Noctua NH-L9i Mini-ITX CPU Heat Sink Review

[palladin9479]

If you are serious about mITX / SFF cooling look no further than a Cyrorig C1. They are outstanding in terms of packaging, package contents, performance, warranty, and acoustics. My overclocked i5 4690k is cooler (35C @ 800RPM) at 4.2 GHz than this Noctua.

This Noctua is a joke, which is not something I say lightly of their products. Either the design is just bad or you have a bad sample. Most reviews I have seen on this unit come out with the unit performing very poorly.

Maybe if your using a big desktop that just happened to mount a mITX board with full PCIe clearance, but that cooler is WAY to big vertically to fix inside a SFF case.

This is what a SFF case looks like, not some monstrosity that fits full sized HDD's, 5.25" mounts or water cooling kits.

 

[zodiacfml]

This won't work even if made from copper.......one still needs plenty of surface area and Noctua knows it.

 

[Vlad Rose]

I'm kinda curious as to how this compares to the Zalman cooler designed for these types of systems.

 

[dwatterworth]

If you are talking about the Zalman CNPS 9800 series, those coolers are awesome. I have several SFF workstation builds that use those on mildly overclocked i5 chips. Both the extreme and quiet editions are the most quiet moving part in the system.

 

[rwpritchett]

I would like to have seen a head-to-head comparison with low profile coolers that are similar in size as the NH-L9i. Phanteks PH-TC90LS, Gelid Slim Silence i-Plus, and Zalman CNPS2X come to mind. Anything much taller than standard RAM height defeats the purpose of a true low profile cooler.

The Gamer Storm and AXP heatsinks are much larger than the Noctua (and the stock Intel)... not very useful for comparison. If one is looking at the NH-L9i in the first place, obviously there are some heatsink clearance concerns in the build.

 

[Myrkvidr]

Afaik at least the Phanteks PH-TC90LS might show up here in a couple of days

 

[rwpritchett]

I see you've also posted a review of the Scythe Kozuti. Interesting... what else are you cooking up?

 

[csH82]

Bought one...It was pretty nice until the fan started making an awful racket. Replaced the fan with a sawtooth but kept the heatsink.

I will say this, it was the nicest packaging I'd ever seen with a CPU cooler.

 

[c2roth]

If you are serious about mITX / SFF cooling look no further than a Cyrorig C1. They are outstanding in terms of packaging, package contents, performance, warranty, and acoustics. My overclocked i5 4690k is cooler (35C @ 800RPM) at 4.2 GHz than this Noctua.

This Noctua is a joke, which is not something I say lightly of their products. Either the design is just bad or you have a bad sample. Most reviews I have seen on this unit come out with the unit performing very poorly.

Maybe if your using a big desktop that just happened to mount a mITX board with full PCIe clearance, but that cooler is WAY to big vertically to fix inside a SFF case.

This is what a SFF case looks like, not some monstrosity that fits full sized HDD's, 5.25" mounts or water cooling kits.

I'm using a Silverstone RVZ01, so not some big desktop case. It certainly isn't as small as the case you linked but the C1 is a tight fit in my case, and even then it won't fit for some folks depending on where their socket is. mITX boards don't all have their CPU sockets in the same places.

 

[Vlad Rose]

If you are serious about mITX / SFF cooling look no further than a Cyrorig C1. They are outstanding in terms of packaging, package contents, performance, warranty, and acoustics. My overclocked i5 4690k is cooler (35C @ 800RPM) at 4.2 GHz than this Noctua.

This Noctua is a joke, which is not something I say lightly of their products. Either the design is just bad or you have a bad sample. Most reviews I have seen on this unit come out with the unit performing very poorly.

Maybe if your using a big desktop that just happened to mount a mITX board with full PCIe clearance, but that cooler is WAY to big vertically to fix inside a SFF case.

This is what a SFF case looks like, not some monstrosity that fits full sized HDD's, 5.25" mounts or water cooling kits.

SSF cases can indeed run water cooling as I'm running a Raven RVZ01 with water cooling inside it without a problem:
https://pcpartpicker.com/b/DFzypg . I also have 5.25" hard drive in it, so both myths that SSFs can use those is untrue.

 

[omg_yeti]

These results were quite surprising to me. I am using an i5-4590S inside my Hadron Air, and was not happy with the load temps I was seeing while gaming. ~63C in a room that at the time I swapped parts was roughly 26C usually. After installing one of these(with Arctic MX-4, and I didn't use any of the inline resistors to limit the max RPM) I have not seen above 58C on HWMonitor since. I know MX-4 will help a little versus the stock TIM, but I can't fathom it accounting for that much difference.