Cooling [SFF Network] Premium SFF - The Noctua NH-L9x65

[confusis]

Having already investigated Noctua's NH-L9a - an ultra-low profile unit designed for AMD sockets - we turn our attention today to the NH-L9x65, a top-down cooler that (comparatively at least) adds some height in exchange for improved acoustic and thermal performance. This 65mm high cooler is claimed by Noctua to be compatible with any motherboard layout that uses the supported sockets, which is good news, given the challenge many have with fitting CPU coolers in most SFF builds.

Read more here.

 

[Phuncz]

Great review and another very interesting cooler. I'm loving the fact that it supports the standard 15mm thick fan but also a 25mm thick fan !
Or with a low TDP CPU you might be able to use no fan at all with just a case fan breezing air past it.

 

[confusis]

Not sure on the low TDP fanless use - the fins are pretty tightly packed which may not be fortuitous for passive cooling. Alas my lowest wattage CPU at the moment is my FX8350.. (wait what? Yep - turned off 4 cores to make it a FX-4350 of sorts. 55W max power consumption so far!)

 

[Phuncz]

15-30W is more what I was thinking of when I said "low TDP", like with the S and T-series Intel CPUs.

 

[confusis]

Ah, that makes sense. I was more implying that I am unable to test the hypothesis on the hardware available to me

 

[iFreilicht]

Thank you for this review! The L9x65 was always an odd beast to me and I had trouble placing it between the other coolers until now.

 

[confusis]

It is a bit odd, but there is a spot for it - cases that would support coolers like the Scythe Big Shuriken 2, Samuel 17, etc in height, but on motherboards with horrible layouts (socket right next to PCIe slot for example)

 

[jeshikat]

Personally I like it because it has good enough performance for even a stock Haswell-E chip but is small enough I don't have to worry about the weight of the heatsink tweaking the board like a large air cooler could since I carry my rig back and forth to work.

A water cooler addresses that problem of course but can still hear the NZXT X41 pump even when it's running at 6V.