SFF.Network Hardware Canucks Reviews Low Profile SFF Coolers

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Those crazy Canucks of Canadian Hardware reviews have gone above and beyond to review a whole slew of SFF low profile coolers. As SFFN readers, you might have one burning question; does anything beat the Noctua L9? Check out the video below to find out!

Spoiler: Spoiler

Fred isn't in the video...

 

[rfarmer]

Good review, I love his reaction to the Cooler Master.

 

[AMv8-1day]

I did really appreciate this review. It's been a while since anyone's done a good roundup of the current low profile air coolers.
My only gripe, which I will fully call out as a very niche problem, is that he didn't cover any of the sub-30mm coolers.
I'm currently considering a super low profile build, and would like to will into existence a new 24mm ultra low profile cooler other than Silverstone's AR04 and NT07.
(I know there are a few others from Dynatron, ID-Cooling, Gelid, etc. but they're all terrible, loud, prone to failure, and ancient.)

 

[REVOCCASES]

The AXP90-X36 would have been a great addition to the tests. Currently having it mounted on a 11700K and I'd love to see how the Noctua NH-L9 would do in comparison.

 

[Neathdrawls]

Great video by Hardware Canucks as usual!

For those able to understand Mandarin, Rinhai on bilibili has done a video testing out coolers under 47mm, with his i9-9900KF. Will be a good comparison with HC's video. Coolers tested were the Alphenhon Blackridge, Cyrorig C7, Thermalright AXP90-x47 Full Copper, SilverStone AR11, ID Cooling IS-40X, ID-Cooling VC45, ID-Cooling IS-47K, and Intel's 10th Gen stock cooler.

If anything else, another creator on bilibili has also tested quite a number of low profile coolers under 75mm, with a 10900K. Too many coolers for me to list. He has quite a bit of bar graphs in his video. I think he found that for cooling potential the AXP90-x47 Full Copper/Full Black has the highest potential, but is noisier as the TL-9015 is louder than the NF-A9x14.

 

[SKYMTL]

Thanks for everyone's feedback. The biggest challenge facing this video was one a lot of you can probably understand: a lack of stock or availability in North America.

The Black Ridge arrived only after the video was complete and its getting a separate piece sometime in the next week or so. The main issue is I have confirmation that Alpenfohn has no plans to begin distribution in North America. That drives up cost by quite a bit since we have to import these things from OCUK.

The Thermalright X36 faced the exact same hiccup at least for me in Canada. There's a single (somewhat shady) seller on AliExpress and other than that, I can't find anything. Welcome to 2022 I guess... though the one cooler I WISH I had was the Jonsbo HP-400. It looks like the IS-30 but with a much better fan.

With that being said, a lot of people are talking about how the ID-Cooling IS-47K needs to have its fan flipped for best performance. I'd agree but that would have also pushed its height past the limit for this roundup.

The sub-30mm category is an interesting one but I'm not sure what you'd need to be running to require one since <30mm is lower than a motherboard's IO shield? Is this a Slim-ITX project?

Overall though, you're all absolutely right and its something I ran across while doing this review: the air cooled ITX market is largely underserved. Some of the coolers don't have any support for modern sockets while others are either impossible to find or take forever to arrive.

 

[SKYMTL]

Good review, I love his reaction to the Cooler Master.

The Cooler Master highlights everything wrong with their approach to air cooling: they reuse an old design, rebrand it over and over again and hope for the best.

 

[robbee]

Thanks @SKYMTL for this great roundup!

With that being said, a lot of people are talking about how the ID-Cooling IS-47K needs to have its fan flipped for best performance. I'd agree but that would have also pushed its height past the limit for this roundup.

I think by flipping the fan, people mean to use the fan as intake rather than exhaust, but still keep it beneath the heatsink. This is also a big deal on the Black Ridge so I would definitely advice to try both orientations if you are going to test that cooler.

Another test that could be interesting (albeit very time consuming), is running the coolers not only noise normalised, but also using the same fan. A lot of people here use varying heatsinks with the fan that comes with the Noctua NH-l9.

Very curious to see what you have in store for the second part!

 

[msystems]

Another test that could be interesting (albeit very time consuming), is running the coolers not only noise normalised, but also using the same fan. A lot of people here use varying heatsinks with the fan that comes with the Noctua NH-l9.

To expand on the above, it would also be cool to test some of the theories involving the NF a9 (25mm) as well as 120mm swaps, where total height is kept roughly equivalent, while the coolers and fans are swapped. There is somewhat of an ongoing debate whether swapping an NF a9 actually outperforms an NF-A9x14, and some tests I have seen show that the NF-A9x14 is superior despite being slimmer.

Whenever coolers are discussed it's guaranteed someone is saying how they swapped the fan and got some result, which is hard to verify outside of a controlled experiment. I suppose airflow/ducts contribute as well so one person's result on swapping a fan is not going to be true for all cases.

 

[SFFMunkee]

To expand on the above, it would also be cool to test some of the theories involving the NF a9 (25mm) as well as 120mm swaps, where total height is kept roughly equivalent, while the coolers and fans are swapped. There is somewhat of an ongoing debate whether swapping an NF a9 actually outperforms an NF-A9x14, and some tests I have seen show that the NF-A9x14 is superior despite being slimmer.

Whenever coolers are discussed it's guaranteed someone is saying how they swapped the fan and got some result, which is hard to verify outside of a controlled experiment. I suppose airflow/ducts contribute as well so one person's result on swapping a fan is not going to be true for all cases.

Completely agree, anecdotal evidence isn't evidence. Needs to be empirical data following at least a slightly scientific process to be helpful.

 

[Revenant]

Thanks @SKYMTL for this great roundup!



I think by flipping the fan, people mean to use the fan as intake rather than exhaust, but still keep it beneath the heatsink. This is also a big deal on the Black Ridge so I would definitely advice to try both orientations if you are going to test that cooler.

Another test that could be interesting (albeit very time consuming), is running the coolers not only noise normalised, but also using the same fan. A lot of people here use varying heatsinks with the fan that comes with the Noctua NH-l9.

Very curious to see what you have in store for the second part!

Running with a Universal fan is part of the testing protocol for SFFN. We use Noctua Redux fans for this with a couple exceptions. I was tuning our test platform tonight so we should be starting some testing very soon.



Couple of changes: added a more power/quiet PSU, swapped motherboard to one that can push 225 watts without the VRM throttling, swapped to a passive GPU.

 

[riba2233]

To expand on the above, it would also be cool to test some of the theories involving the NF a9 (25mm) as well as 120mm swaps, where total height is kept roughly equivalent, while the coolers and fans are swapped. There is somewhat of an ongoing debate whether swapping an NF a9 actually outperforms an NF-A9x14, and some tests I have seen show that the NF-A9x14 is superior despite being slimmer.

Whenever coolers are discussed it's guaranteed someone is saying how they swapped the fan and got some result, which is hard to verify outside of a controlled experiment. I suppose airflow/ducts contribute as well so one person's result on swapping a fan is not going to be true for all cases.

A9 and x14 have roughly the same perf (2000 vs 2500 rpm) but A9 is slightly quieter. It has already been tested.

I agree, I would like to see all of the tested with A9x14 or A12x15 fans, whatever they support.

 

[rfarmer]

Black Ridge has been added, better late then never.

 

[NegativeONE]

this brings me joy, as one of the only coolers i can fit in the A39/A07 case is a Noctua. Hopefully using a 5600 CPU (65w) i get better temps than the 5800x test machine