Construction and design

Construction

If we had to define the type of cooler the NH-L12 is, then we would say it is a down-draft, low profile cooler. Down-draft coolers come with the advantage that the air used to cool the CPU also keeps the motherboards power design and partly the memory cool at the same time. Noctua manufacturs their NH-L12 from aluminium and copper. You can find a nickel plated copper base plate which leads the dissipation power to four - also nickel plated - heatpipes which all have a diameter of six millimeters. Altogether there are 39 fins soldered to the heatpipes for perfect heat transfer.

Design

We couldn't find any manufacturing mistakes on our sample, and it seems that it has been very well made which means that manufacturing is on an excellent level. The heatpipes do have almost indentical bending radius, which results in less vortex. Furhtermore this cooler comes with a total of 39 fins. You find holes where you have to reach to the screws for the installation plate. Otherwise the fins are perfectly even. Noctua soldered the fins to the heatpipes ensuring an optimized heat transfer from the heatpipes to the fins.