Noctua NH-U12A Chromax Black Review

Introduction

After taking a look at Noctuas NF-A12x25 Fans, we had no doubt that their Air Cooler using the same Fans would be just as convincing. Let's take a look if how it performs and if it is able to shock us just as much!

What's in the Box?

Noctua's NH-U12A Chromax Black comes in the same Noctua-style packaging as we're used to. Once the box is opened up we will find the cooler neatly embedded in a couple of carton sheets and a separate carton box containing all of the installation hardware and goodies.

Once everything is unboxed, we will find the following items:

• NH-U12A Heatsink
• 2x NF-A12x25 Fans
• PWM Y-Splitter
• 2x Low Noise Adapter
• Thermal Paste
• Installation Hardware AMD/Intel

Below we also summarized the most important specs:

Compatibility

By using Noctua's well-known SecuFirm2 mounting System, Noctua made sure that their NH-U12A is compatible with as many CPU sockets as possible. Down below you will find the full compatibility list:

Individual Components

Heatsink

The heatsink used on Noctua's NH-U12A measures only 58mm in depth once the fans are removed. Although this seems to be laughable thin compared to something like Noctua's dual-tower NH-D15,  don't make any mistake thinking that it isn't able to perform. By using 7 Copper heat pipes and a huge nickel-plated base covering every IHC currently available, it may be small, but it can perform like the biggest competitors.But let's keep that part for the benchmark section.

As usual with Chromax Black products, the Heatsink comes in a matt-black finish featuring a small Noctua Logo on the op side.

Due to its thinness and slightly offset building type, neither the heatsink nor the Fan are protruding over the ram making the Cooler as a whole 100% Ram compatible.

Fan

The Fans used on here are Noctua's own in-house-made NF-A12x25 PWM Chromax Black. While spinning at 2000RPM, these little monsters are able to push up to 60CFM at 2.34mm/H2O and yell at only 22.6db.

As we already made a dedicated review about these right here, we would recommend having a look at that one. But to summarize it, these are amazing, best-in-class fans that are surely capable of squeezing every bit of performance out of the NH-U12A's heatsink.

Appearance

As it's often the case with Noctua's products, the NH-U12A chromax black can mostly be described as clean.

Instead of some fancy, but often cheaply looking RGB or pieces of plastic, Noctua uses as much metal and high-quality grade plastic as possible to make everything look and feel rigid.

Additionally, to nothing "out-sticking" design-wise, we also noticed the absurd density of the product. Although the single tower design already eliminates the possibility of space in between the towers on its own, the high-quality fans and fan clips are squished so tight to the heatsink that there is absolutely nothing on this cooler that wiggles at all.

All in all, we found the NH-U12A to be extremely clean and minimalistic while suggesting immense performance due to its rigidness and overall excellent build quality.

Benchmark

Until now we talked a lot about build quality and the overall look and feel. But no matter how you look at it, the cooler still has to perform. So we tested it.

Using our usual benchmark setup, we tested the NH-U12S at 100% Fan speed.

Here, Noctua's mini-monster was able to keep the 3900x at 49°C, just a single degree behind the much bigger NH-D15.

Turning the Fan speed slowed down and normalizing the temperature by noise reveals that the NH-U12S is able to keep up shortly behind the D15 all across the board, while actually outperforming it in Noise-to-Performance after reaching 54°C.

To make things even more impressive, due to the usage of Noctua's NF-A12x25, the NH-U12S ended up as the Best in Class in terms of Noise-to-Performance in the lower Fan speeds, even outperforming the, until now unbeaten Dark Rock Pro 4.

Conclusion

Looking at its performance as a whole, the NH-U12A is an outstanding cooler.

Not only did it manage to stay shortly behind the NH-D15 in terms of Max Performance, but it was able to keep up with its Noise-to-Performance ratio, and outperform it in the lower fan speeds.

And this is exactly where we imagined the NH-U12A to land, as Noctua's second-best cooler. Surprisingly for us, however, Noctua outdid themselves on this one as we have never imagined that they would manage to make the coolers perform so close to each other. After all only 1°C behind the best one is a perfectly executed product.

But even if we would call it the second-best product, the NH-U12A has a lot of benefits. One of these is its size. Due to the minuscule size compared to a D15, and its 100% ram compatibility, it will be generally much easier to fit an NH-U12A into a Mid-sized build than an NH-D15.

Another big plus is the usage of Noctua's NF-A12x25 Fans. Although the Fans used on the D15 can spin much slower due to their bigger size, the A12x25 are perfectly optimized and perform so well in noise-to-performance, that the U12A actually wins in overall noise-to-performance compared to a D15.

Looking back at the cooler as a whole, we do not believe the U12A to be inferior to the D15. Taking every aspect into account, including the Size-to-Performance ratio, we believe Noctua created an outstanding product capable of performing just as well as its bigger counterpart, but while being much smaller, and therefore easier to handle and allowing for a better compatibility list than most other coolers out there.

All in all, there is very nothing negative to say about the NH-U12A, and we can only recommend it.