Noctua NH-U12P CPU cooler review

Page 3 - Mounting and performance

Due to its weight and size the cooler must be mounted very well in order to prevent chipping off bits of your motherboard, That's why Noctua made special plate that secures it firmly. To mount this plate you need to remove the motherboard from the case. To tell the truth - I never had that much fun mounting a cooler :) Bits and parts are quite a lot so using the manual is strongly advisable. You'll have to go through 10+ steps before starting your computer again.

For testing the Noctua NH-U12P we checked how will it do cooling Intel E8500, in both stock frequency and after a rather hefty overclock.

• CPU: Intel Core2Duo E8500
• Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E WIFI-AP
• RAM: 2x2GB A-DATA DDR800
• Video card: Albatron GeForce 8800GT
• Sound card: Creative Audidgy Value
• Hard drive 1 1: Western Digital Raptor 10 000rpm 36GB
• Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 9 7200rpm 300GB
• Optical drive: ASUS DVD+/-RW 24x Ligthscribe SATA
• Cooler Master Mystique 631 Black
• 3x12см Cooler Master fans inside the case

In order to test in IDLE mode, we left the machine work after the LOAD test for about 6-7 minutes while under no load, at the Windows desktop. For the load tests we took the results from RealTemp 2.70 (the most adequate program for acquiring temperature measurements from 45nm processors for the time being), after 30 minutes running OCCT 2.0. The results you see are in degrees centigrade and the values are the ones ABOVE room temperature, This way the values are most precise, and the ambient influence is avoided.

РResults are more than adequate. The noisy low profile cooler can not and will not be compared to the NH-U12P with its absolutely noiseless fan (even without the low noise adapters)... Many of you might ask as to how the heck is this Evercool doing so well? At Its price? Oh, sure it did performed well, but at the expense of noisiness - its 92mm fan is rather audible unlike the soft, quiet lack of sound from the NH-U12P.

At this frequency the stock cooler overheated. Not only the fan RPM hit the sealing, but also the temperature rose above 70 degrees with relative ease in mere seconds of testing. That's why he was excluded from further testing.

The higher the voltage got, the higher the frequency went, and the gap between Evercool Buffalo and Noctua NH-U12P got bigger and bigger. The temperature reached with the Evercool cooler was about 70 degrees, adding the ambient one of 24,6. Besides that with the Buffalo the processor wasn't stable due to the high temperature and after around 40 minutes of OCCT the CPU generated error. With Noctua however things went smoothly. And much more quietly :)