Lepa LV12 Black Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 10.06.15Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| Overall, the LEPA LV12 is a decent cooler with an attracitve price point. While the LEPA LV12 is an affordable model aimed at mid-range market, it comes with impressive manufacturing quality as well as a good performance, comparing to same price-level offerings from competing products. The overall performance could still be much better. While some coolers might be cheaper, they are also much cheaper in terms of design, simplicity and build quality. What we really loved was the black matte coating, as it makes this cooler stand out from the crowd of similar products and looks really special. We are quite sure that there are a bunch of modders out there waiting exactly for such a CPU cooler. The overall performance is not bad for the price, and noise levels are decent. The cooler comes bundled with a 120mm PWM fan and possibility to select three different rotation speed profiles. The fan is not noisy at 7V and 12V and neither when set to work in PWM mode. We also liked the compatibility with a vast variety of sockets. |
- Socket compatibility
- Build quality
- PWM - Design |
- Cooling capacity | |
| Installation | + | - | |
| Mounting the LEPA LV12 is quite simple as well as practical and you also get a backplate, which means that cooler mounting is quite a breeze. Basically, the installation is self-explanatory and really isn't hard to do. When it comes to thermal compound, you get a of Dow Corning thermal paste which is even enough for one more mounting. |
- Basic mounting easy and practical
Thermna Paste Tube - Compatible to AMD sockets |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| The cooling performance of the LEPA LV12 is not very good for its size and we know that we are not talking about a big, high-end, tower-design CPU cooler. The overall perfomance is not at the level that we would like it to be since taking a closer look at our test results reveals that at 7V and 12V, it scores very close to end of our chart in our comparison table. When the PWM mode is enabled, it shares the place with the last five CPU coolers in the chart, which is basically not a good score. While taking the price into a consideration, LEPA did a decent job in terms of cooling performance with the LV12, where we have to underline, that performance is rather convincing for the price. | - Cooling capacity | ||
| Noise Levels | + | - | |
| The overall noise levels are not bad but the LEPA LV12 was also not the most silent cooler we tested in our lab. The fan features three different rotation profiles and closer look at the PWM mode reveals that it stays in middle of our chart. When checking the 7V and 12V modes, it is quite surprising that the LV12 managed to get in the top five in our chart. It seems that LEPA has been working hard on tuning the bearings lately. If you are wondering about the overclocking capabilites, bear in mind that we did not have any issues running our test CPU at 4.4 GHz while the fan was set in 7V mode. | - Silent 7V and 12V | ||
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| Should you be looking for a cooler with nice looks, good manufacturing quality and attractive price tag, then the LV12 from LEPA is definitely a safe bet. When it comes to pricing, we believe that the 30 Euro price is definitely fair in this case. | - Price - Mini-ITX Gaming | ||
| Rating | |||
| We gave the LV12 from Lepa 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications |
| Page 2 - Photo Gallery |
| Page 3 - Installation & Test Setup |
| Page 4 - Absolute Performance |
| Page 5 - PWM Performance |
| Page 6 - Conclusion |
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