Introduction

Straight out of Austria we saw the first Noctua PC cooling products arrive in enthusiast shops at end of the 2005. We tested their NH-U12 and NH-U9 CPU coolers and found them to offer an excellent performance/noise balance, especially the larger model with 120mm fans support was able to match the then current crop of high end CPU coolers.

We’re now 2 years later and Noctua has been busy expanding their product line-up with chipset coolers, thermal compound and special 120mm fans. But their CPU coolers remained pretty much unchanged, until now. With the introduction of the NH-U12P Noctua not only includes their own low noise 120mm fan, but also tweaked the heatsink design to fit a wider range of motherboards (no know compatibility issues in fact) and better performance.

Let’s find out if they improved upon their original design, we dusted off the box of the NH-U12 and put it head to head to the new arrival.

Packaging and Specifications

Noctua updated their color scheme, adding a bit of blue to their packaging, they’ve also listed all the specifications one could want clearly on the box:



Here they are again, even more in-depth, from this page.



As you might notice looking at the specs sheet, the included fan is half of the update of the original NH-U12.

Let’s take a look inside the box ->

Inside the box

The team at Noctua spend a good amount of time on the details of the contents of their product; the NH-U12P includes everything needed to install the heatsink, and then some.

The installation manual is in English (multi-lingual versions available online) and explains in detail how to get the heatsink installed on your platform of choice. The mounting materials for each platform are in a labelled plastic bag, you don’t have to sift through metal pieces to find the one you need, each bag holds the exact amount of screws/tools for each platform.

The “Common Parts” has a tube of Thermal Paste, 2 sets of fan clips, rubber anti-vibration strips,more mounting material and last but not least, Low Voltage 3-pin power cables to slow down a fan.



A closer look at the 120mm fan reveals its unique fan blade design:



Closer Look

The heatsink has a copper base where 4 U-form heat pipes come together; the fins are sized up for 120mm fan support, these are aluminium, but everything is nickel plated so you can’t tell.



Noctua stamped their logo in the middle of each fin as it stands out clearly when you look from the top:



While the HSF is width enough for 120mm, its depth is considerably less, as thick as ~3x120mm fans:



How does it compare to the original NH-U12, turn the page ->

NH-U12 vs NH-U12P

A friendly bout between two products from the same company, how do they compare when put next to each other.

• Height: 155mm vs 158mm, the new one is slightly taller.
  
• Width: 124mm vs 126mm, and also wider.
  
• Depth: 70mm vs 71mm, ever so slightly deeper.
  
• Weight: 606gr vs 600gr, the newcomer is fitter, lost a bit of weight.

Picture time:







The NH-U12P clears more room around the socket, has 36 fins instead of 38 on the NH-U12, this loss in fins is compensated by the slightly larger surface area of the fins, but you’d have to look very hard to notice a difference there, as we’re talking about millimetres.

Overall the NH-U12P has a sleeker look and less chance for corrosion over time, leaving no thumb prints on the fins, thanks to the nickel finish.

Time to get the HSF installed ->

Installation

The installation requires motherboard removal as you have to mount a custom bracket on the motherboard, after which you screw the heatsink tight on there.

The bracket is different for each platform; we had no troubles fitting those for S775



On both AM2/S775 you can change the orientation of the heatsink for the best airflow setup. On S775 the screw/springs can be easily accessed no matter the orientation; on AM2 you’ll have to use the long screwdriver-tool and pass through the round holes seen in the heatsink’s fins.

When installed on our board the NH-U12P cleared all components in the near vicinity, newer/high end boards with more elaborate Northbridge cooling will benefit from the extra clearance.



In the photo below you can see that the older NH-U12 could pose problems on certain motherboards, as the lowest fins can be an obstruction. On our mainboard though it was no issue.



Ready for test, details on our test setup ->

Test Setup and Competition

We build a S775 system with parts from Alternate.de, the CPU is one hot running Pentium 4 524, 3.06Ghz. It is mounted on a Swiss-army knife equivalent of motherboards: an Asrock 775Dual-VSTA.



The mounting system on S775 is quite straight forward and well thought out, 4 holes around the socket serve as mounting points for the push pins on the standard Intel cooler. Installation is a snap, and removal is very easy too.



With the stock cooling and at stock voltage the 3Ghz P4 was running stable at 3.68Ghz, quite a nice improvement from default speeds.

A Watt Meter recorded peak power consumption under heavy CPU load at 138W, which is less than our previous Athlon 64 setup which consumed up to 165W. The Asrock bios lacks CPU voltage manipulation, so at default voltage is seems this Prescott setup is more power friendly then the over-volted AMD system.

We’re using a compact Antec Sonata II mid tower case, swapped out the PSU for a passive model from FSP rated at 400W, the outside of the PSU case never went past 40°C during our stress tests,

Intel S775 Setup
CPU	Pentium 4 524 @ 3628Mhz - 1.36v vcore
Mainboard	Asrock 775Dual-VSTA
Memory	1 * 512Mb Mushkin PC3200 LVLII V2
Other	Antec Sonata II with AcoustiFan DustPROOF 120mm @ 5v in the rear as outtake (mounted with soft-mounts) ATI R9000 Passive Cooling FSP ZEN 400W Passive Cooled PSU Seagate 7200.8 200Gb HDD in Scythe Quiet Drive

in-take temperature was measured at 22°C for all tests, but temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-3°C of inaccuracy in the obtained results. Please keep this in mind when looking at the results. Each heatsink was tested repeatedly; if we got questionable results the test was restarted.


example: dBA meter is placed right at the edge of the case - with side panel removed

Noise level of each HSF combo was recorded with SmartSensor SL4001A, the sensor was placed ~5cm away from the side of the case with panel removed. The lowest dBA reading in the test room was 36dBA! with system running without HSF fan.

System was stressed by running K7 CPU Burn for 30min (after Thermal Compound's burn-in); this application pushes the temperature higher than any other application or game we've yet encountered. Speedfan was used to log maximum obtained temperatures.

Arctic Silver kindly send us their “Lumière” thermal testing compound which has the same colour as Ceramique, but only a break in time of 30min!

Arctic Silver's ArctiClean was used to clean off thermal paste of the CPU and heatsink between tests

Fans used for comparison

To eliminate as much variables in the tests we test each heatsink with a "reference" fan if it can be mounted.

GlobalWin NCB 120x120x25mm fan with 41.7CFM rating.


The Competition

These are the heatsinks we have tested so far on this platform and will compare the NH-U12P to:

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro

Auras CTC-868

Auras GTO-990

Auras LPT-709

Coolermaster Vortex 752

Coolermaster Sphere

Coolermaster Hyper 212

Coolink Silentator

Coolermaster Eclipse

Coolermaster Hyper TX

Coolermaster GeminII

Coolermaster Mars

Evercool Buffalo

Noctua NH-U12

OCZ Vendetta

Rosewill RCX-Z5-Ultra

Rosewill RCX-Z775-EX

Scythe ANDY Samurai Master

Scythe Kama Cross

Scythe Katana 2

Scythe Ninja

Thermalright IFX-14

Thermalright SI-128

Thermalright Ultra-120 A

Titan Amanda TEC

TTIC BIG

TTIC NPH-1000

Tuniq Tower 120

Ultra ChillTec Thermo Electric CPU Cooler

ZEROTherm BTF90

Zalman CNPS9700LED

Zalman CNPS8700

and three Intel stock heatsinks:

Intel Reference Alu (included with older Pentium 4 S775 and Intel E2xxx)

Intel Reference Alu/Cu (included with Core 2 Duo models)

Intel Reference Alu/Cu Big (included with Core 2 Quad models)

Onto the results ->

Performance Results

Here we compare the performance of NH-U12P with different fans, fan speeds and display the data in a chart showing both maximum CPU temperatures obtained under load, as well as noise levels at those settings.

We sorted the obtained data by Noise level ranges, then by lowest CPU temp. Since we measure our dBA level from very close distance, the numbers by themselves have little value without some information. Ambient noise in the room was 36dBA, so we used the following “categories”:

Extremely Noisy: >57dBA. These heatsinks can be heard from the room next door, if you are into overclocking the results obtained here will be most interesting if you don’t care about becoming deaf.

Moderately Noisy to “Not so bothersome”: All results between >44-56< dBA, while the difference between the two extremes is “twice as loud” the loudest reading at 56dBA will be do-able for most, while those who want it quieter should look at the results below 50dBA.

Quiet to Whispher Quiet: Any result under 44dBA is included here, you’ll have to focus to hear the fan running with these CPU coolers, on most you’ll be unable to do that unless you take the PC in very very quiet room and open the side panel and have no other actively cooled component inside the PC.

In the chart below we have added a few descriptions after each heatsink’s name to tell you how we tested them.

We hooked the fan up to a Zalman Fanmate2 which gives 11V at “@ High” and 5V at “@ Low”.

Some heatsinks did not allow manual fan speed regulation, those are marked with “@ Auto”

While testing some of the heatsinks with their fan "@ Low" the system overheated, instead of reporting no data, we decided to measure the fan noise and stop fiddling with the fan controller when the dBA meter read 45dBA. These results are marked “@ Low(er)” in the chart.

“+Stock” means tested with the fan included with the heatsink, “+Papst” or “+NCB” or “+Delta” or “+Delta 3200rpm” means respectively that the heatsink is tested with a 120mm Papst fan, 120mm NCB Globalwin fan, Delta 92mm or Delta 120mm High Speed fan.



Results explained and conclusive thoughts on the next page ->

Performance Results Explained

Noctua doesn’t market the NH-U12P for extreme performance with loud fans, their own 120mm fan spins 1300rpm at most and they included ways to reduce that speed to 900rpm, whisper quiet.

First comparing the Noctua fan with our reference Globalwin NCB we can see that the NF-P12 is quieter both at High/Low speed setting, but not unsurprisingly the CPU gets hotter too. At High speed the NF-P12 edges in front of the NCB for efficiency.

• @Low speed: -2dBA but +3°C
  
• @High speed: -1.5dBA but +0.5°C

Next let’s compare the older NH-U12 with the new NH-U12P, we only tested with our reference NCB fan here. The difference is terribly small between the two heatsinks, if you are an owner of the NH-U12 there is no reason to upgrade.

• @Low speed: -1.5°C in favor of NH-U12P
  
• @High speed: -1.5°C in favor the NH-U12P

We previously tested the Noctua NH-U12 on our AMD K8 platform and found it high up in the performance ranks. Our re-test on S775 showed pretty much the same outcome, ranking near the top amongst popular contenders as the Tuniq Tower 120 and others.

The new NH-U12P does slightly better and climbs in the ranking as we can see, coming ahead of Coolink Silentator by a fraction of a degree.

Conclusive Thoughts

The updated NH-U12P offers a solid performance/noise ratio and with the included fan will definitely help make your PC cool and quiet. The NF-P12 custom design fan is very quiet even at full speed and able to cool down the fins on the heatsink sufficiently to have it rank among the best of the bunch.

At an average retail price of $60/€55 this product is not cheap; for the price you do get a quality fan and a carefully assembled package, but you’re paying a premium for the privilege. In a market space filled with harsh competition the Noctua differentiates through product packaging, extra goodies and quality components. The 6 year product warranty ensures you’ll be switching hardware earlier than switching heatsinks, so your investment will last.

So while the NH-U12P doesn’t soar at the top, it’s floating not far below, equipped with all the tools for removing heat from the hottest of CPUs at low noise level.

+ Good performance at Low noise levels
+ Support for 2x120mm fans, mounting gear included
+ Included 120mm fan provides good performance/noise balance

- High Price
- Motherboard removal required for installation
- Doesn’t improve much, performance wise, on the NH-U12


We thank Jakob from Noctua for allowing us to test their latest products, until next time!