The first thing to note is when we did our testing we kept the 120mm fan on top. If you were to remove it you would see higher temperatures but for most people a height of 93mm will be low enough so we saw no need to remove it.
As you can see for such a ridiculously small unit, the NH-L12 actually posted some decent temperatures. Yes it was the hottest cooler in terms of all of those we have tested but for such a compact unit its still a decent set of temperatures. In theory we would expect to see it fall even further behind as we introduce overclocking, right?
Well no quite the opposite happened. The NH-L12 gained ground on all other CPU coolers and it beat a tower heatsink, the Reeven Kelveros, by 3 degrees. This is truly impressive stuff. It also came within 1 degree of the Be Quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow which is also a top down CPU cooler but is around 150mm tall so can’t really claim the low profile moniker.
Given the extremely low height these temperatures are absolutely brilliant. So did the acoustics suffer in order to keep the temperatures competitive? Let’s find out.
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.