Specifications, Availability and PricingThe Noctua NH-U12P is a diverse heatsink that can be mounted horizontally or vertically on all current CPU sockets. Support for Intel’s Xeon is now available as is support for AMD’s Socket F. The heatsink comes with one 120mm fan that is very quiet and is of the same quality as the heatsink. The NH-U12P can also hold a second 120mm fan as an option. For our testing today we will test the cooler in single and dual configurations.
As you will soon see in the product images section the NH-U12P is a large heatsink capable of dissipating high TDP processors to water cooling temperatures. This makes it ideal for today’s quad-core processors from Intel and AMD.
Noctua is an Austrian company, not a place you think of for leading the charge in PC cooling. The downside of that is product availability and Noctua’s limited but growing number of distributers. A scan of Pricegrabber in the US doesn’t show any NH-U12P heatsinks, rather just one listing for the NC-U6 chipset cooler at Xoxide.com. After a quick scan of that e-tail shop I found that they did in fact have the NH-U12P in stock for $64.99, not exactly a low cost cooling solution but we will reserve the right to tackle price vs. performance after we see how the NH-U12P performs.
