Noctua has announced the NH-D12L Chromax.Black cooler. It’s a 145mm tall twin-tower style cooler with a 120mm fan mounted in the center. The fan itself is a variation of the extremely good Noctua NF-A12x25 called the the NF-A12x25r. The design will fit into 4U sized enclosures, and Noctua is claiming that it will make an excellent choice for the Dan C4-SFX SFF case.
“The NH-D12L has become a popular choice for compact, high performance builds in cases like the Lian Li O11 Dynamic or the DAN C4-SFX ”, says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). “With the new chromax.black version, we’re now giving customers the option to leverage the NH-D12L’s renowned quiet cooling performance in all-black systems.” – Noctua Press Release.
Noctua has released this chart to help their customers navigate the various 120mm based coolers they manufacture.
And here are the full specifications.
The included NF-A12x25r PWM fan features Noctua’s SSO2 bearings and a claimed 22.6 dBA noise measurement. Max RPM is 2,000 and the minimum rotational RPM is 20% at 450 RPM.
Noctua claims that the NH-D12L will be able to provide their highest tier of performance on the even the scorching hot Intel I9-14900KS. The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D fair slightly worse at their second highest performance tier levels.
You can check out the official NH-D12L chromax.black webpage by CLICKING HERE.
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My personal take on this is that Noctua has always been the safe bet when it comes to CPU cooling. That said, in my experience, their tier rating system is a bit ambitious as I’ve found you need optimal airflow or an open bench to achieve the results they list. Additionally, Noctua is facing stiff competition from both the resurgence of Thermalright and their substantially less expensive coolers, and ID Cooling with their latest releases. Deep Cool is also knocking on Noctua’s doors. The key benefit of Noctua over its competition is the build quality, installation hardware, and outstanding fan design. Still, at nearly twice the price of some of the competition, it’s going to be a tough sell to SFF builders on a budget.
The immediate competitors to this cooler that comes to mind is the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 Mini and Thermalright Silver Soul 135. Both offer good performance and cost substantially less. Also, both improve upon the effective albeit poorly designed Silver Arrow 130 that I have lambasted in the past for having, in my opinion, a dangerously sharp fin stack that is akin to handling knife blades.
I still don’t know what Thermalright was thinking with that design, but it should be removed from the market as it’s way to easy to cut yourself with it. I used a Silver Arrow 130 in a NCASE M1 build for an Intel 8086K. I will not use one again. I have yet to try the Silver Soul 135 and Peerless Assassin 120 Mini, but Gamer’s Nexus recently positively reviewed the Peerless Assassin Mini.
