- Review -

01.01.2014 Play3r.net

The Noctua NH-U9B SE2 was a pleasure to install, as is every Noctua cooler, but did it perform well enough to pick up any awards from us today? I guess there’s only one real way to find out so let’s add up the positives and negatives to determine an outcome. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that it could cope with a hot running Intel Core i7-4770K at 4.5GHz. It did get a little warm but that’s to be expected with its size and also with the nature of the Haswell CPU as they have a habit of running extremely hot anyway. While it isn’t the coolest in the world, it far outdid my expectations in terms of its cooling performance and the noise levels at which it operated. All Noctua fans are notorious for providing good airflow and static pressure whilst remaining as quiet as a Noctua fan always is. It’s quite unlikely that you will have a high overclock on something such as a HTPC but if it is being used as a gaming system as well as to serve its HTPC duties, an overclock may be desired to give the system that extra bit of grunt. However, that’s ultimately not my say, and it is down to whether the end user would want to overclock for maximum performance or opt for the sweet silence that it offers with the voltage reduction cables in place.

"Due to its small size, pricing and performance, I feel that Noctua have once again produced an excellent cooler and have shown why they deserve their title as one of the very best manufacturers in today’s market. For its size and price this cooler is simply unbeatable" (Brendan van Varik, Play3r.net)