Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler Review

TECHNOLOGY X TEST PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our CPU coolers slightly different depending upon the cooler’s marketed purpose, whether it be for a silent operation or extreme overclocking.  Our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your cooler performs the way it should.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchases; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.

AIDA64 EXTREME

In order to test our CPU cooler, we’ll be running a CPU stress test and monitoring our temperatures using AIDA64, which is a great utility for benchmarking, testing the stability of, and monitoring your system.

COOLING PERFORMANCE

To test our cooler, we ran AIDA64’s ‘System Stability Test’ for one hour and recorded the highest temperature reached on any core. We did so at both the stock core frequency of our Intel Core i5 6600K, as well as overclocked to 4.4GHz, and 4.6GHz.

During all tests our ambient temperature was approximately 23C while the cooler’s intake temperature was a slightly warmer 29C.

Above you can see that two fans sorta makes a difference, but nothing to write home about. The performance from this rather small sized CPU cooler is quite exceptional. We would feel comfortable running this cooler on many and most intensive processes.

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

The Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler is a basic CPU cooler that packs a punch! The punch doesn’t impact your pocket book either. There is no reason why you shouldn’t ditch that stock cooler that comes with your CPU cooler, as this is an extremely simple upgrade for massive performance gains!

There is nothing we don’t like about the NH-U12S, this is one solid CPU Cooler! For this and more, we proudly award Noctua, the NH-U12S with our Editors Choice Award!

Check Out Noctua CPU Cooler Pricing On Amazon!