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The Cooler

The NH-U12P is designed to work with the two most popular sockets available today. And it claims to have high compatibility with any type of motherboard out there, but you might want to check out Noctua’s website to see if your motherboard is actually compatible with this cooler before you make the purchase. More information on that can be found over here.

Once you unpack the cooler, you’re basically left with a big piece of aluminum and copper weighing over 600grams without the cooler and 770grams with one fan attached. This cooler is designed to work with the included fan, but you can also add another fan if you prefer. Be sure to match the same RPM as the fan on the front! Preferably another P12 fan. But one fan would be more than sufficient in most cases. The base of this cooler is made out of copper, so are the heat pipes. The fins are aluminum and have soldered joints. And to make it look extra nice they’ve nickel plated the entire thing. The NH-U12P 4 copper heat pipes which have been nickel plated. The surface of the cooler is not as flat as you might think. It has very tiny differences in the surface to help spread highly viscous thermal pastes and to avoid air-pockets.

Along with this cooler comes Noctua’s NF-P12 120mm fan which as you can see on the photo above, has cuts in each blade. It normally runs at 1300 RPM and it can be turned down to 1100 and 900 rpm using the L.N.A. cables, these cables have each a different resistor to decrease the voltage of the fans. If you run this cooler at its normal speed than its semi noticeable, but once you plug it in using one of these L.N.A. (Low-Noise-Adaptor) cables then its dead silent. Just the way I like my system and it won’t interfere with the performance all that much either, but we’ll get to that later on in this review.

As I said these fans have something unusual to them. They have cuts in each of the blades; you will also notice that the blades are positioned very closely to each other. This results in better airflow but it also generates more noise. This is why Noctua added these Vortex-Control notches. More detailed information on how they work and what they do, can be found over here.