Introduction

From the Noctua website:

Designed in Austria, Noctua's premium cooling components are internationally renowned for their superb quietness, exceptional performance and thoroughgoing quality. Having received more than 1000 awards and recommendations from leading hardware websites and magazines, Noctua's fans and heatsinks are chosen by more than a hundred thousand satisfied customers around the globe.

Noctua has forged a reputation that sticks out in the minds of PC enthusiasts. The quality of their coolers and the support they offer is second to none. What most will remember, however, is the color scheme, with the customary beige color and those dark brown highlights making sure everyone recognizes that Noctua fan inside your case. That said, the company's popularity is only growing as the support, quality, and exceptional performance are proven again and again with each cooler they release.

The NH-D14, for example, may be rather old now, but this bastion of engineering brilliance still stands as one of today's best-performing CPU coolers. Noctua is not locked into a single design like many other manufacturers. The NH-C14 is an example of this with its down-draft architecture. They don't simply release massive heatsinks either. The NH-L12 is a perfect fit for mini-ITX systems the larger NH-D14 would have serious trouble fitting into. Noctua really has managed to offer quality cooling products to just about every niche of the PC community.

Noctua's reputation is now once again being put to the test as I take a look at their NH-U12S, and with Noctua's many great CPU-cooling designs, my expectations are high. Will the noise levels be as low as previous designs or better? Will it top the charts in performance? It is time to put this cooler to the test to see what it has to offer.