Noctua NH-U12S - Premium CPU Cooler Fan (Brown) review

Noctua NH-U12S - Premium CPU Cooler  Fan (Brown) review

Noctua NH-U12S - Premium CPU Cooler  Fan (Brown) review

pros
Excellent cooling performance
Very low noise levels
Adjustable cooler base

cons
Premium pricing
Love-it-or-hate-it traditional Noctua color scheme.

Specifications

Height	6.37 inches / 161.8mm
Width	4.93 inches / 125.2mm
Depth	1.78 inches / 45mm6.37 inches / 72.5mm (w/fan)
Base Height	1.25 inches / 31.5mm
Assy. Offset	0.0 inches (centered) 1.1 inches / 27.94mm (w/fans)Adjustable -3mm, -6mm
Cooling Fans	(1) 120 x 25mm
Connectors	(1) 4-pin PWM
Weight	30.6oz / 868g
Intel Sockets	X
AMD Sockets	TR4, SP3

so the new Noctua Nhu 12a claims to offer performance of a 140 mm sized collar like the legendary and colossal NH d 15 but in just a 120 mm form factor it's the fifth generation of their ever-popular Nhu 12 series and today we're going to see just how good it really is compared to larger 140 ml coolers and liquid a iOS so I understand why someone might want to go with an all-in-one liquid caller like NZXT is Kraken X 62 generally I do think they look better than most air coolers you can customize some lighting effects and they also have the 

benefit of being flexible meaning that you can front mount them you can top mount them and you can even squeeze them into small form factors there is something that can be said for the simplicity of an effective air cooler though you don't need to worry about sight or wiring to the pump or USB wiring to the motherboard you just mount the thing and forget about it there's no worrying about your pump making noise at idle or even failing down the road cable management is usually a breeze and air cooling generally is just less hassle and more reliable in the long term however if you're someone who cares more about the film and noise performance 

of your caller which one is the better choice so here are a few callers that we're looking at today we've got the 240 ml kraken x 52 and the 280 mm Kraken X 62 we've got the dark rock 4 from be quiet and then october NHD 15 and the NHD 12 a this review will mostly focus on the NHD 12 a from rock tour since it is the new kid on the block and there recently has been a bit of hype surrounding this call at regarding thermal and noise performance the most noteworthy feature is that it comes packed with two of knock tours NF a 12 by 25 fans which are as quiet as 2,000 rpm as other 120 more fans are at just 1500 rpm if you can get past the 10 and brown color 

scheme I regard these fans as the ultimate 120 ml fan in terms of noise performance the fan blades are made of a material developed by knock tour called stair ox which allows the fan blade tips to be extremely close to the frame without touching this means less turbulent air surrounding a blades and in turn a better noise profile overall these fans are super quiet they move a ton and you guys have seen me use these in quite a lot of builds and testing the other performance improvement are these seven heat pipes that have been jammed onto the NH 12a

 that's compared to the six on the much larger NHD 15 and the dark rock for the you 12a allows for maximum RAM height due to its offset design so no issues at all with tall memory Zim's and you won't have any issues with PCI Express slot clearance either as you would with larger colors like the NHD 15 so it is much smaller in terms of length and width compared to the NHD 15 but it is only 2 mils shorter with the total height of 158 millimeters this means that if your case is large enough to accommodate the u 12 a it most likely can accommodate the D 15 to pricing is also slightly more than the D 15 on the new u 12 8 versus the D 15 other 

than that let's start talking about the results so the CPU that we're using here for testing is the rise in 2700 X it's an 8 quart 16 thread CPU which does require a decent amount of cooling and we've overclocked it to 4.1 5 gigahertz at one point 3 7 volts so here were looking at CPU temperature over time in a blender render and starting with the kraken X 52 at 2000 rpm the Rison 7 chip settles in it just over 71 degrees C don't worry we'll look at the exact temperatures in a separate chart afterwards as well I also tried a knock to a fan swap over the kraken X 50 to stop fans and although the student lower thermal significantly it did lower noise quite a bit 

adding in the 280 ml cooler the kraken X 62 we get a nice reduction of the 240 ml cooler with the risin 7 chip now sitting under 65 degrees C consistently all right now for the air coolers and let's start with the be quiet dark rock 4 which spins at a max of 1350 rpm although this ends up being the quietest cooler configuration in the stack it does hold back the thermal performance quite a bit the NHD 15 comes in and gives us thermal performance between the 240 ml and 280 ml liquid coolers and finally adding in the Nhu 12a we get thermal performance under 70 degrees C which does beat the 240 ml kraken x 52 so it doesn't beat the NHD 15 when both 

coolers are max fan speed but when the D 15s fan speed is lowered to a more comparable noise level to the you of a subjectively at least we do actually get comparable thermal performance as well and here are the exact values for each cooler for a more simple comparison with the nhq 12a about two degrees c warmer than the much larger NHD 15 and about two degrees cooler than the kraken x 52 the kraken x 62 at full blast gives us the best thermal result concluding that big enough liquid colors still can in fact be lodged how a heat sinks now I understand that not many of you are going to fuss over the couple of degrees that separate the majority of 

coolers here so let's now look at noise levels so here we're looking at the noise measurements 30 centimeters from the open test bench and do take these measurements with a few grains of salt these were not done in an anechoic chamber the noise floor is quite high 33.5 DBA and ideally these noise results would be done with the colors installed inside a case nevertheless overall the nhq 12a is definitely what you can consider here really quiet cooler the nhd 15 is already considered a silent dual towel cooler and the useful of air manages to run quieter despite running at a faster fan speed so let's summarize the results the Nhu 12a delivers slightly better

thermal performance when compared to a 240 ml liquid cooler like the kraken x 52 and run slightly warmer than the NHD 15 which is quite a bit larger now let's be real those couple of degrees might not matter a whole lot but the practicality of the Nhu 12a is why it gets my pick over the NHD 15 the fact that it can deliver similar noise and thermal performance to such a massive cooler yet you don't have to worry about RAM or PCI Express slot clearance that's 

quite an achievement so let me know your thoughts on the NHD 12-8 down below and also whether you prefer air cooling or liquid cooling in general liquid cooling definitely has its perks and customizations as well and it's definitely becoming a lot more popular as time goes on there's also some bragging rights of having a liquid cooled system as well but then again there are those risks long-term.

Noctua NH-U12S - Premium CPU Cooler  Fan (Brown) review

 that air CPU coolers were enough like most new PC builders all-in-one liquid cooling was legitimately the only consideration thankfully in one of my past reviews I had shared my desire for an AI oh and most of my viewers quickly redirected me to knocked off and to seriously reconsider and those back-and-forth discussions sort of went down like this question what kind of beer cooler best that's a ridiculous question false Noctua that's debatable there are basically two schools of thought fact bears eat beets air cooler beats liquid cooling what is going on what are you doing hit that like button if you love the office but seriously that's an accurate 

representation of how that went down so after being schooled on octo I went down the rabbit hole of non-stop research and I concluded the Noctua you 12s was the optimal CPU cooler for my use case completely eliminating a iOS from the table so why did I buy the Utah vests and not the d15 well the Utah vests is the middle of the road for Noctua without the RAM compatibility issues or the case clearing issues the d15 has it just works out of the box and it allows me to preserve the aesthetics of my built while at the same time reducing temperatures 

and noise levels despite the 3900 X being a beefy 12 core processor in reality the processor doesn't produce that much heat relatively speaking as the TDP requirements for the Seven animator processor isn't too outrageous and since I wasn't looking to manually overclock the 3900 X or utilized precision boost overdrive I simply did not require the cooling performance of the d15 so the Utah ves was more than enough for my use case so here's some of the items that are included in the box one low noise adapter which drops the max rpm from 1500 to 1200 plus

 additional chrome acts anti-vibration pads and additional clips for a second and plus plenty of thermal paste for multiple applications any screwdriver but what I really love about Noctua is their attention to detail I mean look at these diagrams from both Intel and AMD you can easily understand what hardware is required for each platform and a glance this is knocked out going the extra mile to make things seamless and I really appreciate that in terms of design the youto VES is simple clean and functional with the focus primarily being performance and if you're trying to match your bill to a specific color nakta does sell some chrome max heats and covers 

and hopefully all these new color options are an indication of future things to come and it goes without saying I'm glad Tanakh dough is now offering these blacked out fans which are miles better than the brown ones now imagine if nakta offered RGB they would probably dominate the entire PC market literally overnight at a fundamental level nacht o is just a different company their primary goal is to make the best performing fans at the lowest noise levels possible and for the noise that you do produce they want to transform that noise into something that sounds more pleasant to the human ear so knocked all engineers have performed some 

kind of witchcraft to achieve these incredible performance to noise ratios but basically not to has some of the best performing fans in the market and that's all you really need to know and you'll get an opportunity to hear them shortly so what are heat pipes well in layman's terms it's a vacuum sealed metal pipe that houses some liquid when heated the liquid turns to gas rapidly moving towards a cooler section of the pipe ultimately turning back into liquid moving back down to repeat the process all over again and that's where the surface area factors in and the aluminum fin surrounding the heat pipes the larger the surface area the better the cooling 

performance in terms of cooling the heat pipes and aluminum fins I will be using a push-pull setup which I will explain as best I can shortly however out of the box the Utah VES only includes a single 120 millimeter pwm fan any push configuration meaning there's still some cooling improvements that can be made with a second fan but let's back up and explain the various push and pull setups and the differences so by default you will receive a push setup a single fan the push err through the heat sink any pull setup as the name implies the fan is now pulling air away from the heatsink and the best of both worlds a push-pull setup is where you 

push and pull the same amount of air at the same rpm to illustrate the points I'm making I think it would be best to show you the temperatures for each setup and you can decide for yourself if the second fan is worth it for the following temperature tests I ran prime95 for 15 minutes although this test is completely unrealistic it does allow us to see the absolute worst case scenario during the testing the ambient temperature was measured to be at approximately 21 Celsius for the pole configuration the 3900 X temperature was 88 Celsius and then basically 

places the Noctua at the same temperature performance as a stock cooler so you should refrain from ever using the setup the stock setup or the push configuration dropped a temperature down to 84 Celsius and as you can see there's an improvement going from pull to push and if you have only one fan and work with always opt for a push configuration now using a push-pull setup has dropped the temperatures down to 78 Celsius now those temperatures look great because this is the absolute worst case scenario and primarily the CPU will be use exclusively for gaming it will never be pushed to a hundred percent utilization as I stated earlier this 

machine is primarily in gaming machine and yes 12 course is a bit excessive for gaming and realistically the eight core 3,700 X would have been better suited in terms of value but I view the 3900 X as a future-proof CPU as multi-core systems become the norm game developers will have to optimize their game to support more cores anyways let's take a look at gaming temperatures because this is where my main focus has always been I wanted a quiet air cooler that provided some temperature improvements from the stock wraith prism but primarily i wanted a cpu clear that wasn't nearly as loud as the stock prism cooler is pretty damn loud and 

it's easily the loudest component in the build and despite not hindering the performance in the slightest it simply had to be replaced due to the noise levels for the following test i had to omit the set up because it's clearly inferior so moving forward we're simply gonna focus on push and push pull setups first let's take a look at the push setup the game I selected for this test will be doom a game that is very well optimized all cores are being utilized fairly evenly with an ambient temperature of 21 Celsius and the average CPU temperature was around 63 Celsius 

but more importantly the fan noise levels were drastically better than the stock Wraith prism now for the push-pull setup doom improved to 60 Celsius the difference between push versus push poll isn't drastic but nevertheless there's an improvement I also decided to include a few more games with the push-pull setup and those games are The Witcher and Metroid Exodus and here's their respective temperatures again Sallah gave me temperatures but more importantly the noise levels are superb a testament to the engineering and quality of noctilum 

so is the second fan worth it I think it depends on your workflow and how often you're going to be pushing the CPU to its limits and if overclocking is on the table then in those cases the second fan might be worth the investment but if you're just planning on gaming then it might not be so worth it you must also really consider your budget because you will require a second fan a splitter bringing the price virtually to the same level as the legendary d15 but for my use case it was worth the extra cost because it maximizes the yuto of esses cooling performance and 

that was my goal to purchase a compact air cooler in a push-pull setup to achieve the best temperatures possible without covering the motherboard so can you overclock on this well yes you can but it depends on what you're overclocking so to make this process seamless NACO has developed a compatibility spreadsheet with various categories for potential overclocking Headroom the categories are pretty straightforward and should be used as a good starting point for my case the 3900 X is rated at medium turbo overclocking Headroom meaning there 

is some room for some overclocking but I will not be able to completely maximize the performance for example a 3700 X which is an 8 core processor is rated at best terrible overclocking Headroom and you should theoretically be able to maximize the overclocking on that CPU for those interested in the CPU Pat ability I will provide a link down below find new CPU and see which category your CPU falls onto and use that as your starting point and make sure you do further research okay let's discuss the noise levels the knockos noise levels are 

fantastic and have exceeded my expectations even with a push-pull configuration the system is pretty quiet even when being pushed to the max before upgrading the wraith prism was easily the loudest component in the build but now Noctua snows levels are simply lost among the rest of the fans the other corsair fans completely dominate the noise levels so yeah they're performing exceptionally well alright so the following audio tests are not just to knock tone utah ves as it includes the overall noise level of the entire system ideally this test should have 

been done on a test bench but I don't have one so this will have to do let's begin with the noise levels for the push-pull setup now let's move on to the stock configuration the push setup for those that are interested in the low noise adapter here's the audio test here's the max temperatures to expect when using the low noise adapter the low noise adapter push the max temperatures to 87 Celsius a mere three Celsius increase from the regular fan speed and that's the general consensus slightly higher temperatures across the RPM spectrum also I couldn't 

test the push-pull with the low noise adapter because I don't have a second adapter but honestly I think that the normal configuration is quiet enough but if you demand the quietest system possible you have that option to conclude nakta has always been highly respected in the PC world but I don't think that new PC builders are aware of what knock door has to offer and honestly I was one of them as well as all-in-one liquid cooling was literally all I was considering but now that is no longer the case I've you knocked off heat sinks as an investment because of 

their six year warranty and seriously impressive CPU compatibility history they virtually support everything while the Utah vest can't directly compete with a massive AI o the D 15 certainly can and that's the point I was trying to make at the beginning of the review nakta Heat sings can directly compete and approach some a iOS performance and with the reliability that no AIO can compete with so next time you're considering an AI o simply because that's what you saw other youtubers use understand then you can approach those temperatures with unmatched reliability sure all in one liquid cooling looks awesome but I'll take reliability over a 

pure aesthetics any day and again for my use case I chose to compromise with the middle of the road from knock doe but that was because I didn't want to cover up my motherboard and even with a single fan the knocked o Utah ves can still typically lower your temperatures in real-world tasks such as gaming and more importantly the noise levels are far more tolerable so after being schooled on knock door and really learning all I could about them I am now a firm 

believer in the power of air and the premium of silent fan operation and I like having that peace of mind knowing that realistically the only thing that can fail is the fans and that's a whole lot better than having an AI o leak and for those that made it this far in the review .

Noctua NH-U12S - Premium CPU Cooler  Fan (Brown) review

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