this cooler stands. i’m looking for a cooler for the asrock z77e itx, but most of them do not fit because the pci-e slot sits right up against the cpu block. asymmetrical ones like the l12 seem to give some hope.
Unfortunately the NH-D14 is too old to sample. The other one is a possibility I will look into it.