Introduction and Specifications

Noctua is a fairly new company, they launched their first products back in December 2005, the NH-U 12 and NH-U 9, both are high performance CPU heatsinks which kept our test system quiet and cool. More recently they’ve added case fans to their repertoire which are custom designed for maximum airflow with lowest noise in low air restriction areas. Today we test their latest addition to their quiet computing product range, a chipset cooler for Intel and AMD motherboards.



The NC-U 6 is based on the now popular tower design of heatsink, it’s a slim design based around two U formed heat pipes. The official specifications are:

Material: Copper/Aluminum

Type: Two copper heat pipes

Dimensions: 85x70x33mm

Weight: 130 gram

Mounting: Push-Pin or Hook Mounting



Inside the Box

Inside the package you’ll find the Push-Pin and Hook mounting brackets, an installation manual, thermal paste and a square cushion to put around smaller chipsets:



It’s worth noting that the NC-U 6 comes with a 6 year warranty!

A Closer Look

The NC-U 6 has excellent finishing and eye for detail, looking at the photos below, without comparison material next to it, you might even mistake it for CPU cooler



The base is quite smooth, and shows only small traces of machine lapping



The aluminum fins are evenly spread out over the 2 U-shaped heat pipes, you can also see a few cutouts in the fins, which allows you to fix a fan onto the NC-U 6.



Fanning

Noctua did not include fan mounting clips; the NC-U 6 seems to except 60mm sizes only, while you can force to fit other sizes, it’ll be less easy. Below you can see the NC-U 6 with a 40mm and 80mm fan:



Let’s get it installed ->

Installation

Our test system is based on an Asus A8N SLI Premium, the standard chipset cooling of this nForce4 motherboard is already quite good, it’s a passive solution based on a long heat pipe which transfers heat from the hot chipset to a heatsink near the CPU area.

The Asus cooling:



A bit of pushing of pins later:



Since the core of the chipset is unprotected, we put the protective square cushion on there:



The original chipset cooling used push-pins, so does the new NC-U 6, so it’s very plug and play; you screw the bracket with push pins in place:



Apply some thermal paste on the Chipset core and line up the pins with the holes around the socket, making sure the heatsink sits correctly in the middle of the chipset:



When that is done, you push down the pins, and you’re done:

SLI or Crossfire a problem?

Many of the 3rd party chipset coolers will be larger then the default one, the NC-U 6 is not different, although it has a quite slim design, its height will make it difficult to fit a longer VGA card if your chipset is right behind the PCI Express slot.

On the Asus A8N-SLI Premium the chipset sits between the two 8x PCI Express slots, which surely comes in handy:




A close fit, the 7900GT used it not as long as the 7900GTX or newer 8800GTX, so some problems may still arise; if you use mid-range VGA cards, the chipset cooling can fit correctly;

Throwing a 7800GT in the mix makes it a tighter fit:





It’s still do-able, although longer VGA with dual slot cooling will not fit with the NC-U 6 installed.

Some performance tests and conclusion next ->

Performance Tests

AMD Test Setup
CPU	Opteron 144 @ 2.25Ghz
Cooling	Scythe Mine @ 100%
Mainboard	Asus A8N SLI Premium
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 OCZ
Other	Antec 900 Gaming Case Club3D 7900 GT with Zalman VF900 Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Maxtor 200GB SATA HDD

Room temperature was ~19°C during testing, no noise levels were recorded since both the standard Asus cooling and the Noctua NC-U 6 work completely passive.

With the case cooling of the Antec (2x120mm front, 1x120mm rear, 1x200mm top) set to low the maximum temperature reached by the nForce4 chipset was identical for both coolers; The NC-U 6 kept the chipset as cool as the high end premium solution from Asus.

We did not mount a fan directly on the NC-U 6 but did a second test with the case fans running at high speed, the extra airflow gave the Noctua cooler a 2°C lead over the stock cooling.

Conclusive Thoughts

At an estimated retail price of ~$25/€25 the Noctua NC-U 6 is quite a high end solution for chipset cooling, its easy installation and 6 year warranty do justify its price if high performance and silence is what you’re after.

The tower design doesn’t prevent compatibility issues on all motherboards, depending on your chipset location you may have some or not at all, so be sure to check the dimensions of the NC-U 6 and your motherboard layout.

The NC-U 6 is a capable product, which does exactly as advertised, Noctua is successfully expanding their product range, we look forward their next creation and hope they keep the quality up as with past products.

Hope this review has been useful, thank you for reading. Special thanks to Jakob from Noctua for his patience and support.