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Noctua NH-U12A Dual Fan Air Cooler Review

Test System & Methodology

As you may appreciate, we review a lot of coolers here at eTeknix. As such, our prior results sheet was getting more than a little crowded. We have, therefore, applied a new system in which we have picked those coolers we consider most popular or most relevant to this design. Please note that we re-tested the Noctua NH-D15S as our base benchmark for cooling results.

Test system:

Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Z270
Intel Core i7-7700K Delidded w/ NT-H1 under IHS
Radeon R7 Passive GPU with 2GB VRAM
8GB Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz
512GB OCZ SSD
be quiet! Dark Power Pro 800W
Lian Li T80 Test Bench
All testing conducted using NT-H1 thermal paste

We’d like to say a big thank you to Gigabyte, Noctua, Crucial, Intel, OCZ, be quiet!, and Lian Li for providing us with the above testing equipment and their on-going support.

Testing Methodology

We always use Noctua Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste to make sure testing reveals the efficiency of the tested coolers not the efficiency of the bundled thermal paste
Prime 95 is run for 10 minutes to calculate “load” results
Unigine Superposition is run for 10 minutes to calculate “gaming” results
The average temperature across all cores is taken
Fans are left to operate at default PWM profile speeds unless otherwise stated
For water cooling tests, all pumps have been operated at 12 volts unless otherwise stated
Ambient temperatures should be between 21-23 degrees in all our tests unless otherwise stated
Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally and 10cm vertically away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled
Stock tests are performed using “out of the box” settings for the CPU
Overclocking tests are performed with the CPU set to 5 GHz and 1.345v
All coolers were tested under identical settings unless otherwise stated.
There is approximately a 1-degree Celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software CPUID HW Monitor
There is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meter
In all these graphs we may have a few “reference” results of particular products that do not fit within that category for comparative purposes.