DeepCool, a global brand in designing and manufacturing high-performance computer components for enthusiasts worldwide, announces a highly compatible CPU air cooler that offers impressive heat dissipation power in a compact and efficient design. With a slim profile, the AK400 air cooler serves as a thermal solution that can easily fit into mainstream ATX/MATX system builds. the unique design of the matrix form fin-stack and the non-RGB cover top offers a special aesthetic value to particular users.

The DeepCool AK400 Performance CPU Cooler is highly compatible and offers impressive heat dissipation power of 220 W in a compact and efficient design. Four direct touch copper heat pipes quickly transfer heat away from the processor into a dense matrix fin array heat sink for effective cooling performance.

Industry reports and sources in the financial community have placed Apple and Intel as the two premier customers for TSMC's upcoming N2 node. N2, which is expected to enter volume production by the end of 2025, will be TSMC's first manufacturing process making use of GAAFET (Gate-All-Around Field-Effect Transistor) design. If there are no significant market upheavals or unexpected snags in technology transition, TSMC will be late to the GAAFET party, following Samsung's 3GAE node in 2023 and Intel's first Angstrom-era process, Intel 20A, in 2024.

While Apple's uptake on TSMC's latest manufacturing technology is practically a given at this point, the fact that Intel too is taking up TSMC's N2 node showcases the company's evolved business tactics after the introduction of its IDM 2.0 strategy (IDM standing for Integrated Device Manufacturer, meaning Intel too will fabricate chips according to clients' specs). While pre-Pat Gelsinger was seemingly scared of touching any other foundries' products - mostly from the fact that Intel does have its own significant manufacturing capabilities and R&D, after all - the new Intel is clearly more at peace with driving its competitor's revenues.

Taiwanese company Thermalright has recently launched the LGA1700-BCF (Bending Corrector Frame) to mitigate the risk of bending and warping with 12th Generation Intel Alder Lake processors. Intel has previously disclosed that their Alder Lake processors could exhibit mild warping as a result of changes to the integrated heatspreader (IHS) design but that the processors still performed within specification. This new product from Thermalright aims to prevent this warping despite Intel advising that any 3rd party modifications could void the warranty for Alder Lake processors. The Thermalright LGA1700-BCF is now available to purchase for 39 RMB (6 USD) in red and silver color options with support for H610, B660, and Z690 motherboards.

ORIGIN PC, a leader in custom high-performance systems, today announced the availability of its latest thin and light laptops. With ORIGIN PC's newly upgraded flagship systems, the EVO17-S and NT-17, as well as the addition of two brand new laptops to its lineup of world-class systems - the EVO14-S and NT-14 - gamers can play with power and portability. The EVO17-S is a performance powerhouse, equipped with an Intel Core i9-12900H 14-core processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, and support for up to 64 GB of DDR5 DRAM, while a 240 Hz QHD screen displays all your games in stunning detail. With this combination of hardware pushing laptop gaming to entirely new heights, ORIGIN PC reaffirms its dedication to exceptional mobile performance.

The EVO17-S, EVO15-S, NT-17, and NT-15 systems feature massive hardware upgrades to meet the growing demands of users. For those looking for an expanded display, Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI ports can connect up to two additional monitors. Weighing in at only 2.4 pounds, the new EVO14-S and NT-14 serve to provide users the incredible power of an ORIGIN PC system with the maximum portability benefits of a laptop. These 14" display systems can be further upgraded by adding an external GPU, connecting up to a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 or NVIDIA RTX A6000 for top-tier desktop graphics performance.

With its desktop graphics card lineup still elusive, the company is planning a new entry-level SKU positioned below the Arc A380 and A350M. Called A310, this chip will be based on a heavily cut-down version of the DG2-128 (ACM-G11) silicon, and offer performance levels somewhere between the Iris Xe MAX (DG1) desktop discrete GPU, and the A350M, with the design goal being to compete with AMD's Radeon RX 6400 and NVIDIA's GTX 1650 in the entry-level space.

At this point the core configuration of the A310 is not known. It is speculated to feature 64 to 96 execution units (EU) out of the 128 present on the ACM-G11 silicon. 4 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 64-bit wide memory bus, could remain standard fare for this card. All of the media-acceleration features of "Alchemist" could be featured, including AV1 decode and encode. The A310 could make for a good combo with future Intel workstation or HEDT platforms with non-gaming visual requirements. The ACM-G11 is built on the 6 nm silicon fabrication process, and so the A310 could come with a low power footprint that doesn't need additional power connectors.

Pricing for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards has been evolving positively for the last seven months, experiencing a downtrend that has brought street prices closer to the actual MSRP on the best graphics cards. According to 3D Center's price analysis of the Austrian and German markets, GPU pricing for both AMD and NVIDIA's latest GPUs have reached historical lows - although these lows are still at a premium over MSRP. Anyone looking to buy an AMD graphics card is now looking at an average markup of 12% over MSRP, while NVIDIA cards seem to be holding their inflated values slightly better, and still stand at 119% of MSRP.

The price action comes on the back of months of increasing supply at retailers, alongside reduced demand from Ethereum miners due to falling ETH prices ($2,912.54 at time of writing) and the expectation for Ethereum's passage to Proof of Stake (PoS) through The Merge, which is still slated for later this year. It's also likely that most customers who still haven't bought into the latest generation of GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are waiting for the release of Intel's competing Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs, not to mention AMD's mid-year RX 6*50 refresh and NVIDIA's next-generation graphics solutions. An exploding ETH price might bring GPU prices back up again; but until then, and at the rate prices are seemingly (at least locally) falling, it seems that consumers might finally be able to purchase GPUs at MSRP sometime after May.

One of the largest cloud providers in China, Alibaba, has today announced a preview for a new instance powered by Yitian 710 processor. The new processor is a collection of Alibaba's efforts to develop a home-grown design capable of powering cloud instances and the infrastructure needed for it and its clients. Without much further ado, the Yitian 710 is based on Armv9 ISA and features 128 cores. Ramping up to 3.2 GHz, these cores are paired with eight-channel DDR5 memory to enable sufficient data transfer. In addition, the CPU supports 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes for IO with storage and accelerators. These are most likely custom designs, and we don't know if they are using a blueprint based on Arm's Neoverse. The CPU is manufactured at TSMC's facilities on 5 nm node and features 60 billion transistors.

Alibaba offers these processors as a part of their Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance called g8m, where users can select 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128 vCPUs, where each vCPU is equal to one CPU core physically. Alibaba is running this as a trial option and notes that users should not run production code on these instances, as they will disappear after two months. Only 100 instances are available for now, and they are based in Alibaba's Hangzhou zone in China. The company notes that instances based on Yitian 710 processors offer 100 percent higher efficiency than existing AMD/Intel solutions; however, they don't have any useful data to back it up. The Chinese cloud giant is likely trying to test and see if the home-grown hardware can satisfy the needs of its clients so that they can continue the path to self-sustainability.

Last month, Intel released its Arc Alchemist lineup for mobile/laptop configurations. As expected, being the first discrete GPU that the company made, there are some hiccups here and there that happen along the way. Today, we have an interesting case of Intel Arc A350M getting a heavy performance boost with Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT) disabled. The DTT is Intel's solution to automatically and dynamically allocate power between an Intel processor and an Intel Discrete Graphics Card to optimize performance and improve battery life. This is essentially a competing tech for AMD SmartShift and NVIDIA Dynamic Boost implementations. Thanks to a South Korean YouTuber, BullsLab, we have information that disabling DTT in drivers helps Arc 350M GPU reach higher performance targets.

He found when disabling DTT in drivers that the gaming performance improved significantly and that the Arc 350M was outputting 30-80 more frames per second. This is no slight improvement and shows that the drivers are still not yet mature. Creating a discrete graphics card is not an easy task, as noted here; however, we hope to see Intel put out more fixes in the coming weeks and hopefully end this strange behavior.Below, you can see the YouTube video with benchmarks.

CPU-Z is one of the most widespread tools for profiling and monitoring, gathering information from the system, and presenting it in a user-readable UI. Today, the application has reached another milestone with the release of the CPU-Z 2.01 version, which brings support for additional upcoming processors from AMD and Intel. One of the software highlights is the inclusion of AMD's forthcoming processor designs, codenamed Rembrandt and Raphael. These processors are what AMD is bringing to the market now and in the near future, meaning that the software ecosystem has to prepare. Additionally, CPU-Z has been updated with preliminary support for Intel's upcoming 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors, alongside Intel ARC 3/5/7 DG2 designs. CPU-Z developers also improved validation process for high-frequency overclocking submissions of over 6 GHz. The full changelog is listed below.

Download CPU-Z 2.01 here.

AMD's first desktop processor with DDR5 memory support, the Ryzen 7000 series "Raphael," based on the "Zen 4" microarchitecture, will come with a design focus on DDR5 memory overclocking capabilities, with the company claiming that the processors will be capable of handling DDR5 memory clock speeds "you maybe thought couldn't be possible," according to Joseph Tao who is a Memory Enabling Manager at AMD.

Tao stated: "Our first DDR5 platform for gaming is our Raphael platform and one of the awesome things about Raphael is that we are really gonna try to make a big splash with overclocking and I'll just kinda leave it there but speeds that you maybe thought couldn't be possible, may be possible with this overclocking spec." We are hearing reports of AMD innovating a new overclocking standard for DDR5 memory, which it calls RAMP (Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile), which it is positioning as a competing standard to Intel's XMP 3.0 spec.

The recently announced Intel Arc A350M mobile graphics card is now shipping with it's recent debut in the South-Korean exclusive Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro laptop. The A350M is the entry-level Arc Alchemist skew from Intel featuring an ACM-G11 GPU with 768 shaders and 4 GB of GDDR6 video memory. This specific Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro model is also equipped with an Intel Core i5-1240P Alder Lake processor and 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory. The Intel video drivers (30.0.101.132) included with the laptop appear to have issues correctly identifying the card however newer versions are available which should address this.

The laptop was tested in various synthetic and gaming scenarios with the Arc A350M (30 W) performing anywhere from 40% to 60% faster than the NVIDIA MX450 (25 W). The Intel A350M reached a maximum boost clock of 2.2 GHz during gaming with the card offering adequate performance in eSports and older titles. The Galaxy Book2 Pro model with 32 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD (NT950XEE-XD72S) is currently available to purchase directly from Samsung Korea for 2,520,000 KRW (2,054 USD). Intel has noted that more laptops featuring Arc Alchemist mobile graphics should be launching worldwide in the coming weeks.

ID-COOLING today announced IS-47S 47 mm height low profile CPU air cooler. At a total height including the fan of 47 mm, this cooler would be a good choice for your A4 cases. Designed with an overall dimension of 100x93x47mm, it has no conflict of the RAM or PCI-E slots. The heatsink is solid built with a pure copper base and 4 heatpipes and massive aluminium fins. The heatsink itself is measured at 35 mm height. Adding a powerful 12 mm PWM fan, this cooler is capable of handling processors with a maximum TDP of 95 W. In terms of mounting kit, two separate backplates are provided in the box for Intel and AMD respectively. The sockets list includes Intel LGA1700/1200/1151/1150/1155/1156 and AMD AM4.

The bundled thermal grease is named FROST X25, which has a thermal conductivity of 10.5 W/m-K.

Lambda, the Deep Learning Company, today in collaboration with Razer, released the new Lambda Tensorbook, the world's most powerful laptop designed for deep learning, available with Linux and Lambda's deep learning software. The sleek laptop, coupled with the Lambda GPU Cloud, gives engineers all the software tools and compute performance they need to create, train, and test deep learning models locally. Since its launch in 2012, Lambda has quickly become the de-facto deep learning infrastructure provider for the world's leading research and engineering teams. Thousands of businesses and organizations use Lambda including: all of the top five tech companies, 97 percent of the top research universities in the U.S. including MIT and Caltech, and the Department of Defense. These teams use Lambda's GPU clusters, servers, workstations, and cloud instances to train neural networks for cancer detection, autonomous aircraft, drug discovery, self-driving cars, and much more.

"Most ML engineers don't have a dedicated GPU laptop, which forces them to use shared resources on a remote machine, slowing down their development cycle." said Stephen Balaban, co-founder and CEO of Lambda. "When you're stuck SSHing into a remote server, you don't have any of your local data or code and even have a hard time demoing your model to colleagues. The Razer x Lambda Tensorbook solves this. It's pre-installed with PyTorch and TensorFlow and lets you quickly train and demo your models: all from a local GUI interface. No more SSH!"

SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. ("SMART"), a division of SGH and a global leader in memory solutions, solid-state drives, and hybrid storage products, announces its new SMART Kestral PCIe Optane Memory Add-in-Card (AIC), which is able to add up to 2 TB of Optane Memory expansion on a PCIe-Gen4-x16 or PCIe-Gen3-x16 interface independent of the motherboard CPU. SMART's Kestral AICs accelerate selected algorithms by offloading software-defined storage functions from the host CPU to the Intel FPGA on the AIC. SMART's Kestral memory AICs are ideal for hyperscale, data center, and other similar environments that run large memory applications, and would benefit from memory acceleration or system acceleration through computational storage.

"With the advancement of new interconnect standards such as CXL and OpenCAPI, SMART's new family of SMART Kestral AICs addresses the industry's need for a variety of new memory module form factors and interfaces for memory expansion and acceleration," stated Mike Rubino, SMART Modular's vice president of engineering. "SMART is able to leverage our many years of experience in developing and productizing controller-based memory solutions to meet today's emerging and continually evolving memory add-on needs of server and storage system customers."

XanxoGaming has finally released its complete set of benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and it's been tested against an Intel Core i9-12900KF. This time both platforms are tested using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and four times 8 GB of 3200 MHz CL14 DDR4 memory. The only difference appears to be the OS drive, motherboard and cooling, although both systems rely on a 360 mm AIO cooler. Both systems were running Windows 10 21H2. The site has a full breakdown of the components used for those interested in the exact details.

The two platforms were tested in 11 different games at 720p and 1080p. To spoil the excitement, it's a dead race between the two CPUs in most games at 1080p, with Intel being ahead by about 1-3 FPS in the games where AMD loses out. However, in the games AMD takes the lead, it's by a good 10 FPS or more, with games like the Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy XV seeing an advantage of 40-50 FPS. AMD often has an advantage when it comes to the one percent low numbers, even when Intel is ahead when it comes to the average FPS, but this doesn't apply to all of the games. It's worth keeping in mind that the Intel CPU should gain extra performance when paired with DDR5 memory in some of these games, but we'll have to wait for more reviews to see by how much. The benchmarks displayed are mostly the games TPU normally tests with, but aren't the entirety of games tested by XanxoGaming.

When NVIDIA announced its Grace CPU Superchip, the company officially showed its efforts of creating an HPC-oriented processor to compete with Intel and AMD. The Grace CPU Superchip combines two Grace CPU modules that use the NVLink-C2C technology to deliver 144 Arm v9 cores and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. Each core is Arm Neoverse N2 Perseus design, configured to achieve the highest throughput and bandwidth. As far as performance is concerned, the only detail NVIDIA provides on its website is the estimated SPECrate 2017_int_base score of over 740. Thanks to the colleges over at Tom's Hardware, we have another performance figure to look at.

NVIDIA has made a slide about comparison with Intel's Ice Lake server processors. One Grace CPU Superchip was compared to two Xeon Platinum 8360Y Ice Lake CPUs configured in a dual-socket server node. The Grace CPU Superchip outperformed the Ice Lake configuration by two times and provided 2.3 times the efficiency in WRF simulation. This HPC application is CPU-bound, allowing the new Grace CPU to show off. This is all thanks to the Arm v9 Neoverse N2 cores pairing efficiently with outstanding performance. NVIDIA made a graph showcasing all HPC applications running on Arm today, with many more to come, which you can see below. Remember that NVIDIA provides this information, so we have to wait for the 2023 launch to see it in action.

Last week Intel finalised the installation of its first EUV tool in Fab 34, which is located in Leixlip, Ireland. That comes just two months after Intel started installing its first chipmaking equipment in the fab. The EUV tool is made by ASML, but was shipped to Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon, USA first, before being sent back to Europe. It's unclear why it was shipped to the US first, but it's possible that Intel tested the equipment there and made sure it was to its spec, before shipping it to its new fab.

This is the first of several machines from ASML that are expected to be installed in Fab 34 and Intel says it's "a key enabler of Intel 4 process technology". The ASML machine required four unspecified Boeing aircrafts to ship, as well as 35 trucks to bring it to Fab 34. The machine, or tool as Intel calls it, has been sent in parts since December last year and has only now been completely assembled. For more details, see the video after the break.

Enthused with its IPC leadership, Intel is possibly planning a return to the high-end desktop (HEDT) market segment, with the "Alder Lake-X" line of processors, according to a Tom's Hardware report citing a curious-looking addition to an AIDA64 beta change-log. The exact nature of "Alder Lake-X" (ADL-X) still remains a mystery—one theory holds that ADL-X could be a consumer variant of the "Sapphire Rapids" microarchitecture, much like how the 10th Gen Core "Cascade Lake-X" was to "Cascade Lake," a server processor microarchitecture. Given that Intel is calling it "Alder Lake-X" and not "Sapphire Rapids-X," it could even be a whole new client-specific silicon. What's the difference between the two? It's all in the cores.

While both "Alder Lake" and "Sapphire Rapids" come with "Golden Cove" performance cores (P-cores), they use variants of it. Alder Lake has the client-specific variant with 1.25 MB L2 cache, a lighter client-relevant ISA, and other optimizations that enable it to run at higher clock speeds. Sapphire Rapids, on the other hand, will use a server-specific variant of "Golden Cove" that's optimized for the Mesh interconnect, has 2 MB of L2 cache, a server/HPC-relevant ISA, and a propensity to run at lower clock speeds, to support the silicon's overall TDP and high CPU core-count.

XanxoGaming has now posted its first game benchmark with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, paired with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition. They put it up against an Intel Core i9-12900KS and Core i9-12900K. However, as you might have deduced from the headline of this news post, so far, they've only run a single game, but are promising to deliver more results shortly. That single game so far is Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 720p and using low settings, which means that this is a far cry from a real world scenario, but it does at least give a first taste of what's to come. For whatever reason, the Core i9 systems are using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and the CPUs are paired with DDR5 memory rated at 4800 MHz CAS 40. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D has been given another pair of 8 GB modules, so it's now using dual rank memory, but still at 3200 MHz and CAS 14.

In their test, the Core i9-12900K averages around 190 FPS, which they place as their baseline. The Core i9-12900KS manages around 200 FPS, or a bit over a five percent improvement. These benchmark numbers are provided by CapFrameX that claims that due to the low resolution used, the GPU doesn't really matter and although it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, it's very close. So what about the Ryzen 7 5800X3D? Well, it gets an average FPS number of 231, which is a bit odd, since the Intel CPU benchmarks are rounded and the AMD ones are not. Regardless, that's over a 20 percent increase over the Core i9-12900K and over 15 percent of the Core i9-12900KS. XanxoGaming is promising more benchmarks and those will be delivered at 1080p at Ultra settings according to the publication. In other words, this is still not what most of us have been waiting for.

Intel in March 2022 kicked off its ambitious campaign to grab a slice of the consumer graphics market, with its Arc "Alchemist" line of discrete GPUs, based on the Xe-HPG graphics architecture. The announcement mentioned an immediate availability of at least the entry-level Arc 3-series GPU models in notebooks generally available. These GPU models include the Arc A350M and Arc A370M. People on social media are beginning to ask Intel why these notebooks are nowhere in sight, and the company responded.

In response to one such query by a user, Intel Support stated that laptops with Arc will be available "by the end of the second quarter of 2022." This would put general availability in June 2022, two months from now. Interestingly, this hasn't stopped laptop manufacturers from raking in pre-orders, with the likes of the Acer Swift X and Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro up for "grabs." You can "purchase" the Swift X, but shipping dates are stated to be as late as May 23 (now pushed to June 13).

ASRock, announces that it is ready to support the latest Intel Core i9-12900KS processor, the newly released CPU not only offers higher base clock to squeeze out more performance, but also supports Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) & Adaptive Boost Technology (ABT) making this processor the absolute king of gaming as well as other content creation usage. As a company that always design ahead, most ASRock Intel 600 series motherboard is shipped with the correct BIOS to support Intel Core i9-12900KS processor, but it is still recommended to update to the latest BIOS in order to experience the best performance.

HotHardware did a video interview with Intel Fellow Tom Petersen, who briefly teased a prototype Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics card with three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, for a total power input capability of 450 W. This does not necessarily mean that a finished product will ship with three connectors; as prototype motherboards and graphics cards are known to feature various redundant connectivity and power-input options for product developers to test capabilities. The three connectors are spaced far apart from each other, so it's likely that the board tests various combinations of power inputs. One of the three could even be a 224 W EPS instead of a 150 W PCIe. The Arc "Alchemist" 7-series desktop board that maxes out the DG2-512 silicon, has been grinding through the rumor mill for quite some time now, including PCB pictures, showing two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

Intel, Micron, Analog Devices, and MITRE Engenuity announced they have an agreement of principles to accelerate semiconductor research, development, and prototyping to build a more robust U.S. semiconductor industry, foster advanced manufacturing in the United States, and protect intellectual property amid increased global competition. This engagement signifies a commitment to collaborate on ensuring the resiliency of the industry. It establishes the Semiconductor Alliance to propose the foundation for a whole-of-nation approach for a more innovation-focused U.S. semiconductor industry and supply chain, one that ensures American innovation truly leads to American growth.

The Semiconductor Alliance, led by MITRE Engenuity, was developed from working groups in 2021, and its principles were published in a white paper on American Innovation for American Growth summarizing the Alliance's whole-of-nation call to action for a fair and objective National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC). The leading U.S. semiconductor manufacturers—Intel, Micron, and Analog Devices—and MITRE Engenuity seek engagement from industry and experts from all facets of the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem, including integrated device manufacturers; fabless chip companies; providers of infrastructure, design, and manufacturing tools; and technology innovators from industry and academia. MITRE Engenuity is built on MITRE's 60+ year history of serving as an independent, objective bridge and convener of government, industry, and academia, bringing together the whole of nation to tackle some of the biggest challenges to our national security.

Ringing in a new era of premium business computing, Dynabook Americas, Inc., formerly Toshiba PC Company, today announced the all-new, ultra-premium 14-inch Portégé X40-K. Benefitting from new hybrid-architecture 12th Gen Intel Core P-Series 28 W processor options, Windows 11 Pro and a skillfully crafted dark blue aluminium chassis that is both stylish and durable, this new laptop boasts greater performance, uncompromising portability and robust security. "With a more dispersed workforce becoming the norm for businesses, IT departments are challenged with procuring computing solutions that offer the best mix of portability, performance, and productivity features. Our premium 14-inch Portégé X40-K was designed specifically for this," said James Robbins, general manager, Dynabook Americas, Inc. "This new laptop checks all the right boxes for customers. It's lightweight, powerful, secure, and loaded with features. Furthermore, it is very stylish, which is something modern buyers demand, and comes reinforced with a durable aluminium chassis and a warranty that ensures these laptops continue fostering years of worry-free productivity."

"With a more dispersed workforce becoming the norm for businesses, IT departments are challenged with procuring computing solutions that offer the best mix of portability, performance, and productivity features. Our premium 14-inch Portégé X40-K was designed specifically for this," said James Robbins, general manager, Dynabook Americas, Inc. "This new laptop checks all the right boxes for customers. It's lightweight, powerful, secure, and loaded with features. Furthermore, it is very stylish, which is something modern buyers demand, and comes reinforced with a durable aluminium chassis and a warranty that ensures these laptops continue fostering years of worry-free productivity."

Noctua today presented the all-new NH-D12L low-height dual tower CPU cooler and the corresponding NF-A12x25r round-frame 120 mm fan. At a height of only 145 mm (13 mm lower than Noctua's regular 120 mm models), it fits many 4U enclosures as well as narrower tower cases that have been previously limited to solutions with 92 mm fans. At the same time, its five heatpipe dual-tower design and state-of-the-art NF-A12x25r 120 mm fan allow it to achieve a level of efficiency that surpasses many full-height 120 mm models.

"So far, all our 120 mm class coolers were 158 mm high, but as of recent, more and more PC cases only support up to 150 or even 145 mm - this is where the NH-D12L steps in", explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "Simply lowering one of our existing models wasn't an option because a standard square 120 mm fan would cause lots of issues with motherboard heatsinks or shrouds. That's why we came up with this novel dual tower design and a round-frame version of the NF-A12x25 fan that can be installed at a very low position between the two towers - a winning combination that provides impressive results for this height class."