Noctua NH-U12P CPU Cooler – The Sound of Silence

Installation

Today, I will be installing the NH-U12P onto out Intel E6300 testbed. With all the hardware together on the work bench I read through the instructions off I went.

When I first picked up the backing plate, I was shocked that is was as thick as it was. Then I noticed the foam pad with the white backing. Initially I thought it was a sticky pad to hold the plate in place for install, its not. Noctua even points this out in bold text in the instructions not to peel this off, as its a protective film that must be between the plate and your motherboard.

With the mounting bars of Noctua’s SecuFrim mounting system in place you can see that is just clears the capacitors next to the socket.

Now here is a beautiful sight, a fully tightened backing plate and NO bowing in the mainboard that the LGA775 socket is prone to. This I was very happy to see.

Here, we have the retaining brackets that are second part of Noctua’s SecuFirm mounting system attached to the base, they simply attached with 4 screws.

Here we have in install onto the socket, you can get the feel of how big this cooler is. Noctua provides you with sticky backed silicone strips to place between the fan and the cooler to aid in noise reduction. Now with it installed we can see how it just did clear some of the motherboard components.

Remember how close the mounting bars looked to the capacitors? Well, here is a better shot. If the spring screws were not a shoulder screw, making it stop at a certain point, one could have over tightened the screw and right into the capacitors. Good thinking on Noctuas part to make it a shoulder screw.

Looking to the other side, we can see the cooler gets nice and close the chipset heatsink as well.

This cooler is not small by any means and that fact is made evident as I assembled the system into the Antec P190 case. As I have had to do in the past with tower coolers, I had removed the 200mm side fan to accommodate the height of the coolers. This time not only did I need to remove the side fan, but the side filter and mounting bracket. At a whopping 158mm (6.3 inches) tall it would be in your best interest to measure your case to see if you will have enough room for this cooler.