Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler Review

 

 

Installation and Testing Continued

 

As you may have noticed the NH-U12S only comes with one fan, the NF-F12, but they were kind enough to send me another one to use for testing purposes.

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The NH-U12S features a newer style of fan clips than was used before on Noctua coolers. The below picture has both style, the top is the older style and the bottom is the newer style.  This newer style of clips is much more sturdy and stronger allowing for a better grip on the fan and cooler and they do seem easier to install.

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Here’s the NH-U12S with both fans installed, yes it’s much bigger but there’s still plenty of room around it.

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For testing I’m comparing the NH-U12S to the NH-U12P, Cooler Master Seidon 120 XL, Evercool Silent Shark, Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro and Water 2.0 Performer. I tested the NH-U12S with one fan, with one fan and the low noise adapter and then with two fans.

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During testing the ambient room temperature was 24.5C (+/- .2C). I used several instances of Orthos Stress Prime to get load on the CPU and I then used CoreTemp to monitor and log the CPU temperatures during testing. I then average them out to get a single temperature for the following charts.

 

The first chart is the cooler with the CPU at the stock speed of 3.4Ghz.

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Let me just say that I’m very much surprised that the NH-U12S is as good as the liquid cooling of the Cooler Master Seidon 120 XL. Yes I had to use two fans on the cooler to achieve this, but still that’s pretty good.  All of the coolers are fairly decent performers though, they’re all within a couple/few degrees of each other.

You’ll notice one thing about the results, actually using the fan adapter with the single fan seems to yield better results. The reason for this is actually that the adapter makes the fan spin faster than it normally does on the PWM connection of the motherboard. When I first installed the cooler I got an error when I turned the computer on, it was a fan error telling me the fan was essentially going to slow and I had to go into the BIOS to override the warning so the computer would boot without stopping for the error. The fan was running at 400rpm when this happened, but when I used the adapter it ran faster than that when I powered the computer on.

 

I then overclocked my CPU from the stock 3.4Ghz up to decent 4.4Ghz.

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So here’s the overclocked results, but I didn’t use all of the same coolers, only the Cooler Master Seidon 120XL and the Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro, basically the ones that performed the best during the stock speed test.

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So here the water cooler is more effective than the NH-U12S which is obviously an air cooler, this was to be expected but still it’s surprisingly close. The NH-U12S comes up even against the Seidon 120 XL with one fan.

The fan of the NH-U12S is the NF-F12 which is in itself very quiet, but it does get slightly audible when running at full speed and when you have two of them stacked. They’re not loud by any means, but they are audible but that’s only when they’re at full speed. Like any other Noctua cooler or fan it runs very quietly overall.