This is my first encounter with a Noctua CPU cooler here at eTeknix and I can honestly say I am thoroughly impressed with the Noctua NH-L12. As always I’ll start off by revealing to you the price, if you don’t already know. The Noctua NH-L12 costs £43 from Scan, and between £40-50 more broadly from other retailers. Thus you can safely say this Noctua CPU cooler occupies a high end part segment of the market, priced similarly to other high performance CPU coolers. Being a Noctua product, it is widely available across Europe and North America as Noctua are a big brand in the world of computer cooling.
At that price you are getting a unique , yet cost effective proposition. On the one hand you have a CPU cooler that is compact enough to fit into the smallest of systems of mini-ITX, micro-ATX and ATX form factors, and on the other you have a CPU cooler that is capable of running Ivy Bridge at 4.5GHz without breaking into a sweat.
We agree if you consider other cooling solutions for the same price, the performance is below-par however this is a foolish way of looking at it since this cooler is specifically designed for small form factor systems where the height of your CPU cooler is an important consideration. You wouldn’t spend £6000 on an Nvidia Quadro GPU and complain it sucks at running games, so why make a similar mistake here?
Acoustic performance was excellent, and we really can’t rave enough about how good it was. The Noctua NH-L12 was probably the quietest CPU cooler we have ever tested. Add to that the fact it looks the business, is extremely high quality, offers highly competitive performance for its unique form factor and is well priced.
Awarding the Noctua NH-L12 is a tough one. It could have our innovation award for being such a unique product in the HTPC/SFF market. It could snatch the Bang For Buck award for being one of the best performing and best value HTPC cooling solutions on the market we have ever seen. Yet the Noctua NH-L12 ticks so many boxes that we feel it is more than deserving of our highest award, the Editor’s Choice award.
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.