by Sergey Lepilov
06/23/2008 | 05:45 PM
Unlike other coolers, the solutions from the Austrian Noctua Company cannot boast any memorable or bright names. The first models to please the overclockers were NH-U12 and NH-U9, and about a year and a half later they launched enhanced NH-U12P and NH-U9P. Noctua fans, chipset coolers and even thermal interfaces also have very plain names that do not give you any idea of the product. It could be Noctua’s engineering origins and scientific approach to coolers design as well as their naming. Although we sincerely believe that a nice meaningful name will certainly help the cooler to succeed in the market.
Anyway, if you are willing to order yourself our today’s hero, you should be very attentive, as there is only one new letter in the model name: NH-C12P, although the constructive changes made to it are more than significant compared with the previous models.
The package of the new cooler didn’t really change that much compared with that of Noctua NH-U12P. The box is made of the same thick cardboard with a cut out window in the front panel. It is designed in the traditional brown colors matching the overall Company style:
The box contains a lot of technical info: detailed cooler specifications, a lit of compatible platforms, description of key features and technologies employed in this solution, the list of online and printed media awards the Austrian Company received to day. Well, anything you can think of is actually there.
Inside the box is separated in two sections. The large section contains a heatsink with a fan and the small one is actually a small plastic box with bundled accessories:
The bundle is pretty traditional for Noctua products. There is a plastic bag with a retention kit for each socket type marked accordingly. The third bag contains the rest of the bundle including Noctua NT-H1 thermal compound, two adapters for fan rotation speed reduction, sticky silicon stripes, springs and screws and two fan retention wire clips. The beautifully designed foldable installation manual is included separately.
The retention kits for different types of processor sockets include the following components:
Socket 754/939/940/AM2 & AM2+ | LGA 775 |
Well, you can see everything on the photo’s above, so I will not list all the components here. Instead, let’s move on to checking out the constructive design peculiarities of the new cooler.
It wouldn’t be quite correct to claim that Noctua NH-C12P features an originally designed heatsink. Nevertheless, I have to point out that the engineers from the Austrian Institute of Heat Transmission and Fan Technology were very meticulous about every little detail of the new cooler design. As a result, C-type heatsink appeared. It is also called top-oriented heatsink, i.e. with the airflow directed from the cooler fan to the mainboard surface.
Noctua NH-C12P heatsink is relatively small for today’s standards and measures 91 x 126 x 152mm. It weighs 550g:
If you add a 120 x 120 x 25mm fan the total height of the cooler will equal 114mm and its weight will increase to 730g.
The cooler heatsink is made of three aluminum plate arrays using two types of plates. If you look at the cooler from the side where the heatpipes end, then you will first see the largest array of 20 trapezoid-shaped plates. Then comes another array of 15 narrower but at the same time taller plates that contact the cooler base. And then another array of 9 trapezoid-shaped plates:
The gap between the heatsink plates is 2mm bi in each heatsink array and all plates are ~0.5mm thick. So, we calculated the heat dissipating surface area and it equals about 4300sq.cm.
The central array forms two gaps in the heatsink, so that some of the heatpipes remained “naked”:
According to the info we found on the official company web-site, these gaps have been designed specifically to direct some of the airflow right towards the components in around-the-socket area of the mainboard. In my opinion, it is a doubtful solution, because two side heatpipes simply lose about 40% of their cooling capacity in this case.
There are six copper nickel-plated heatpipes 6mm in diameter coming out of the cooler base. They pierce the heatsink and curve inside it:
Note that the upper ends of the heatsink array are of different height. These “waves” are about 4mm deep and serve the well-known purpose or reducing the fan airflow resistance, which in its turn allows using fans with low rotation speed and low level of generated noise without losing any of the efficiency. The bottom of the heatsink also has a few “waves”. Here, however, they ensure mostly acoustic comfort.
The heatpipes lies in special grooves cut out in the copper base of the cooler. As a result, there is bigger heat exchanging contact area between the cooler base and the heatpipes. So there will be more efficient heat transfer than in case of contact with flat surfaces, like in Scythe coolers, for instance. Here I would also like to add that all parts are soldered, not glued.
The base finish is of highest quality, they were almost a tiny step away from the mirror-shine:
The evenness test on a glass surface and then with a thermal compound imprint on the CPU heat-spreader revealed impeccable quality:
We have already told you about the Noctua NF-P12 fan in our article called Roundup: 11 Fans for Two Super-Coolers and One System Case, that is why we will only offer you its photo here, you can read more about it in the corresponding section of our roundup:
The nominal rotation speed of this fan is ~1300RPM according to the official specifications, and two included adapters allow reducing it to ~1100RPM and ~900RPM with respective lower levels of noise and lower airflow.
In conclusion to our Noctua NH-C12P review I would like to offer a few photographs side by side with a recognized leader among contemporary air-coolers – Thermalright SI-128:
As you can see, the new Noctua cooler is slightly larger: it has longer and taller heatsink plates:
At the same time, the heatsink of Thermalright SI-128 has more plates that are spaced out at half the distance compared with Noctua NH-C12P heatsink plates (1mm by Thermalright and about 2mm by Noctua). If we compare the effective heatsink cooling surfaces, SI-128 will again be superior to the competitor with ~6786sq.cm against 4300sq.cm of Noctua NH-C12P.
Besides, do not forget that the heatpipes of Thermalright SI-128 are 2mm bigger in diameter:
However, it has 2 heatpipes less than Noctua NH-C12P. Overall, Noctua NH-C12P is going to have a very serious competitor, but before we get to the test results, let’s discuss the installation procedure with different mainboards.
First, keep in mind that you can always download the Noctua NH-C12P installation guide from their official web-site (PDF file, 983KB). No matter what mainboards you have, the actual installation starts with sticking the plastic washers to the base of retention spindles:
Then screw the spindles onto the backplate through the mainboard PCB (herein after we are going to use the example of an LGA 775 platform, but for AMD K8 the idea remains the same):
Backplate ensures that the cooler is pressed securely against the processor heat-spreader and prevents the mainboard PCB from deforming:
After that use four screws to attach the appropriate retention bracket to the cooler base:
And now all you need to do is fasten the cooler with spring screws:
These screws hold the cooler dead locked against the CPU.
By the way, when Noctua NH-C12P cooler just launched I assumed that the gaps in the heatsink array were designed to simplify the installation procedure, although once I took a closer look at it and studied the corresponding documentation, it turned out to be absolutely not true. Besides, the photos also show that losing one plate in the heatsink array was more than enough to allow easy access during installation procedure and there was simply no need for gaps like that:
A few words about proper cooler positioning. The manual suggests two ways of doing it: with heatpipes ends facing upwards and sideways:
Since the cooler heatpipes are bent, we didn’t have any problems installing the cooler both ways on our ASUS P5K Deluxe mainboard, however, we decided to stick to the option when the heatpipe ends are facing upwards:
I would also like to add that there is a 45mm gap between the mainboard PCB and the lower heatsink plate. So considering how compact the center of the cooler is it shouldn’t cause any problems to the electronic components around the processor socket.
Before putting the fan on top of the heatsink, you should stick enclosed silicon strips across the plate edges. They should absorb fan vibrations and lower the noise:
However, these “silencers” also have another useful role: they lift the fan another ~1.5mm above the heatsink, which allows the airflow from the fan to speed up more before entering the heatsink. Together with variable height of heatsink plates it contributes to higher cooling efficiency.
The fan is attached to the heatsink with wire clips that should go into the corresponding holes in the heatsink and then lock in the corresponding holes in the fan:
This is what Noctua NH-C12P looks like inside the system case:
Now let’s move on to the specifications
The table below sums up all the technical specifications of the Noctua NH-C12P cooler:
New Noctua NH-C12P cooler and its competitor – Thermalright SI-128 – were tested in two modes: in an open testbed when the mainboard sits horizontally on the desk and the cooler is installed vertically, and in a closed testbed with the mainboard in vertical position. In the latter case both coolers were installed with the ends of their heatpipes facing upwards.
Our testbed was identical for all coolers and featured the following configuration:
All tests were performed under Windows XP Professional Edition SP2. SpeedFan 4.34 Beta 44 was used to monitor the temperature of the CPU, reading it directly from the CPU core sensor:
The mainboard’s automatic fan speed management feature was disabled for the time of the tests in the mainboard BIOS. The CPU thermal throttling was controlled with the RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.35.0:
The CPU was heated up with OCCT (OverClock Checking Tool) version 2.0.0a in a 23-minute test with maximum CPU utilization, during which the system remained idle in the first 1 and last 4 minutes of the test:
I performed at least two cycles of tests and waited for approximately 20 minutes for the temperature inside the system case to stabilize during each test cycle. The stabilization period in an open testbed took about half the time. Despite the stabilization period, the result of the second test cycle was usually 0.5-1°C higher. The maximum temperature of the hottest CPU core of the four in the two test cycles was considered the final result (if the difference was no bigger than 1°C – otherwise the test was performed at least once again).
The ambient temperature was checked next to the system case with an electronic thermometer that allows monitoring the temperature changes over the past 6 hours. During our test session room temperatures varied between 21.0 ~ 21.5°C. It is used as a staring point on the diagrams. Note that the fan rotation speeds as shown in the diagrams are the average readings reported by SpeedFan, and not the official claimed fan specifications.
We tested Noctua NH-C12P with its original fan in three work modes. However, we also tested it with a few other fans, such as Scythe SlipStream 120 working at ~840RPM and ~2000RPM and Scythe Ultra Kaze running at ~1000RPM and ~2900RPM. The Austrian cooler’s competitor, Thermalright SI-128, was tested with the most suitable Ultra Kaze fan from Scythe in two identical modes. Now let’s discuss the obtained results.
Using the weakest cooling system of our today’s testing participants we managed to overclock our quad-core processor almost to its maximum of 3950MHz without losing stability or getting into the throttling mode. The processor Vcore was increased to 1.5875V in the mainboard BIOS (1.55~1.57V according to the monitoring utility). The obtained results are summed up on the diagram below:
First of all I would like to point out that Noctua NH-C12P doesn’t depend on the rotation speed of its original fan that much: increasing its rotation speed from ~940RPM to ~1390RPM brought only 3ºC improvement in processor temperature in an open testbed and only 2ºC improvement in a closed system case. It indicates that they designed a very smart heatsink and selected a good fan for it. During our experiments with other fans, we managed to lower the processor temperature by 7ºC, but unfortunately, at the expense of uncomfortably high level of noise (when we replaced Noctua NF-P12 at ~940RPM with Scythe Ultra Kaze at ~2900RPM). By the way, even though Ultra Kaze has a pretty big “dead zone” Noctua NH-C12P still demonstrated its maximum efficiency with this particular fan.
As for the comparison between Noctua NH-C12P and Thermalright SI-128, the results are pretty predictable here. Larger heatpipes diameter and almost 58% bigger heatsink surface size do not leave our hero any chances to win. Thermalright SI-128 is 6-7ºC more efficient than Noctua NH-C12P with identical Scythe Ultra Kaze fan in its quiet mode at ~1010RPM. Moreover, Thermalright solution allows pushing the processor frequency even higher: to 4030MHz at 1.6V Vcore, while Noctua cannot cool the quad-core CPU at this speed any more. However, once we sped up the Noctua NH-C12P fan to its maximum rotation speed, we managed to continue successful CPU overclocking.
We didn’t include any acoustic tests this time for one very simple reason: we have already tested all the fans that are participating in our today’s test session. As for the Noctua NH-C12P with its original fan, I can say for sure that it is a very quiet cooler at ~940RPM and ~1070RPM, and at ~1390RPM it generated moderate noise. However, since the difference between these two modes is only 1-2ºC, I would strongly suggest using Noctua NH-C12P in one of the quiet modes depending on your sensitivity to noise.
Frankly speaking, I didn’t expect anything more from Noctua NH-C12P. The Austrian manufacturer managed to design a very decent cooling solution: very efficient, universal, relatively light-weight and compact, with low noise, simple and reliable retention and, as always, of the highest quality. At the same time, the new cooler doesn’t really aim at the ultimate leadership and will have pretty hard times competing against the other solutions in the market considering its relatively high price of $69. On the other hand, if we continue comparing it against Thermalright SI-128 from the pricing standpoint, then you will have to add another $10-$15 for a good fan to its retail price of $50, because SI-128 ships without a fan at all. Add another $2-$5 for a tube of quality thermal compound and you get yourselves the same price. Although Thermalright SI-128 will still be a little more efficient.
In conclusion to our today’s review I would like to wish Noctua not to focus that much on the acoustic aspect of their solutions and release a new performance leader. I am sure that overclockers expect a lot from a company with engineering background like that. Why not start with polishing off the cooler we discussed today, for instance? Install five 8-mm heatpipes, add more heatsink plates at a smaller distance from one another, equip their upcoming Noctua NH-E12P (Extreme) with a 38mm fan and keep a few advantages of the NH-P12. And maybe they could do something about their naming principles, at least they could add some attractive names to the current model numbers. Well, as log as they keep going, we should see all this pretty soon, I am sure.
