Noctua

[pat]

Well I'm sold on the Noctua brand. I've now replaced all my fans in both systems with those cute pink fans and I bought the NH-U12P heatsink for my 6000+.  Those fans are great, they move so much air and are so quiet. Perhaps not silent at full speed, but I see no need to use the included low or ultra low noise adapters.  What I hear is air moving more than fan noise and really they are hardly louder than background noise.

The heatsink is all aluminum and rather large, fits in my case fine with an inch or so clearance for the door to close. With the fan installed the first memory slot is blocked, but the fan is no big deal to remove to get to the slot and clearance over the slot with a module installed is fine. You do have to pull the motherboard to install the heatsink as one needs to remove the standard back plate of the cpu retention bracket and use the one that comes with the heatsink.   Noctua supplies parts for either AM2, AM2+ or LGA775 systems. They also throw in a generous supply of their NT-H1 thermal compound, indeed it seems like a full retail package. The directions are some of the best I've seen and installation is straight forward.  I'd say it took me about an hour to pull my mainboard, clean everything, install the heatsink and put it all back together again and that's taking time out for a coffee. Caffeine seems to be required for this type of thing. The heatsink can be mounted either pointing up toward the power supply or back toward the rear fan, that is what I did.

OK, now for a few numbers. Idle temps seem to hover between 28 and 32 degrees C. and I had a really hard time getting my system to crack 40 C. I had to start the cpu burn-in utility and the video card stability test utility  and once I had core one pegged out at 100% and core two at 80% I finally got it to go over 40 C after about 10 minutes, after 15 minutes I was up to 42C and turned off the utilities. Temps went right back down to the low 30s almost immediately.

Here's the link to the site,   Noctua

I bought my stuff here: Quiet PC USA they were fine to deal with, one of my fans was out of stock and they called to see if it was ok to hold my order for a day and ship it all at once. I'd buy from them again.

I've a couple of pictures: