Noctua NH-C12P CPU Cooler Review

Conclusions

Noctua NH-C12P is a CPU cooler with an excellent construction quality, with thick and solid fins just like its "brother" NH-U12P. The silentful fan is also the same, as well as the holding system. The only difference between them is the heatsink shape: NH-U12P uses the already popular tower format, with four U-shape heatpipes (acting, thus, as eight heatpipes pumping the heat from the base to the heatsink), while NH-C12P uses six heatpipes to carry the heat to the heatsink, which stays in horizontal position. An advantage of this design is the fact it is not as tall, and therefore can fit into SFF cases. Another positive point is that since part of the fan stays over the chipset heatsink it helps cooling down one of the hotter areas of the motherboard.

With the CPU idle NH-C12P was pretty efficient. Unfortunately at full load the performance from the reviewed cooler was not good, being very inferior to NH-U12P. It was not as bad as Thermaltake ISGC-100, but it performed worse than the other coolers we tested so far.

Considering it is a relatively expensive cooler – costing more than NH-U12P (which provides a higher performance) – we cannot recommend buying Noctua NH-C12P, unless your case is too narrow to fit a tower-design cooler and your CPU doesn’t get very hot.

Updated on 10/23/2009: After we published this review the manufacturer contacted us saying the low performance achieved by this cooler could be due to a defective sample. We received another sample, which was tested and achieved results similar to the first sample.