Noctua NH-L9x65 Review

Introduction

Noctuas NH-L9x65 is probably the beefiest Ultra-Low-Profile CPU cooler you will find which will handle the job. Doubling down on the NH-L9i design, Noctua enlarged the heatsink significantly creating essentially a low-profile monster.

What's in the Box?

In contrast to the smaller Noctua NH-L9i mini-version, the bigger NH-L9x65 comes in the usual (big) Noctua-styled box featuring some imagery and spec sheets. Inside we will also re-find the usual brown carton box containing all of the Installation materials and special goodies.

Once everything has been removed from the box, we will find the following items:

• Noctua NH-L9x65
• Thermal paste
• Installation Hardware Intel
• Installation Hardware AMD
• Low Noise Adapter
• Screwdriver

Down below we added a summarized spec sheet:

Compatibility

Thankfully, Noctua decided not to create a socket-specific lineup this time around. Therefore, the NH-L9x65 is compatible with a whole range of CPU sockets on multiple platforms. Down below you will find the complete list.

Individual Components

Heatsink

The Heatsink is definitely the most impressive part of this cooler. Considering its small overall size, the Heatsink used on the L9x65 is shockingly huge resulting in a cooler that mostly consists of an enormous Heatsink with only a tiny fan slapped on top.

At 51mm, this enormous heatsink even got enough space to fit in 4 individual heat pipes. While on most coolers the heat pipes are traveling from the top down and then back up on the other side, the L9x65 took a different approach. This time around, each heat pipe travels only through one side of the cooler. If this is due to the heat pipe already being bent significantly due to the heatsinks form is unknown, but with a total of 4 copper nickel-plated heat pipes and a sufficiently sized base, the cooler is up for some heavy tasks. 

Fan

The fan used on the L9x65 is Noctua's own in-house made little NF-A9x14 High Speed. While spinning at around 2500RPM, it is capable of pushing around 33CFM at 1.64mm/H2O.

The fan comes in the usual Noctua color scheme with a mix of Noctua's Brown and Dark-Brown colors. 

Appearance

Strong. The best word we could find that describes how the NH-L9x65 looks like is Strong. Although the cooler might not be as big as a dual tower cooler such as the NH-D15, we do need to keep in mind that the L9x65 is still an ultra-sff cooler. And keeping this fact in mind we were impressed by how far Noctua managed to push this boundary.

Comparing the L9x65 to its smaller and less thick L9i counterpart, the L9x65 clearly looks like it's supposed to be as beefy as a cooler could be before stepping into the normal Tower-like form factor.

Benchmark

We benchmarked the L9x65 on top of our Ultra-SFF benchmark suite.

While letting the L9x65 spin at 100%, it managed to keep the CPU at 49°C above ambient.

This not only positioned the cooler on the very first spot of all the Ultra-SFF Coolers we've tested so far, but it also means that the difference between the L9x65 and L9i ended up being 12°C. A very impressive results considering that this (only) stems from thickening the heatsink.

On the Noise-to-Performance graph, the L9x65 managed to deliver as well. While being a tick in front of the Scythe Shuriken 2 at every step of the way, the L9x65 managed to score the very first place from start to finish.

Conclusion

All in all, the NH-L9x65 is a very impressive cooler. From a Design and Build Quality standpoint, it is exactly where a Noctua cooler should be. Nothing wiggles, nothing is able to flex, it just stands upright and can handle the job.

But the most impressive part about the L9x65 is its performance, especially in regard to how the cooler is built.

While the L9i was able to deliver a surprisingly good noise-to-performance ratio, the L9x65 can take that result and deliver an even better ratio due to it having a big head start thanks to its bigger radiator.

That being said, we still need to keep in mind that this is an Ultra-SFF Cooler. Although the L9x65 was able to deliver exceptional results, it will never be even close to regular tower coolers such as the D15 or even oversized C-Style coolers like the C14s.

Considering the NH-L9x65's impressive Noise-to-Performance ratio paired with the usual Noctua level of quality, we can absolutely recommend this cooler for every small-form-factor use case. Therefore, for Mid-Range CPUs, such as a 12600K, or 5600x, you will do nothing wrong when deciding to go for this little monster.