Testing:

Test setup:
Noctua NH-U12 and NH-U9
Thermalright XP 120
AMD stock four heat pipe cooler
Asus A8N SLI Deluxe (1016 bios)
AMD X2 4400+
G.Skill 4400le
2 x Samsung 200GB SATA2
Western Digital Raptor 36GB
Gainward 7800GT GS
OCZ Powerstream 520w
Antec P180 Case

Toast
ASUS PC Probe II V1.00.43

Before we show you the result of the testing we will give you a little info about the fans being used in the review. The fans used on the Thermalright and both the Noctua coolers are recommended by Noctua and made by their close affiliate; Kolink international cooperation, and are called “Coolink SWiF”. ( http://www.coolink-europe.com )

On the Thermalright XP 120 and the Noctua NH-U12 the SWiF-1202 fan was used. This is a fan that rotates in ~1600rpm at 12v and pushes approximately 64m3/h (~52cfm) at a sound level of 24 dB/A.

On the Noctua NH-U9 the SWiF-922 was used, which rotates in a speed of ~1850rpm and pushes 63m3/h (37cfm) at a sound level of 22dB/A.

Both the fans comes with a fan controller that fits into a free pci slot, but only 12v will be used during testing, we didn’t see the need to try the lower speed option since the fans were nearly inaudible at full speed.

The coolers from Noctua will be tested against the mighty XP 120 from Thermalright and the very strong stock cooler for the X2 4400+ with four heat pipes.

The temps were measured using the latest version of Asus PC Probe II. Idle temps were obtained upon reboot and after been idle for 15 minutes. Load temps after 30 minutes of running “toast” on high priority.

The ambient room temp was kept between 21-23°C during the period of testing. Arctic Silver 5 was used with all the coolers and applied accordingly to Arctic Silvers recommendations.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

As you can see in the above charts the coolers from Noctua proved to be very good performers, the NH-U9 managed to keep up with the XP120 using a slow spinning 92mm fan while the XP 120 used the bigger (more powerful) 120mm fan. The NH-U12 was even more impressive, outperforming the XP 120 by 5° using the same fan is outstanding!

Just for fun we tried putting on a 2000rpm Titan 120mm fan that pushes ~75cfm on both the Noctua NH-U12 and the XP 120.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

You can see that the NH-U12 managed to keep a 4° load advantage over the XP 120 with this more powerful fan...