CPU Cooling by jmke @ 2011-02-09
Noctua has a go at top down CPU cooler, the NH-C12P comes with a 120mm fan while the SE14 adds a massive 140mm fan to this unit. Does it stand a chance against popular tower coolers for sale today? Let's find out.
Noctua is an Austrian company which impressed us from the get go. In 2005 they introduced a high end heatsink called the NH-U 12, a tower cooler with a design which meant business. Not only do their coolers focus on performance, but they are destined to find out the ideal fan design and always ship their heatsink boxed with their latest design. The Noctua 120mm fan series have received excellent feedback from the community.
Today Noctua tackles a heatsink design which was abandoned by most high-end cooler manufacturers: a top-down HSF. We test two variations of the NH-C12P which originally shipped with 120mm fan, later on they upgraded the mounting gear and included a custom design 140mm fan. The naming convention of the latter is a bit confusing, as it retains the "12" bit (referring to 120mm fan support) and adds SE14 at the end.
Both models share everything except the fan; here are the heatsink details:
The Noctua NH-12P maximizes all the area around the CPU socket, so the design is really a block with some clearance under the aluminum cooling fins, which expels heat transferred from the copper base through 6 heatpipes. The total surface area is well used, if you have a case with limited amount of space, this heatsink could offer you a nice third party cooling solution, so it seems.
The base is nickel plated and well finished
As mentioned before, the NH-C12P was first available with a 120mm fan, later on this was replaced by a larger 140mm custom designed unit
The blade design on the Noctua fan is supposed to improve airflow with the added notches as you can see above.
The 140mm has the same mounting holes as the 120mm fan, but as you can see the frame had to be made custom to pull this of. The mounting clips are pre-assembled on the 140mm unit with noise reducing rubbers.
Installation will require motherboard removal and a bit of patience, the cooler can be rotated 90° so you shouldn't have any issues fitting this unit inside a mid-range case, inside a HTPC things might be more challenging. Inside the package you'll find clearly marked plastic bags which contain the platform specific mounting bits and bytes.
From left to right in the photos above:
- Thermal paste, common mounting gear, fan mounting clips, anti vibration strips and two different 3-pin fan adapters which have a resistor build-in to reduce voltage to the fan. When tested with the Noctua 120mm fan the results were obvious. @12v it did 1385rpm, with the Black cable: 1111rpm with the Blue cable: 1000rpm. It's a no-frills approach into reducing the fan rotation speed without resorting to a dedicated fan controller or software solution.
- Intel S775 mounting gear (other Intel stock mounting gear included in the new boxes looks very similar)
- AMD AM2/3 mounting gear
Installing the bracket was easy thanks to the cut-out at the back of the CM HAF922, so far so good. Getting the heatsink screwed down however was more challenging as the top-down design blocks easy access. With fine pliers and magnetic screwdriver the heatsink was finally installed, the rubber strips pasted in the correct area and the 120mm fan in place:
Swapping fans was quite easy, the clips provide a solid installation for any fan that has open-flanged holes as the one pictured above. The Noctua 140mm fan comes with its own mounting clips and installed it looks like this:
Our S775 test setup has been laid to rest as we move along with our times. Although the majority of PCs in the world are still S775 based, we realize that those people who buy and install 3rd party heatsinks, will not use outdated hardware. To give an idea of how the tested heatsinks perform a variety of heat outputs we performed our tests with the CPU overclocked (and overvolted) at 3 settings. The test setup consisted of the following gear:
- Intel Core i7 920
- MSI X58 Motherboard
- Geforce 7900 GT with Zalman VF900 @ 5v
- 3x1 Gb DDR3 RAM
- Laptop 5400rpm HDD
- Coolermaster HAF922 (Default fan config, 200mm Front and Top, 120mm in the back, all at 12v)
Windows XP was installed and LinX 0.6.4 used for creating 100% CPU load. When comparing different software tools, we measured the total system draw at the wall socket, with the Core i7 920 at stock speeds:
- Prime95 (8 thread): 155W
- K7Burn (8 instances): 167W
- LinX: 200W !
Than we overclocked/overvolted the CPU to 3.4 and 3.7Ghz, to create these three profiles:
1) 2.67ghz - 133Mhz - default vcore - 200W
2) 3.41Ghz - 170Mhz - +0.05v vcore - 250W
3) 3.71Ghz - 185Mhz - +0.2v vcore - 362W
The last is brutal and only the high end CPU coolers can survive this test, hitting 100°C CPU temp caused the thermal throttling to kick in and so if you see a heatsink with CPU temp results of 100°C = FAILURE.
The ambient room temperature was 22°C during testing. Noise readings of the CPU coolers and fans was done outside the system, with the dBA meter placed diagonally at approximately 20cm. Ambient noise recorded was 32dBA.
Intel's stock cooler you receive with Intel Core i7 920 CPU.
We test each heatsink with its default fan, and if we can fit a reference fan we will use the following depending on the fan size:
- Vantec Tornado 92mm (4800rpm)
- Titan 120mm (2900rpm)
- Delta 120mm (3200rpm)
- GlobalWin NCB (1300rpm)
We start of with the CPU running at stock speed, the Noctua with it's 120mm fan offers a decent performance/noise ratio here, better than expected to be honest, the 140mm version doesn't add anything to the table here, the fan is at full blast a tiny bit noisier even. When we use our reference fans we can compare the results head to head with a tower cooler we recently tested, the Coolermaster Hyper 212 Plus. The outcome with the rather silent GlobalWin NCB fan is very promising, when swapping the silent fan for one of the faster ones the difference remains minimal. At the CPU's stock speeds this cooler does deliver the numbers, compared to an entry level tower cooler. Compared to a more expensive tower cooler (Megahalems) the difference is bigger, but still nothing too shocking.
First step of our system overclock adds 50W to the total system wattage, here the NH-C12P puts up a good fight again, trailing Coolermaster's 212 Plus only when using slower fans. With high performance fans the NH-C12P is pretty good. How will it cope with an extra 110W?
That the NH-C12P would overheat with the slower 120/140mm fans was to be expected, but even with a Delta 3200rpm screamer the CPU went over 100°C quickly, we have pushed past the thermal performance of this heatsink with our third test. For extreme overclocking on air a tower cooler will give you a bit more headroom.
After putting the NH-C12P (SE14) through its paces in our thermal tests we can make an informed decision, its strenghts are definitely the included silent fan with options to reduce rotation speed even further, good platform compatability and solid mounting back plate method. Its compact size makes a prime candidate for a HTPC build; inside a mainstream ATX tower case however its easily outclassed by much cheaper tower coolers, when pushed to the limit the NH-C12P lacks the surface area to expel the heat generated by a highly overclocked Core i7. Of course this is worse case scenario, and as you can see from our results the NH-C12P holds its own when installed on a CPU with lower heat output.
Noctua's price point for their products hasn't changed much over time, their NH-U 12 was launched at ~€50, the NH-C12P SE14 is available for ~€55.
For a desktop system there are cheaper/better alternatives available, if however you're working with a compact system case and want to cool down a recent CPU silently the Noctua NH-C12P SE14 makes a good alternative, your budget allowing.
We like to thank Jakob from Noctua for allowing us to test their products.