Noctua NH-L9x65 Review

If you are looking for a low profile cooler, you might want to read this review of the Noctua NH-L9x65 at Overclockers Club this morning.

As far as performance goes, things got a little toasty in my testing, which was expected. But my testing is really outside the boundaries of what this cooler would normally be subjected. My testing did show that this little cooler that can almost fit in the palm of your hand still kept an overclocked 4770K a few degrees below 100 °C. While that is a bit on the high side, I hesitate to list the cooling performance as a Con, because if you use the cooler within the design intention, which is small form factor cases and HTPC environments, then you will have no problems. It does a fine job of cooling. If you try to cool an overclocked gaming system, well, Noctua has a variety of coolers that are better choices.

Nasgul said:

Cons: NONE?

Well, for $20 less you can buy that EVO from CoolerMaster and it'd be the same thing.

4 Pipe cooler are better than stock but not better than 6 pipe coolers. I like my AIO though, now I can populate all 4 memory slots and won't see a brick covering half my motherboard.

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I think you missed the point of this cooler which is designed for a very specific need. If you have a really tiny HTPC case it may not fit an EVO. This thing does a good job for how tiny it is, but if you have the room for a bigger cooler then yeah go with that.

Not a bad little cooler, but the absence of cooler intake air temp is glaringly obvious in the testing .. and without knowing what the cooler / radiator intake temp is we have no baseline to calculate cooler performance deltas. Room ambient give us how well the system performs with different coolers, but not the actual coolers' performance.
OCC says:

Most systems are built and mounted into a sealed (relatively) chassis as opposed to a test bench, so this method will be used to generate the idle and load results to give a real world view as to the cooling performance from a system listed below. Of course, your results may vary by several degrees due to case design and ambient air temperature.

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The only "real world view" involved is their test system .. so of course our results will most likely be different .. unless we have the exact same system. In other words three is no "real world" involved except the test system itself.

Add to this that these pancake coolers tend to ingest their own heated exhaust, meaning cooler intake air temps are easily 6-8c warmer than surrounding air (even when testing on open bench) makes the use of room ambient even more of a joke.. After doing several tsts of pancake / downflow coolers I've found reversing the fan to pull air out of cooler usually results in much better temperatures. Reason is downflow thru cooler turns out at mobo, turns up at RAM & GPU past cooler & fan where it is sucked back in. Fan reversed airflow is over mobo & RAM into bottom of cooler, up through and out and away.

I think the AXP-100 is better and almost the same size.
Noctua .. NH-L9x65 .. = .. 95x95x65mm w/ 4x pipes and 92mm fan for for $59.99
Thermalright AXP-100 = 121x105x58mm w/ 6x pipes and 100mm fan for $49.95