Testing

For comparison purposes, the cooling performance of the Noctua NH-C12P CPU cooler was put up against the stock Intel cooler for an Intel i7 CPU. For thermal testing the system was removed from the Lian Li case so that the tight layout of this specific setup would not influence the thermal results. The cooler was tested in still air on an open testbed.

The idle and load temperatures were monitored using the HWMonitor 1.1.4 software. The idle condition was established by powering the system without running any other applications for a period of at least 30 minutes, and the load condition was established by also running OCCT 3.1.0 for a period of 60 minutes.

I was not expecting much competition from the stock Intel cooler. I have always felt they do the bare minimal cooling, and would be especially worried about heat if it was installed in a SFF case. As you can see from the chart below, the Noctua cooler wins hands down in the CPU thermal test. Even with the U.L.N.A. adapter installed it is a solid 8 degrees lower when idle, although when there is a full load it is only 3 degrees cooler.



The core temperature readings were done from the highest reading out of the four cores. Again the NHC12P comes out on top, with the closest race being the U.L.N.A. readings, 11 degrees cooler at idle and 7 degrees at load.



To do some testing on the NF-S12B FLX fan I removed the fan that came with the cooler and attached the FLX. I ran all of the same tests as above, but only included the new results in the chart below.



I did run into an issue with the load testing with the U.L.N.A. adapter installed. About 10 minutes into the test, OCCT stopped due to the CPU being too hot; all other tests completed as normal. The temperatures were pretty close to the bundled fan despite the 2 degree difference.