- Review -

23.12.2015 SmallFormFactor.net

[E]specially when taking the rated 65w limit into account, the cooler performs admirably in the face of the higher thermal load provided by our test bench. And, during our load tests, the L9a manages to significantly outperform AMD’s own stock low profile cooler, which is taller than the L9a. The recently tested Scythe Kodati is also easily bested, although this isn’t too surprising given that the Kodati has a smaller fan. During testing, the sound output of the L9a felt very similar to the other cooler we tested, the Noctua NH-L9x65 (review coming soon!). This is not at all suprising, as they use the exact same uprated NF-A9x14 fan. Consequently, the fan was never ‘loud’, and the sound signature was always pleasing and non-obtrusive. That’s quite the achievement, given the fact that our load testing exceeded the TDP of the cooler by a whopping 23%!

"The Noctua NH-L9a is an excellent performer, considering it’s size. Being this small, it was always going to be a challenge for it to keep our hot 89W test CPU under control, but the NH-L9a did manage to achieve this – your chassis ambient temperature would have to top 45 degrees celcius for the cooler to hit the AMD thermal limit of 65C." (John Morrison, SmallFormFactor.net)