My first Noctua product - the NH-U12S CPU cooler

The Decision

As I sent back the Silverstone HE-01 cooler due to erratic vibration issues (read about it here), after a lot of thought I decided to buy the reasonably new Noctua NH-U12S, single tower cooler. Although this is a very small cooler compared to all of the high-end coolers out there, even compared to the HE-01, it seemed to perform exceptionally well on reviews. I had the Noctua NH-D14, Thermalright Silver Arrow IB-E, Bequiet Dark Rock 3 and Bequiet Shadow Rock Slim in my mind as well. But in the end, I went with the NH-U12S because it would give me peace of mind when looking to buy a new GPU as all of the above seemed to have clearance issues if the GPU had a backplate on it. All of those seemed to have a problem with the clearance with the too most PCI-E slot in the motherboard.

The NH-U12S has two advantages over the HE-01 that I had.

• Like I said, it's much smaller that means there will be ample clearance between the video card and the heat-sink. There were clearance issues with the HE-01 where I had to insulate the fan clip using tape because it touched the back of the graphics card.
• While the HE-01 had to rev the fan at 2000RPM to get to its maximum cooling performance, this does it just with a silent-optimized, 120mm 1500RPM fan. A lot of reviewers seemed to praise the Noctua cooler because of its noise to performance ratio.

 

The purchasing

Unfortunately I could only find two stores (Oliospec and PC-Ones) carrying the product and both of them asked an unreasonable price for it. On top of that, I had to pay shipping as well. It kind of disheartened me because I was so used to buying stuff with free shipping from Amazon and some of the other well known PC stores such as Sofmap, Tsukumo and Dospara. However, as I was all set on that cooler I decided to go ahead with the purchase despite the price.  Obviously I went with the store that offered it at the cheapest accumulative price.

Something is wrong with my Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B CPU cooler!!!

I love silent computers. IMO, loud PCs are PCs with bad build quality. Hence, I’ve removed most of the fans that used to reside in the case, and further have lowered the RPM of the fans below 1000RPM. Well, right now, the loudest fan in the PC is the PSU fan when I’m not gaming, which of course isn’t controlled by me. When gaming, fan on the video card ramps up its RPM, making its presence very noticeable. Scythe Kaze Master Ace fan controller is the hero of the show.

 

The CPU cooler (Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B) is very loud when the fans is running at full speed. The stock RPM is 1700RPM and that’s insanely loud. So much for CNPS title! CNPS stands for “Computer Noise Prevention System”.

 

The CNPS9900MAX-B is not the best cooler out there. (Check Tim Logan’s review)The Thermalright Silver Arrow, for example, is much better. But there were few reasons for choosing this cooler.

1. It didn't intervene with absurdly tall RAM sinks on my Corsair Vengeance sticks. Finding a decent cooler that passed this criteria was very hard. But now I think that I should have removed those RAM sinks (apparently, you can do that quite easily.) and bought a bigger cooler back then.
2. The cooling performance wasn't really bad. It was up there with the best air coolers, only 5C or so behind the best of the best. It was definitely in the 85th percentile. 
3. It looked nice. The fan was illuminated in blue. That’s what the letter B at the end means. And it didn't look overly large (but that was a misjudgment. It is a HUGE cooler, and unfortunately, most of it is air. The surface area of the cooler isn't THAT large.

So, the cooler is loud, and since I had the fan controller, I didn't really care about the noise back then. I have dropped the RPM of the fan to the point that the noise of it gets drowned under the ambient noise. That magic point lies just over 1000RPM. But at 1000RPM, the CPU temps increase by a little over 5C compared to 1700RPM. That’s not a big deal, if it was doing fine at 1700RPM in the first place. It does not!