Parted with the Noctua NH-U12S cooler

My new PC case, the Silverstone SG13, doesn't support air coolers taller than 61mm. Hence the Noctua NH-U12S cooler than I had been using with the Silverstone SG09 case does not fit anymore. There is no point holding onto it because I won't be building a PC in a larger case in the foreseeable future. Therefore, I exhibited it on Rakuten Auction.

I set a starting bit at JPY 5,000. The cooler was going for around JPY 7,500. Since there was no degradation in the cooler, I thought it would be a easy sell. I was wrong. It's not that nobody was interested in the cooler. There were many who added it to the watch list but waited without bidding, hoping that I would drop the price a tad lower.

After a couple of weeks, I dropped the starting bid to JPY4,500. I waited many days and finally I got lucky. Someone thought that it was a fair price and placed a bid. He paid for it the next day and I sent it a couple of days later. That person lives in Hiroshima and it is hundreds of miles from my apartment. Thus it took a couple of days for it to arrive at the destination.

Here is the link to the Rakuten listing.

And there you go. My first Noctua cooler is not with me anymore. To be honest, I wasn't all that impressed with its cooling capabilities. The reviews that I read about it spoke of nice things about it. Even with two fans, it was nowhere near as cool as the Silverstone HE01 cooler with the sole fan running at 1000RPM.

If you are wondering what I am using in my PC at the moment, it is the Antec Kuhler 620 All-In-One water cooling unit that I bought about 4 years ago (yes, I didn't get rid of it for some reason). I do not have the stock fan with me anymore. A Gentle Typhoon AP-29 3000RPM non-PWM fan is helping the radiator cool down. Of course I do not run it at 3000RPM all the time; not noise would be deafening. The integrated fan control of the Asus Z97i-Plus takes care of the noise issue. The overclock/Vcore of the CPU and the maximum fan speed are set so that the CPU temps hardly go past 80C with the fan speed of 2000RPM while doing a normal CPU intensive job like encoding a video in Handbrake. Definitely it is very audible at 2000RPM but I cannot expect miracles with this 4 years old thin-radiator.