Noctua’s newly released NH-C12P is up for review today, this is Noctua’s first ‘down-draft’ cooler. Find out whether this new cooler is a success or a flop!
Noctua is a company that is located in Austria. They produce high-performance cooling solutions for PC enthusiasts. I have had the pleasure of reviewing many of their products and I regard the company highly because I know that they are a company with very high standards. Noctua have a great lineup of CPU Coolers and it falls on me today to review one of their newest additions – the NH-C12P.
The NH-C12P differs from any previous CPU Cooler from Noctua in that it doesn’t adhere to the usual pattern of being a tower heatsink. The NH-C12P has a new design, with new physics. This new design is called a down-draft heatsink. The following is an extract from the Noctua website:
Sporting 6 heat pipes and the award-winning, psycho-acoustically optimized NF-P12 120mm fan, the NH-C12P achieves excellent performance and outstanding quietness. The down-facing c-type design doesn’t only allow for optimal motherboard and case compatibility, but also provides additional cooling for motherboard components through two Airflow-Gaps. Outfitted with the professional SecuFirm™ mounting system and Noctua’s much acclaimed NT-H1 thermal compound, the NH-C12P is a premium-class silent cooler through and through.
So the objective of this cooler is to maintain high-performance cooler whilst providing maximum compatibility for motherboards and cases – in particular media cases and HTPC chassis’ which are quite compact and cannot host tower type heatsinks quite as easily. The common construction of the tower heatsink causes air to be lifted directly from the CPU and then driven off, and through an exhaust and hopefully out of the case itself. This isolates the CPU temperature and focuses solely on just this – whilst the down-draft design seeks to not only cool the CPU by drawing off temperature off it, but also cooling motherboard VRM components which the tower heatsinks shy away from. This should give an overall temperature drop throughout the case which is very pleasing.
