Noctua NH-U12A Chromax Black review

hello this is the provoke prawn and this is the noctur nhu12a chromax black I've used this recently with an I9 13900 K and I'm here to review it and talk about my experiences with it as well as showing you some of the things of interest from the build now this is a pretty slim line 120 mil allinone cooler which means that it will take 2 120 mm fans but claims to deliver 140 mm experience in terms of in performance as you'd expect from noctur a very nice setup especially with that chromax black style nice black fans and a very subtle design so if you don't like RGB and prefer just performance then this is the one for you there are some really nice things about it as well straight out of the box I really liked for example that they split the packaging in two so that you have your LGA 1700 socket set up on one side and am5 on the other or Intel and AMD depending on what mother board you're using cuz it is multi-socket compatible so you easily have your parts separated out I've done a full build and setup guide for this cooler that I'll link to in the description we're going to depth on each of those you can also buy AMD offset bars which means that you can offset the cooler into a slightly different position ping it just 7 mm lower than the standard setup meaning better Cooling in terms of installation it's also really easy to install both on am5 sockets and lga7 00 with AMD you have to remove the pre-installed brackets for the am5 setup replace them with some standoffs and then these mounting brackets that fit on either side of your CPU this then allows you to screw the cooler on top of that and the seating for it is really straightforward and simple the process throughout both builds whether you're doing AMD or Intel is really easy and very simple to do no matter what you're doing you can also get some additional things for it like a thermal paste guard and those additional brackets that I showed you and noct also supplies thermal paste for Intel LGA 1700 boards the setup is slightly different because you will need to install a back plate which you can see here and this will allow you to install a variety of motherboards so you can actually use it on various different sockets but I used it for 1700 socket with a 13900 K CPU and the process is basically the same sort of logic back play installation standoffs washes then mounting brackets and installing it the thing that's nice about this color is it's really compact so it is as you'll see pretty small which means it doesn't get in the way of the ram so there's no problems with ram clearance and in the case I was using it in there was no problem with the height of it as well so it is obviously reasonably tall and tall enough to be cool but not so tall that it's going to cause problems unless you've got a really tiny case obviously I'll leave the specs down below so you can find out more about that but what I found is the installation process is really straightforward and it didn't cause me any headaches afterwards and that's a benefit there are other options and things to bear in mind as well with this for example it comes with a wi splitter cable so you can connect both fans together into a single port on your motherboard alternatively you also have low noise cables which means if you want to keep it really quiet if you're running let's say a budget or mid-range CPU you can use the low noise cables which will then reduce the fan speed which then makes it run even quieter obviously you're sacrificing some performance for that so for my testing for the review purposes I actually went with the full setup so that it' get maximum speed out of them potentially if it needs it and done some benchmarking and gaming with it and I'm happy to report that surprisingly quiet and very effective for its size as well so once it was built installed it in this deep cool case that I've been testing as well and then went about seeing how we got on with that now bear in mind we got three front fans for intake and one additional case fan as exhaust and then obviously the two fans installed on the cooler you can see it's got quite a subtle style to it especially when you put it alongside the RGB lit up case but you also are able to mount a vertical GPU just below it so there's plenty of space both in terms of the depth of the case the size of the thing and also other things that might be doing with it as well so a really good experience all around there to test how it performed I ran out a number of test using 3D marks in bench in Intel's extreme tuning utility I wanted to put it under pressure with synthetic low to see how we got on so these tools are pretty good at doing that and seeing what the top end of the temperatures could be which as you can see maxing out in about 93° somewhere around there now XTU did show that it did a thermal throtle during the testing but this is an I9 13900 K which does run pretty toasty and keep in mind we've only got three intake fans in the case as well so we are limited with the air flow in there obviously your experience may vary depending on your case and your build but the point here is that those numbers in Hardware Mar actually didn't go red at any point and the stress tests did pass so I do feel like this is actually pretty good cooler and is managing to cool the I9 pretty effectively with a smooth experience during the stress testing and with gaming as well while also staying pretty quiet in Real World experience I wanted to test a few different things so I jumped into pal world with it and then obviously the experience is going to vary depending on your case fans so it's worth bearing in mind and the games you're playing so whether the CPU band or GPU bound but I thought maybe you could capture some Pokémons I mean Pals and then test to see what the performance was like in here so tested out a variety of games and this one was averaging around 40° topped out around 64 obviously you're going to have some Peaks at some points but it was pretty quiet during the testing there then I jumped into fortnite which I often find ramps up CP to begin with and then cools down a bit after that so we often get some pretty high temperatures even with an I9 on this game which you wouldn't think it would but it does and what I found here again is that it's nice and quiet despite that load so you'll see in a second what the performance was like but the important part is the experience is good enough to cool the CPU effectively to give you good frames and also still good enough that it's not causing loads of noise when running with a multiple case fans and then other things so fortnite maxed out at 84° on the package of the CPU and you can see otherwise we're generally just averaging around 40 degrees which is pretty nice again so then I went into the finals so obviously testing a few different games to put it under load for just general datto day experiences and you'll notice that the temps here are a lot lower than they were with cinebench and with stress testing which is what to be expected again somewhere in the 40° Mark maxing out at 86 when going ramping up but otherwise really good in terms of the general load on the CPU and the experience while playing so it's been a really nice cooler to use so all around a great bit of kit for the money and Brilliant style for the case and good cooling hopefully you found this useful if you did check out the links in the description to find out more you've made it right to the end of the video you brilliant Legend you if you've enjoyed it click that subscribe button give me a thumbs up and drop me a comment down below if you've got any questions if you really enjoyed it consider joining the channel and see the benefits of doing so check out these other videos you might well find them interesting or useful and most importantly have a great life

Channel: The Provoked Prawn

Views: 11,186

Keywords: Provoked Prawn, The Provoked Prawn, Noctua NH-U12A Chromax Black, Noctua NH-U12A Chromax Black install, Noctua NH-U12A Chromax Black install guide

Id: jv9iGWQF65o

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024