The new Noctua L12Sx77 - Like it's made for the Terra!

all right so this cooler is probably the most cooling that you can get into this case the Tera it's going to sit right up against the side panel the little teaser do have an NFA 12x 25 mm fan underneath [Music] it welcome to machines and more so the l12 S by 77 is a new cooler from noctu it's not a brand brand new one per se it's more of a revision or variant as OCTA considers it um of the regular l12s but in fact the heat sink is changed there's two additional heat pipes here in addition to being raised an additional 5 mm away from the motherboard and that brings the heat sinks heat pipe count more in line with coolers like ID cooling's is- 67 XT and thermal rights a1067 these changes are actually meaningful and they can make it a more useful cooler in certain situations so that's what we're going to take a look at today real quick before I begin big thanks to nak for providing the cooler they sent us this guy all the way from Austria for the purposes of making this review at no cost the channel but as with all reviews on this channel they are not paid for by the manufacturer the manufacturer doesn't have input into the testing methodology and neither do they have any advanced knowledge of any of the review findings and that's the standard that you can expect from this channel so this one is called the l12s by 77 because it's 77 mm tall and that is a slight departure from the original l12s which stands at 72 mm both coolers do come with nocuous NFA 12x 15 mm fan which is wait for it actually 17 mm with the bumpers um it's important to note though that the 72 or 77 mm height represents the lowest possible configuration and with the l12 series that's going to be with the fan underneath your heat sink and and you can certainly put the fan on top of the heat sink if you have clearance so you just need to add the thickness of the fan to that number so either 72 or 77 mm depending on which cooler you're you're considering one interesting choice here is that the cooler ships with the fan installed to exhaust air away from the motherboard this is not the typical configuration for this type of cooler with a sandwich sty case this airflow Dynamic is unconventional and and for those of you bu in a sandwich style case especially the Terra my recommendation would be to flip the fan around to intake from the side panel and the idea here is to draw cool ambient air from the outside in and that uh gets you the best performance I did test with this in the outof the-box configuration and that was 2.3 de hotter with the 7800 x3d uh for a CPU only test and and when you have a combined CPU and GPU usage scenario like gaming you could see even more impact because your ambient air is going to be even hotter inside the case and you're going to be pulling that through the heat sinks and that's not necessarily a good configuration so for many of you the fan underneath configuration is going to be the mode of Interest since let's face it even 72 mm is pushing it for a lot of the cases that you might choose to deploy in for example uh 73 mm is the max for form dt1 V2 with you have a two slot card and that makes this l12 by 77 not very useful for that case unless you truly have a sub uh two- slot card and you can shift it so you can have enough space for this but uh for the fractal Hera two slot configuration gives you 43 mm for the card uh so it'll fit cards like this 4070 Founders Edition and this revision is actually perfectly applicable here because when you do that mode you get exactly 77 mm on the CPU Cooler and knock do own promotional material features this case well not this specific case but this finish of the Teran looks very good in here and uh so this also happens to be the case that I'm going to focus in on for this review so let's take a look here okay so that additional 5 mm it gives you a few advantages assuming you have the clearan so for one it increases the amount of space underneath the heat sink and that's going to give you a bit more flexibility for insulation uh for example with this MSI b650 ibard that's enough room to run the heat sink when it's overlapping the rear IO area heat sink and that can give you unlimited Ram clearance if you truly have a tall Ram kit now do take note that in the terara actually a good portion of the heat sink on this side would then be covered by the solid portion of the side panel which is absolutely not optimal if you have a reasonably sized Ram kit lower than 44 mm tall you can just flip it the other way and just make sure that your front panel cables over here are well managed so that they'll sit under underneath the cooler or you can also do like I've done here with the horizontal heat fins and that's done with the heat fin Bend at the bottom and this configuration is absolutely fine in general you will want to sync up the heat fin orientation with whatever case you're using if you know if you know the predominant air flow here but for the Terra it's actually not going to matter too much you don't actually have a case fan that's shaping the air flow too much because you only have one fan here and all this is really doing is encouraging intake at the GPU at the power supply and Al at the CPU Cooler and with the fan underneath the heat sink it's not as if you'll have exhaust being partially directed out the back or towards the casean the fit with the motherboard is going to dictate your choice more than anything else but there is one orientation that you'll typically want to avoid and that is when your heat pipe bends are at the top of whatever case you're using and that tends to be a suboptimal orientation although if you really don't have any other choice for some reason it's not exactly the end of the world in in terms of performance it's just not as good so in this case if you were to put the heat pipe bends on the top here then that's not as good for this board and a suitable Ram kit this is actually how I would set it up because in this orientation doesn't overlap the board's heat sink and it only overlaps one slot of ram so you don't really have to worry about the front panel cables and here it's actually not being obstructed by the solid part of the side panel either with Intel you have a Square mounting pattern so you can just rotate your mounting bars to the orientation that you want for am4 and am5 like I am set up here with am5 you get two sets of mounting hardware so for a vertical heat fin installation you'll just choose the top and bottom bars like these and for the horizontal heat fins you you're going to choose the left and right bars for AMD this is noct to's new offset mounting style of a mounting bar and that means you have the option to off set the cooler lower uh well in this case it's actually going to be higher but it's going to sit lower on the IHS when you're looking at it right side up and then that's for nothing other than better alignment to the center of the ccds on the am5 CPU layout now you can still mount it at the zero setting but I've tested that on this channel if you're curious and I'll leave the link for that video up here uh just you know take a look and and see if that's something you want to do another Advantage here of the higher clearance though is additional air flow underneath the heat sink as well as closer positioning relative to the side panel so not only is there more space underneath for better air flow is also closer to the outer panel and that's going to draw air more directly from the outside if you happen to be in configuration number one anyway which is for a two- slot card inat Tera the regular l12s will have less air flow underneath the heat sink and the fan and it will also leave a small air gap between the heat sink and the side panel so that's not not as good as this one uh whereas the l12s x77 will close that Gap and you're basically intaking from the side panel or I guess the outside air more directly uh with fan on top coolers in this case you do have to be very careful being right up against the side panel and in my initial review of this case I noted that when you have a fan close to the side panel you're going to get turbulent noise but with the l12s because the fan is underneath and I'll demonstrate this later it's not not at all a concern being able to run this cooler in the Terra will require a 43 mm or thinner card that's also narrower than 31 mm that's what allows 43 mm of thickness uh but in the build I did recently this was with a Founders Edition 470 which is perfect and so if you're using something like this 4060 TI 4070 super Founders Edition this cooler is ideal but if your cart is thicker then you won't have this uh as a choice here so first off I did want to compare against the regular l12s like for like and for that I did go ahead and test in the nr200 test system on my legacy 3700x which is where I tested the l12s before just wanted to get an idea here at identical fan speeds compared to the l12s the addition of two heat pipes and the additional clearance does result in a significant improvement over the regular l12s so much so that it even beats out the regular l12s in the fan on top or high-profile configuration noctur rates the l12s by 77 version slightly better so on their standardized rating system the nspr it uh scores a 100 versus the l12s at 88 I did want to turn to testing in the Terra which is the main focus here and I tested here with the 7800 x3d which is my go-to high-end gaming CPU for terab belts and even a more production oriented system the 7800 x3d would be a good match due to just how efficient it runs and how easy it is to cool with the low profile cooler that you are pretty much mandated to in this case noise normalized testing here CPU is drawing around 75 Watts here up against the stock ID cooling is- 67 XT which is also a six heat pipe cooler so it's a little bit lower but it does put up a very favorable result and that's a 26 MHz benefit over that cooler of course with the is- 67 XT you could ostensibly go out and get the same stock knock to a fan the uh NFA 12x 15 so let's just test that out as well and in fact that doesn't improve things too much here because the stock ID cooling fan it matches up quite well with this cooler and it works quite well so one other thing you can do with this lower is- 67 is uh throw on a 255mm fan because when you take this heat sink and throw on a 10 mm thicker fan you get to basically 7 mm but I will absolutely caution against this for the reason of noise and I'll demonstrate that shortly and that is unreasonably loud but if we go ahead and just ignore the sound pressure level with both fans at the same RPM performance- wise this is as good as you can get the is- 67 XT in this case and even then it is behind the stock l12s by 77 by a tad but they they basically perform about the same uh for practical purposes so there is a very big difference between having the fan directly against the side panel where it's obstructed by the fluted cut side panel Vents and uh that different difference is about 6 DB between open and closed it is tremendous so take a quick listen and you'll see why I don't recommend that type of arrangement in this case so when I saw this cooler at first the gears started turning in my head because I knew what the extra 5 mm meant you can Ram depending run an NFA 12x 25 underneath this heat sink and the reason why this is helpful is because underneath the heat sink it doesn't really matter what you put underneath it as opposed to you know adding thickness on top because the heat sink has already broken up the air and therefore you're less likely to have turbulence induced noise like you just heard with the is- 67 and a thick fan against the side panel the clips that knock to supplies these will work with a 25 mm fan as well and that's cool because you don't have to switch fan clips for get a new set uh they'll work just fine uh based on the ramp kit I have here which is Kingston's Fury ddr5 35 mm is the maximum height of your RAM for this type of configuration and this Ram kit happens to be that tall it barely clears the fan with all the vibration dampeners uh removed the fan clip does touch a little bit but it's absolutely fine two things you'll notice if you deploy it this way is the alignment to the mounting hardware it's a little bit trickier because you don't have the line of sight that you might with the NFA 12 X15 but with the teret you can kind of look through the bottom so if you just line it up and Eyeball it that way you'll be absolutely fine mounting it but the other thing which is more of more concern is boy oh boy is this setup choked off underneath the fan of course it's not surprising right because you pretty much max out the clearance under this thing so that's you're getting what you asked for in some sense but uh performance of this combo at Max RPM because of that is actually worse than the l12s x77 with the stock fan but it's important to note that it's a deciel quieter and with the advantage of having a much less offensive noise quality and the slim fan tends to be more High frequency of course if we had to dial down the slim Fan's RPM to match the noise level of the thicker fan the performance would be worse so current gen CPUs that this one would be good for I think your non-x ryzen nonk Intel SKS are great ryzen 7600 X 7800x 3D would also be good candidates uh for K Intel your 14600 K is as high as I would go the 13 and 14700 K are really power hungry so I would recom against using those with this cooler especially in this case um something like the ryzen 7700x is going to be marginal you're not going to get all the performance out of it at a peak power draw but um if you're just gaming with it that that can be a choice here but I think if you're comparing 7700x and 700x 3D in a gaming scenario there's not really a reason to get the 7700x so it's not going to happen in this case but if you wanted to you can slap another NFA 12 x255 on top with two of those Push Pull and open air but I don't really don't think that makes too much sense unless you have a case with exactly that much clearance and no more um in cases like the M1 Evo where you have more clearance than that you're actually just better off running a c14s especially based on how much the combo with two NFA 12 x 25s would set you back the c14s is actually just cheaper and it's it's going to be better so don't uh don't do this I did want to share another set of sound samples here this set is really just demonstrate that the cooler doesn't cause turbulent noises with the tera's side panels and the most evident comparison will be between the is- 67 that you heard with the fan up against the S panel the same RPM for both fans and uh we're just compare the two with this setup [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so personally I would switch to the NFA 12x 25 just for the sake of noise but you have to run the numbers right so this cooler comes in at $75 us which is $10 more than the regular l12s so if you slap on the NFA 12 x25 you're now around 105 $5 which that's a lot of money for a low profile gluing combo and of course you do have a spare NFA 12x5 right uh but either way that's not cheap and uh the is 67 XT that I showed you in this build originally that's around $35 us so it's a much better Fit For A mid-range build and the performance is perfectly adequate with the 7800 XT so this is a great cooler if you want a little bit better performance or you are happen to be limited to position number two in the terara and you can't get the l12s by 77 then the regular l12s will make a lot of sense as well but if these stars align meaning that you can run position number one in this case you can get a bit more RAM and board clearance flexibility with the stock l12s by 77 because it's an absolute solid cooler and for the ultimate high-end terab build the souped up config like I did here I think this has just what you need to tie it all up and this is going to be as much cooling as you can get in this case so I've tried to cover everything that you might want to know about this but uh if you have any questions please let me know down in the comments below and please also help the channel out by using the links down below also please give a like make sure you are subscribed since it really helps out the channel big thanks for watching today [Music]

Channel: Machines & More

Views: 23,592

Keywords: noctua u12s, amd ryzen, ryzen, mini-itx, small form factor, SFF, computer building, computer, custom build, noctua, amd 5700xt, radeon 5700xt, evga sfx gm, mitx case, chromax, noctua u12a, Ryzen 7, 3700x, ryzen 3700x, CM NR200P, NR200, CoolerMaster NR200, Coolermaster NR200P, NCASE M1, Cooler Master NR200, NR200P, AIO Cooling, Water Cooling, Noctua L12S, Air Cooling, Gaming PC, SFF case, Nvidia 3080, nvida 3080, nvdia 3080, 3070, nvidia 3090, 3090 GPU, 3080 gpu

Id: HPC5lpWutJs

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024