Installation, Testing and Comparison:
Before I get started with anything here, I should note that this cooler is not made for overclocking, it’s made to keep your CPU cool in small, confined areas like an HTPC case for example. So there’s no overclocking of the CPU involved in this review. If you missed it above in the Specs section here it is again straight from Noctua: Caution: The NH-L12 is a low-profile quiet cooler designed for use in small form factor cases and HTPC environments. While it provides first rate performance in its class, it is not suitable for overclocking and should be used with care on CPUs with more than 95W TDP (Thermal Design Power).
My basic setup is:
Asus P8z68-v Pro/Gen3Motherboard
12 gb of ram
Installation was tricky, at least for me and my setup. My ASUS motherboard has limited space around the CPU socket area because of the integrated heatsinks. I actually had to install the brackets twice as it wouldn’t work the first time because the cooler hit the heatsinks, or rather the pipes did. Depending on your setup you might ruin into a similar problem or not.
You can see from the two pictures below that the brackets are a very tight fit.
Here’s what it looks like from the back of the motherboard:
Here’s the NH-L12 installed without the 120mm fan and just the 92mm on the bottom. This orientation was the only way I could install this cooler on this motherboard. You also see that the cooler hangs over my ram sockets so using any type of ram with tall heat spreaders on it just would not work.
Then here’s a couple pictures of the cooler fully installed for you:
As I mentioned there’s not much room around the CPU socket, I was going to put the NH-L12 up against another small cooler made for small cases, the SilenX Effizio EFZ-92HA3 but I couldn’t even install it on my board because of the mounting bracket hitting the heatsinks.
So I’m back to using the Intel stock cooler for comparison, which works as I’m sure everyone wants to know how it compares to after-market coolers. I should note that I used Noctua NT-H1 thermal compound on the Intel stock cooler for a better or more equal comparison.
Ambient room temperature was 24C (+/- .3C) during all testing.
I used four instances of Orthos Stress Prime to get 100% load on this CPU.
You do have to remember that running 100% load on all of the cores isn’t something that most people are ever going to do in real life. The average person, not an enthusiast I mean. It’s the extreme end of things. I don’t think I’ve ever really run 100% usage on a quad core CPU no matter what I did, and that includes gaming and video encoding and pretty much anything else I do during the day with my computer.
For testing the Noctua NH-L12 I tried some different configurations mainly because I was curious and I thought other people might be as well. I tested with both the 120mm and 92mm fans installed, then I did it with just the 120mm, and then with just the 92mm and finally with no fans at all.
So here’s the results of my testing:
As you can see there’s not much of a difference between running both fans and running just the 120mm fan, only one degree on average.
The NH-L12 is made to be used in smaller PC cases and that’s where the 92mm fan comes in, remove the top and you’ve reduced the overall height of the cooler itself. It’s one of the features actually listed above in the specs section. From the chart you can see that using just the 92mm fan does increase the temperature but it’s well within tolerances for this CPU, you won’t have to worry about heat.
I’m surprised about the Intel Stock Cooler not performing that well. I’ve read that many people overclock the Corei7 CPUs on air using the stock cooler, I don’t see that happening with mine at all. You do have to remember though that running all cores at 100% usage isn’t what the average person will do. As you can see from the chart above running the Noctua NH-L12 with no fans gives you the same cooling ability as the Intel Stock cooler that has a fan. I think that says a lot about the NH-L12 and it’s ability to cool efficiently.
As far as noise levels, even without using the low-noises adapters my case was very quiet. There is a slight hum from the fans but nothing that would call unbearable. I prefer my system to be as quiet as possible and this cooler is fine for my needs.