The Noctua NH-L12 had a relatively complex installation as far as CPU coolers go. You first had to fit some screws to the backplate and affix that to the underside of the motherboard. Then add some spacers over the screws poking through the motherboard mounting holes. This is followed by placing the correct brackets on the spacers and then screwing the brackets down with the supplied screws. With the backplate and brackets secured you then have to remove the NF-F12 fan from the L12 cooler, use the provided holes and screws in the heatsink to secure it into place and then reattach the fan if you want.
There isn’t really anything “useful” I can tell you that the manual doesn’t already point out. Sometimes in this section of the review I like to give some tips, tricks or criticisms about the installation procedure or supplied manual but the Noctua manual covers EVERYTHING. If you read the manual you cannot go wrong with the procedure, there are a lot of steps but nothing is fiddly, tricky or requires more than 2 hands to do – so top marks to Noctua for keeping things easy, even if it isn’t necessarily simple.
I also thought it was nice that Noctua included a tube of their NT-H1 thermal grease and three manuals for all the different socket variations instead of trying to cram it all into one book. You can tell Noctua have really thought about their products and it is something refreshing to see as we often see CPU cooler manufacturers making the same basic mistakes time and time again – like giving ambiguous installation instructions and not telling which way round to put the backplate because that does actually matter on most motherboards.
From the top, although this is a slightly angled picture, you can see that the cooler covers the majority of the CPU socket area and encroaches over DIMM slots #1 and #2.
Here you can see normal sized RAM modules will fit fine, but higher profile ones struggle to fit.
Due to the fact there is a 92mm fan used at the bottom, there aren’t any motherboard compatibility issues so this should be good for most motherboards. Although, ITX motherboard users will need to be more careful in their planning as the more compact things get the less room there is for error.
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.