Noctua NH-D12L: A breath of fresh air for short twin-tower coolers

Noctua has recently launched the Noctua NH-D12L, a fairly compact cooler with a height of just 145 millimetres. This makes it an ideal cooling solution for smaller cases, but also for servers with a height of 4U. Thanks to its interesting design and high-end fan, this cooler should offer very solid cooling effectiveness. But of course this assumption needs to be thoroughly verified, which is the aim of today’s article.

Conclusion and evaluation

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the Noctua NH-D12L. It is practically a smaller version of the popular Noctua NH-D15S cooler, without any dramatic loss of efficiency by reducing its size. With a height of 145 mm, it can also be used in compact cases where large coolers usually don’t fit.

As usual with Noctua coolers, the workmanship is top-notch, including the soldered heatpipes. The accessories are not lacking anything substantial and the six-year warranty is now the standard with Noctua coolers.

I tried this cooler also together with a second NF-A12x25r fan on the front tower. However, the measured temperature differences were minimal compared to the base configuration. In addition, the added fan could not be placed as low as the base one because it came into contact with the RAM module (even though I use low-profile RAM with a height of 34 mm). So adding a second fan negated the main advantage of the cooler, which is its 145 mm height.

The only thing that might discourage you from buying this cooler is its relatively higher price. And for some reason, you will find “only” the older version of the NT-H1 thermal paste in the accessories, although the NT-H2 version with improved properties has been on the market for some time. However, these are only minor shortcomings that do not prevent me from giving this cooler the Approved editorial award.

English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš