Noctua NF-A12x25 Chromax Black Review

Introduction

With the introduction of Noctua's NF-A12x25, Noctua managed to produce probably the best Fan available on the market until today. Now Noctua re-released their iconic monster in a Chrmoax Black Line, meaning that the best available PC Fan is now also one of the most beautiful Fans. Let's see if it also performs as well as the original one.

What's in the Box?

The NF-A12x25 comes in the usual minimalistic Noctua Package. Inside we will find the A12x25 fan accompanied by a little box containing the Chromax Black Swap multicolored rubber pieces that allow you to customize the Fan to a certain degree.

Down below we included a short summary of the Fans spec sheet:

Installation

In terms of installation, there is not very much to talk about.

Included in the small box containing the Swap rubbers, Noctua included a small bag with 4 Fan screws.

The A12x25 uses the standard PWM connector, and just as we are used to with Noctua Fans, the PWM cable attached to the fan is extremely short, but Noctua pre-installed a 30cm long extension out-of-the-box.

Appearance

Although there is no RGB to be found on Noctua's NF-A12x25 Fan, or any other Noctua Fan for that matter, the fan still looks amazing.

The sturdy looking and feeling black Fan Frame makes the fan stand out while the usage of Noctua's Sterrox LCP material creates a highly interesting color on the Wings. Instead of the plain Black color usually found on black Fans, Noctua's Sterrox Material creates a type of sanded-paper-like finish that looks incredibly interesting.

But if Plain-Black is nothing for you, Noctua got you covered. As usual with Noctua's Chromax Black Swap products, they include 7 different colored rubber pieces in the box. These rubbers can be placed on each of the frames edges creating the look of your liking.

Benchmark

We benchmarked Noctua's NF-A12x25 using our usual Benchmark setup.

At 100% Fan speed, the A12x25 managed to keep the 3700x at 39°C above ambient, making them the absolute best-performing Fans we have seen so far. To make it even better, they were able to do this with a 3°C lead in front of our second-best fan.

Normalizing our numbers by noise only strengthened the A12x25's dominance. With a clear lead to every other fan we have seen, the A12x25 are not only the very best fans in terms of performance, but they can keep their level of cooling at a noise level lower than everybody else.

Truly an amazing performance.

Conclusion

If we were to conclude the Fan in a short sentence, it would be: Best in class.

The NF-A12x25 is the best-in-class in Performance,

It is best-in-class in Noise,

and Build Quality is outstanding.

All in all, no matter what task we would assign to Noctua's little monster, it is the best candidate to do it.

Although we knew beforehand that Noctua's A12x25 set of Fans are incredibly powerful, it's astonishing that we were able to benchmark a fan that outperformed every other Fan we have seen so far to a degree where the difference was so big and observable on the charts themselves.

The usage of Noctua's in-house-made Sterrox material gives the fan a unique color on the wings, and we appreciate the inclusion of Noctua's Swap-multicolored frame rubber pieces which allow customizing the Fan in a color of your choice.

With every positive aspect that the NF-A12x25 brings to the table, we can only recommend this fan.