they finally did it 10 years ago i complained to noctua that
their products were great but simply too ugly to use for my own personal projects
well back in 2015 we partnered with them to launch their first all black consumer
fans which was a big step in the right direction and now
four years later we're back at it with something even bigger
not this this is ugly meat the ltt editions of noctua's first ever
lineup of all black coolers the first 5
000 units of each the chromax black nhd15 and nhu 12s will have some special
extras included and will help support us here at ltt
so in today's video we're going to give you guys a close look at them and
also make sure that they match both the excellent thermal performance and
low sound levels that we have come to expect from noctua's ugly products
speaking of things you should have come to expect this segway to our sponsor glassware
with glasswire you can instantly see your current and past network activity
detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or android device use
offer code linus to get 25 off at the link below
now it's no secret that i am a huge knock to a fan boy
sorry puns aside any fandom that i have
of any company is going to be out of respect not because there's like an
emotional attachment and there's a reason that i hold noctua in such high
regard their secu firm 2 mounting system
which by the way like the fan included and the heatsink
itself is now all black down to every
single mounting plate and screw is still by far my favorite solution
when it comes to keeping a large heavy tower cooler firmly planted on a cpu and
as we showed in our recent video their performance is on par or better than aio
water coolers in the same price bracket or in some cases even higher ones and
their ugly fans are the standard that other fans are measured to from a
performance perspective anyway the only reason that their products have
been relegated to test bench duty for me is that
i confess i like a little bit of flash with my
dash and until now they haven't had
anything in their cpu cooler lineup that's even
close enough to the visual appeal of other solutions to justify the couple
degrees of better performance or few decibels of lower acoustics
at least until now
let's open it up
it looks so good there's nothing on it
that isn't black wires sleeving heat shrink connectors
screws even the retainers here are black which
has gotta kinda make you wonder if
this was such an obvious problem
and such an easy solution why didn't they hurry up and do this
before well because as it turns out it's actually
not an especially easy solution now there are lots of different ways to
attach heat pipes to a cpu cooler's base and the heat pipes are what are
responsible for quickly moving the heat away from your processor to the cooling
fins which are responsible for dissipating the heat to the surrounding
air but no way of attaching them is as reliant
or performant as soldering them
now soldering heat pipes is already a tricky matter because
think about it for a second these are sealed tubes with fluid inside that are
designed to transfer heat away from where it's being applied so doing it
safely without them exploding isn't as simple as whipping out a torch and just
going for it so then wait
you want to put a coating on these things adding yet another layer of
complexity for what just for looks are
you crazy that's a very knock to a way of thinking
but i and the thousands of other enthusiasts
who sadly do care about these things
finally got through to them so much of the r d for this product went into
finding a way to manufacture the chromax black lineup with the same performance
and consistency as the regular versions
that don't have to deal with that added layer of complexity here and
noctua claims that they did it so to
validate their claims we have both the big boy nhd15 dual tower cooler and for
the more space conscious of you we also have the nhu 12s with a single 120
millimeter fan and a heck and ton of clearance for your pci slots and your
ram there's an extra little note in the box a little letter from ltt as well as
some ltt stickers for the hubs of your fans or you can throw them on your case
if you want and these sexy orange rubber
anti-vibration pads of course the original black ones are also included in
the box there's also an nhd9i but there's no ltt edition of that one
so that was some movie magic right there we have replaced the stock black pads with
the orange ones so you can see what they're going to look like in their ltt
edition goodness now let's head over to the workshop and
make sure they're actually worth buying compared to the originals so step one of
putting these things through their paces is building up a test bench that is
really going to challenge them so this right here is intel's furnace of a cpu
the extreme edition 9980xe18 core and we're going to be
using ida 64's stress test to compare both the
ognhd15 and u12s
to their new all black counterparts
so for the sake of simplicity we actually tested our
products as they came in the box so that
is with only one fan installed and no low noise adapters
this way we can also have a look at how much benefit there is to having two
cooling towers versus just a single one
all right so now it's time for the results guys first up thermals each of our coolers
was allowed to run for 10 minutes to hit thermal equilibrium and we repeated the
tests three times remounting the coolers between each run
so between the two u12 s's our black cooler actually came out on top with an
average temperature 1.7 degrees cooler than the raw version with the nhd15s
however we saw the opposite with the raw cooler beating out the black version by
about 1.3 degrees now here's the thing guys
considering the 20 variability in rpm from one knock to a
fan to the next that's their manufacturing tolerance and the variance
that we saw from run to run particularly on our nhd15s we think it's safe to say
at this point that buying black versus raw is not going to yield a performance
difference one way or the other but that doesn't answer the question of
how they compare acoustically the problem is we have no way of testing
that here i mean even somewhere like this empty workshop has you know this
transformer you hear that buzzing that is so much
louder than these coolers that we would have no way of getting an accurate
measurement of them fortunately we've got friends in high places and our
buddies over at simon fraser university graciously gave us access to their world
class satomo antenna testing chamber this chamber is normally used to map the
transmission patterns of antenna designs for all types of devices from tiny iot
things all the way up to satellites and it's actually a happy little accident
that it happens to work so well for acoustic testing as it's designed to
prevent radio waves from reflecting around the room as well as preventing
any from entering from the outside it's actually one big faraday cage so we're
back and the data is really interesting
so once again there is a difference between our silver and our black
heatsinks but this time the superior performance
actually goes completely the other way around which appears to validate our
previous theory that the temperature differences that we observed yesterday
pretty much came down to the fans spinning a little slower or a little
faster depending on the manufacturing tolerances
so then bottom line they're as good as they're
supposed to be so how do you get one great question
the first couple batches of units out of noctua's manufacturing facilities are
all going to be ltt edition with the extra stickers the orange mounting pads
and all that good stuff and these will exclusively be available on noctua's
official amazon stores while supplies last
after october 22nd 2019 knoxville will begin shipping regular ones that are
just all black and those may end up being mixed in with the ltt edition ones
at the amazon warehouse after that time you'll need to check noctua's ebay store
where they're going to try and keep a few of these around even after that date
for anyone who's a little late to the game
speaking of late to the game i'm never late to the segway game
make your walls look awesome with our sponsor for today's video display
they're posters made out of metal they're three millimeters thick they've got bent edges so that you don't
accidentally slice open your fingers and they've got a matte finish that looks
absolutely fantastic the best thing about disc plate though is the mounting
system they use a magnetic mounting system that makes it easy to swap out
the art in your place make small adjustments if something you know could
stand to be shifted to the left or adjust it a bit and this is really cool
they've got over 15 000 artists who have contributed to over a quarter million
different designs for each disc plate sold they will plant 10 trees they offer
hassle-free returns they're pre-gift wrapped and they've actually partnered
with cyberpunk 2077 to do a collection of cyberpunk themed artwork so go check
it out and use code ltt to save 15 at
the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys i hope you're
as excited about the ltt edition coolers as we are if you're looking for another
video to watch maybe check out the one where we actually compared the raw
versions against water coolers with some pretty surprising results