NoctuaNH-U9S, Premium CPU Cooler with NF-A9 92mm Fan (Brown)

I am STUNNED with how silent this fan is on top of it's performance! Played POE2 for a few solid hours, typically with my intel stock cooler my temp would be about 145(f) while that cooler made SO MUCH noise. This one hardly made a sound and kept my temps around 120(f) with a few hotter spikes depending on game play.Install was a bit of a pain - I did have to take everything apart and unscrew my motherboard from my case to get the backplate on, which was less than fun. However, it is well worth it. Also make sure you're really following instructions based on your chip set because the screws have triangles that lock them into the baseplate a certain way depending on your chip.So yes, a tiny bit of a pain to install it, but nothing you can't figure out if you're an "I played with LEGOs growing up" kid and can follow picture instructions. If you've got a better case than mine (I do have a "back of CPU cut out panel on my case but it was offset JUST enough that I couldnt' get the screws in) you might not have to take your motherboard out. If you don't have to, then honestly, installing would be 10 times easier.If you're not comfortable puttering around inside your rig to install this, be aware that you'll need to outsource help. It's not a quick snap-into-place piece, but it truly isn't difficulty just tight space that makes it a pain

I mistakenly reported a missing Backplate required for installation, which was located behind a small cardboard noticed when repacking for return. My error.The cpu cooler was installed on an LGA 1200 socket in a Dell XPS 8940 with an intel I7 11700k processor.Note: the motherboard was removed to install the mounting Backplane and 4 standoffs on the motherboard sheet metal plane were popped off to eliminate motherboard conflict with the new Noctua NH-U9S mount.Well worth the time and effort in my opinion.

Very quiet. My installer said I bought the right one. Highly recommended.

I recently did a "hand-me-down" "upgrade" on my Media center PC putting in a 9th gen I5 and a GTX750. Previously it was cooled with a AIO but you could hear the pump noise. I put it together at first using a stock intel cooler. Which was loud. As it doesn't need a lot of graphics power it has a old GTX750 in it. It is well below the minimum specs of flight simulator 2020 but I loaded it as a test. Using the stock cooler the CPU was hitting 100c and it would never load. With this cooler it stayed around 50c and actually loaded and played it fully stable for a few hours (some just letting it run on autopilot) Honestly impressed in the performance for such a small quite cooler. With 2 120mm Noctua case fans and everything in the quietest fan profiles it is nearly silent under nominal loads which was my goal. Using zcpu load test the temps stayed low.

Before I start the review, I want to list the components I have installed in my computer:Case: Silverstone GD08Motherboard: Gigabyte GA X99 Ultra GamingCPU: Intel Core i7 5820K @3.3GHzRAM: 16GB (4x4) Corsair Vengeance LPXGPU: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1070Boot SSD: Samsung 960 EVO 250GBGaming SSD: Mushkin Reactor 1TBHDD: 3x WD Red 4TBBluray Drive: Asus BW-16D1HTBluray Drive: LG WH16NS40For the last few years, I've had a large case (Fractal Define XL R2) sitting on our TV stand. It was an eyesore to have sitting out under the TV (beautiful case, but ugly in the living room), but it was incredibly spacious with great cable management, and housed all of my components with no issues.In that case, I was using an ARCTIC Liquid Freezer 240 to keep my CPU cool. The computer is a work horse (gaming, video encoding, Plex server, etc.), so having a quality CPU cooler is a must.I was finally able to find a quality case that would fit all of my components while fitting in to the TV stand, and also blending in (SilverStone GD08B). However, the smaller case meant that I would no longer be able to use a 240mm cooler for my CPU. It's HTPC form factor also limited my choices for a new cooler because of its height limitations.I did a great deal of research on low height coolers, and finally settled on the NH-U9S. I knew I wasn't going to get the same cooling performance I got with my AIO, and I knew the air flow in the new case was not going to be great with the number of drives in place. I was maxing out at about 62°C under full load with my old setup.Installation of the heatsink was incredibly easy; I was done in less than five minutes. Once I got everything installed in the new case and fired it up, I immediately saw an increase in idle temps. Where I was getting 28°C-35°C before, I was now seeing 39°C at the low end, but averaging in the low 40s at idle. Not great, but expected. Once I started encoding my first video, I saw temps shoot up to the high 70s, and reaching into the low 80s at some points, which was less than ideal. But, I knew the tradeoffs with the new setup, and it was still in the safe range, so I was ready to deal with it.I decided to try and manually adjust the fan speeds and curves to try to improve the cooling a bit, so I went into my bios and looked at the fan setup. For some reason, it was reporting my CPU fan at 0RPM, no matter how I adjusted it. So I cracked the case open, expecting that I did something stupid like I forgot to plug in the header, and found out that one of my SATA cables was stopping the fan (anyone who has used the GD08 with both optical drive bays and SSDs installed knows that cable management is tough). So i pushed it back, and the fan started spinning again.I booted back into Windows to see if that made a difference. Sure enough, I was now seeing idle temps down in the mid 30s (I set up the fan curves to run at 20% even at idle). Major difference. I saw even more improvements under load. I've been encoding for the last 4 and half hours (95-100% load the whole time), and the CPU has been sitting in the mid 60s for the most part, with only one core hitting 70°C at max (but averaging around 68°C). So in other words, without a fan on this heatsink, my CPU was kept under or at 80°C under full load, and now I'm seeing just a few degrees more than I was with my old AIO. I may even be able to (very moderately) overclock my CPU even in the new case.I am incredibly happy with how well this cooler is working out, considering the space limitations I was working with and the limited airflow inside the case due to how much I've crammed in there. I would definitely recommend this cooler for anyone looking for a low height or small form factor cooler.

Cooler is a little tougher than most to install, at least in my personal experience. However, the instruction sheet that comes with it is very good at showing how the parts are supposed to be installed. Took a little longer than my last build, but looks (and sounds) great.