Noctua NH-L9x65 Low-Profile CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

The cooler its self is very nicely designed, although find me a Noctua product that isn’t! It still has the iconic colours we’ve come to know and love/hate, with the brown and sand coloured fan.

Since this is the bigger, more high-performance model of the L9, those of you who saw the previous model will notice it’s around twice as tall, albeit still bearing a relatively low-profile design.

This increase in thickness allows a lot more surface area for cooling, as well as double the heat-pies, as there are no four passing through the heat fin array.

Fan clips on the side allow quick and easy installation/removal of the fan too, handy for quickly cleaning and maintaining the cooler.

On the base, you’ll find a large and beautifully finished contact plate, which is quite thick overall and I’m sure this will help greatly with the overall cooling performance and heat transfer.

The fan comes equipped with a black braided cable and a PWM header, although you can also add the low noise adapter to limit the maximum RPM of the fan, as well as reduce the overall acoustics.

The fan certainly looks nice and provides perfect coverage of the entire fin array, no more, no less.

With the fan removed, we can see the whole cooling block is packed tight with durable fins, giving us impressive surface area to take heat away from those rather thick heat pipes and help keep things as cool as possible.

The fan is one of Noctua’s NF-A9x14 PWM 12v fans.