Noctua FINALLY Has All Black Coolers! - Chromax Black

they finally did it ten years ago I complained to Noctua that their products were great but simply too ugly to use for my own personal projects well back in 2015 we partnered with them to launch their first all-black consumer fans which was a big step in the right direction and now four years later we're back at it with something even bigger not this this is ugly meet the LTTE editions of not to us first-ever lineup of all black coolers the first 5,000 units of each the chrome axe black n HD 15 and Nhu 12s will have some special extras included and will help support us here at LT T so in today's video we're gonna give you guys a close look at them and also make sure that they match both the excellent thermal performance and low sound levels that we have come to expect from nachos ugly products speaking of things you should have come to expect this segue to our sponsor glassware with glass wire you can instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device use offer code liveness to get 25% off at the link below [Music] now it's no secret that I'm a huge knocked to a fanboy haha sorry font aside any fandom that I have of any company is going to be out of respect not because there's like an emotional attachment and there's a reason that I hold Noctua in such high regard there SEC you firm to mounting system which by the way like the fan included and the heatsink itself is now all black down to every single mounting plate and screw is still by far my favorite solution when it comes to keeping a large heavy Tower cooler firmly planted on a CPU and as we showed in our recent video their performance is on par or better than AI Oh water coolers in the same price bracket or in some cases even higher ones and they're ugly fans are the standard that other fans are measured too from a performance perspective anyway the only reason that their products have been relegated to test bench duty for me is that I confess I like a little bit of flash with my dash and until now they haven't had anything in their CPU cooler lineup that's even close enough to the visual appeal of other solutions to justify the couple degrees of better performance or few decibels of lower acoustics at least until now there's nothing on it that isn't black wires sleeving heat-shrink connectors screws even the retainers here are black which is gonna kind of make you wonder if this was such an obvious problem and such an easy solution why didn't they hurry up and do this before well because as it turns out it's actually not an especially easy solution now there are lots of different ways to attach heat pipes to a CPU coolers base and the heat pipes are what are responsible for quickly moving the heat away from your processor to the cooling fins which are responsible for dissipating the heat to the surrounding air but no way of attaching them is as reliant or performance as soldering them now soldering heat pipes is already a tricky matter because think about it for a second these are sealed tubes with fluid inside that are designed to transfer heat away from where it's being applied so doing it safely without them exploding isn't as simple as whipping out a torch and just going for it so then wait you want to put a coating on these things adding yet another layer of complexity for what just for looks are you crazy that's a very Noctua way of thinking but I and the thousands of other enthusiasts who sadly do care about these things finally got through to them so much of the R&D for this product went into finding a way to manufacture the chrome ax black line up with the same performance and consistency as the regular versions that don't have to deal with that added layer of complexity here and Noctua claims that they did it so to validate their claims we have both the big boy NHD 15 duel tower cooler and for the more space conscious of you we also have the hu 12s with a single 120 millimeter fan and a hecan't uh no clearance for your PCI slots and your RAM there's an extra little note in the Box little letter from LT T as well as some LT t stickers for the hubs of your fan so you can throw them on your case if you want and the sexy orange rubber anti-vibration pads of course the original black ones are also included in the box there's also an NH g9i but there's no ltd edition of that one so that was some movie magic right there we have replaced the stock black pads with the orange ones so you can see what they're gonna look like in there LT t edition goodness now let's head over to the workshop and make sure they're actually worth buying compared to the originals so step one of putting these things through their paces is building up a test bench that is really going to challenge them so this right here is Intel's furnace of a CPU the Extreme Edition 99 80 XC 18 core and we're gonna be using i-264 stress tests to compare both the og n HD 15 and u 12s to their new all-black counterparts so for the sake of simplicity we actually tested our products as they came in the box so that is with only one fan installed and no low noise adaptors this way we can also have a look at how much benefit there is to having two cooling towers versus just a single one alright so now it's time for the results guys first up thermals each of our coolers was allowed to run for 10 minutes to hit thermal equilibrium and we repeated the tests three times remounting the coolers between each run so between the two u 12 s's our black cooler actually came out on top with an average temperature 1.7 degrees cooler than the raw version with the NHD 15s however we saw the opposite with the raw cooler beating out the black version by about one point three degrees now here's the thing guys considering the 20 percent variability in rpm from one not to a fan to the next that's their manufacturing tolerance and the variants that we saw from run to run particularly on our NHD 15's we think it's safe to say at this point that buying black versus raw is not going to yield a performance difference one way or the other but that doesn't answer the question of how they compare acoustically the problem is we have no way of testing that here I mean even somewhere like this empty workshop has you know this transformer you hear that buzzing that is so much louder than these coolers that we would have no way of getting an accurate measurement of them fortunately we've got friends in high places and our buddies over at Simon Fraser University graciously gave us access to their world-class Satsuma and Kenna testing chamber this chamber is normally used to map the transmission patterns of antenna designs for all types of devices from tiny IOT things all the way up to satellites and it's actually a happy little accident that it happens to work so well for acoustic testing as it's designed to prevent radio waves from reflecting around the room as well as preventing any from entering from the outside it's actually one big Faraday cage so we're back and the data is really interesting so once again there is a difference between our silver and our black heat sings but this time the superior performance actually goes completely the other way around which appears to validate our previous theory that the temperature differences that we observed yesterday pretty much came down to the fans spinning a little slower or a little faster depending on the manufacturing tolerances so then bottom line they're as good as they're supposed to be so how do you get one great question the first couple batches of units out of knock - US manufacturing facilities are all going to be ltte addition with the extra stickers the orange mounting pads and all that good stuff and these will exclusively be available on knock - as official amazon stores while supplies last after October 22nd 2019 Knoxville will begin shipping regular ones that are just all black and those may end up being mixed in with the LTTE once at the Amazon warehouse after that time you'll need to check knock to his eBay store where they're gonna try and keep a few of these around even after that date for anyone who's a little late to the game speaking of late to the game I'm never late to the Segway game make your walls look awesome with our sponsor for today's video display their posters made out of metal they're three millimeters thick they've got bent edges so that you don't accidentally slice open your fingers and they've got a matte finish that looks absolutely fantastic the best thing about this plate though is the mounting system they use a magnetic mounting system that makes it easy to swap out the art in your place make small adjustments if something you know could stand to be shifted to the left or adjust it a bit and this is really cool they've got over 15,000 artists who have contributed to over a quarter million different designs for each display sold they will plant 10 trees they offer hassle-free returns their pre gift wrap and they've actually partnered with cyberpunk 2077 to do a collection of cyberpunk themed artwork so go check it out and use code LTT to save 15% at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys I hope you're as excited about the LTTE edition coolers as we are if you're looking for another video to watch maybe check out the one where we actually compared the raw versions against water coolers with some pretty surprising results

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,255,249

Keywords: noctua, cooling, thermals, aio, water, air, custom, ltt, edition, chromax, black, matte, dark, heat pipes

Id: ajJaYGnKpu4

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SimonSkarum]

Brown and beige was good enough for my forefathers, and it's good enough. You kids with ya fancy colours. Like black. And... Other shades of black! Bah!

[u/_Roller_47]

Still waiting for black version of the NF-A12x25 fan as well as a black 140mm version

[u/tachyon8]

These will probably eat some of be quiets potential sales too.

[u/[deleted]]

No flood of second hand silver D15s on ebay jet. I'm waiting.

[u/infinitelyExplosive]

I don't quite get the U12S. From what I can tell it's basically a 212 Evo that's slightly better but much more expensive. What are you really paying for, dark or not?

[u/Boofster]

It's cool they are available now.

I got a bunch of the linustech special edition which were the same thing

[u/Trumpian_Era]

Does anyone know if Noctua will release NHU-12A in black?

[u/PolicedriverStudios]

Link?