The Noctua NH-U9B

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This is the side of the NH-U9B. Starting at the bottom you can see that Noctua even goes as far as to ship the cooler with a protective plastic cover to keep the base free of damage. Moving up is the nickel plated, copper base with the four copper, nickel plated heat-pipes soldered inside of it. The heat is then transferred to the 37 aluminum fins. Lastly, you can see the heat-pipes do protrude from the top of this cooler, like the others in the Noctua line-up.

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The top of the NH-U9B has a lot of features to explain. The left side and right side have small curved grooves to accept the wire fan mounts and flank and indent to allow a screwdriver to pass to the bottom. In the middle is Noctua's name and owl logo stamped into the fin. Above and below, again, are holes to ease in mounting this cooler if your install requires it. The fins themselves are also shaped with the outermost little tab of the fins being designed to snugly hold the fan into place.

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With this straight on angle you can see how Noctua has also added the little edge notches to these thick fins to aid in better airflow. With the design and shaping done, this will reduce voids inside the cooler and in principle, make this a more efficient cooler than if they had left the edges stamped flat.

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The base of the NH-U9B is flat, but far from mirror-like in finish. As you can see, there are defined milling marks left on the base, but depending on your train of thought some people take the side of small grooves being better at transferring heat than they do lapped or mirror finish bases.

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The 92mm, 64.3m³/h fan included is set on this angle to show a few "tricks" that Noctua uses to decrease the overall noise level and efficiency of their fans. Notice each blade has two notches cut from the trailing edge and that the end has a small amount removed to allow a bit of flow to sneak by the end, which also aides in noise reduction.

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With the fan mounted to the cooler, you can see that the fan supplied does a great job of covering most of the fin area. A bit more noticeable from this angle is the end trimming of the blade I was explaining with the previous image.

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A final look at the fully assembled NH-U9B, as it awaits the hardware to be able to mount it for testing.