Noctua is an Austrian company rather new on the scene dealing in after market CPU cooling, here’s a snippet from their webpage. www.noctua.at

Noctua aims at establishing a new level of quality and performance "Designed in Austria" through paying attention to the users' needs in a market burdened with all kinds of frills and furbelows and providing sound-optimised premium components, which serve their purpose in a smart, precise and reliable manner.

Noctua has so far been able to produce two CPU coolers the NH-U9 which can be coupled with either an 80mm fan or a 92mm, and the NH-12 that is made for 120mm fans.

Specifications NH-U9:

Specifications NH-12:

Now let’s have a look at the coolers:

The Noctua NH-U9 and 12 comes packed in an appealing box with plenty of information detailed.

Here you can see the coolers taken out of the box; those are some big coolers indeed.

Another front shot and one from the side:

Both the Coolers come with a protective sticker for the base.

Here you can see one of the coolers with the bundled mounting hardware; they are compatible with most sockets available today from the Intel 478 to 775 and AMD 754 to 939. They are not compatible with the ageing Socket A though.

When peeling off the protective sticker from the base I was greeted with an unexpected sight. The copper base wasn’t polished like we are used to seeing on CPU cooler bases; it actually had tiny “potted holes” across the base. This I never had seen before, but we have been told they are to allow for better contact between the thermal paste, cooler and CPU core.

Here’s a closer look on the base and the four u-shaped dual heat pipes, they form a total of eight risers that spread the heat throughout the fins. Both the coolers have 38 aluminium fins to dissipate the heat. On the NH-U9 there is a total surface area of 3800cm2 and on the NH-U12 a total of 5000cm2 of heat dissipating goodness.