- Review -

20.04.2019 APHNetworks.com

With a sufficient amount of time to load the processor, you can see how each of the coolers performed with the peak temperatures across all the cores. Unfortunately, I did not have a 140mm sized cooler to test against the NH-U12A, but you can see it was indeed the top performer compared to the other similar sized heatsinks. The two NF-A12x25 fans do a great amount of work with the NH-U12A to keep maximum load temperatures at 74c. Taking off one fan increased the results by one degree. Compared to the CRYORIG H7 Quad Lumi, you can see how this was seven degrees cooler. It is not often we see such a delta in similarly sized heatsinks, so it is great to see this sort of result. As for the sound analysis section of the Noctua NH-U12A, on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is silence, and 10 is the definition of loud, I would rate the NH-U12A at 2.5/10 during idle and around 4.0/10 under full load for both fans. The NF-A12x25 fans, on a day-to-day use, are very quiet and spins without much noise. When you push your computer to greater loads, as we did in Prime95, you will start hearing the fans whirring on, but this not much louder than our single-fan competition.

"The Noctua NH-U12A simply starts and stays ahead of other competing heatsinks in the same size class. [...] Once again, with the NH-U12A, Noctua shows that compact and powerful can belong in the same sentence." (Aaron Lai, APHNetworks.com)