Noctua NH-P1 Passive CPU Cooler Review

Exterior Packaging

The exterior packaging carries everything you have either come to love or hate about the Noctua brand. In other words, there’s a lot of creamy beige colours around. With its sleek, easy on the eye, no-nonsense approach, however, this is instantly recognisable as a Noctua product.

The front of the packaging clearly denotes all of the products key features. The only downside is that nowhere is there a nice clear image of the cooler itself. Put simply, exactly what you’re getting on the inside is a mystery based upon what they show you on the packaging.

There is very little space utilised on the packaging that doesn’t give you a nice clear indication as to at least what you can expect from the contents. Again, the lack of any actual full-sized clear images of the cooler is a little disappointing (aside from a quite ironically small diagram showing the dimensions), but on the whole, it tells you most of what you will want to know, but as this is Noctua (with their Marmite aesthetics), I wonder if the lack of any notable images is deliberate.

Accessories!

Noctua provides you with everything you need right out of the box to ensure you can easily install this on either an AMD or Intel socket design. You’re also given a pretty generous portion of their ‘improved’ N1-H2 thermal compound. Likely a good choice as this is, after all, designed to run passively and will need the best heat transfer possible to achieve that.

One of the more interesting inclusions, however, is the screwdriver. This isn’t Noctua just being nice though as this is a completely integral part of the installation method. More on this later in the review when we come to fit it onto our test bench,