Noctua NH-C12P SE14 Top-Down CPU Heatpipe Heatsink with NF-P14 Fan

I was looking for a “silent” solution for my early (135W) i7 system and was contemplating a fanless cooler (I don’t drive the PC very hard) but was talked out of doing this by Andy Ford, QPC’s very knowledgeable and equally helpful Technical Support Manager. He assured me that with the ULNA fitted (a resistor in the power supply lead) and with a Nofan CS-80 case, I would get excellent cooling and I would not be able to hear it. I was deeply sceptical and equally wrong. 20 degrees cooler than the stock device and I simply cannot hear it. I can, however, now hear the slight buzz from the audio system and the water circulating in my radiators! Do you know anything about central heating pumps, Andy? !

This item arrived well packaged from Quiet-PC, with all the component parts engineered to a very high standard. My Motherboard is a ASUS P7P55D and the Noctua components fitted precisely into and onto the Motherboard.

The assembly instructions were well printed on good quality glossy paper and were extremely easy to understand and to follow.

Although this Noctua Cooler and Fan are of considerable size, it did not interfere with any of the Motherboard components. There is adequate space around the Corsair RAM memory strips and also adequate clearance between the curved parts of the copper heat-pipes and the printed circuit board of my Graphics Card, a substantial sized Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650Ti, fitted into the upper PCIe slot.

My tower case is approximately 180 mm wide, and when the Noctua cooler is fitted with the fan, there is plenty of clearance between the fan and the inner surface of the left side of the case. (Approximately 25 mm).

I used the slowest fan-speed adaptor cable and this has proved extremely good. My Processor is a Intel i5 Quad-core Lynnfield CPU. During a lengthy video editing session or playing a computer game with excellent graphics (Portal 2), the Noctua heat sink barely got warm. Much of the time it barely got the chill off.

I have no fans running in the tower case. There is a large diameter fan in the Power Supply Unit and two large and slow running fans on the Graphics Card. The air flow from the PSU causes more than sufficient cooling through the case and the Noctua fan is extremely quiet.

The only slight noise I can hear is that of the PSU fan, which is at a low level. The Noctua fan, using the slowest speed adaptor cable, adds no audible noise that I can hear at all. If I had a totally silent PSU, I doubt that I could hear the computer running.

This Noctua cooler and fan are an excellent quality product that I thoroughly recommend.

Replaced the stock cooler on my i5. Although it only rarely peaked above 45C, there was a steady drone. Installation was fairly easy although I did need to partially remove the MB. Instructions are perfectly clear. The fan is very quiet with a much more tolerable whirr. At idle it is currently showing 21C going up to 33C when doing some heavy Photoshop reprocessing, then dropping back to 21C very quickly. Now to try some overclocking…

Probably one of the smaller heatsinks from Noctua (still massive). It’s got a good low profile which made it ideal for my Antec fusion case. Very quiet fan. Excellent results 20c down in temps from the previous cooler (replaced case fans also).

There are a few things to watch out for. There is no am2 backplate in the box. A lot of mobos do come with this as standard. Also there can be clearance issues with taller memory modules.

With all that said the performance is exceptional and its extremely quiet.