for years Noctua has sat basically unchallenged as the king of air coolers
but as they say cost noise and performance
pick two their products have never been well
budget-friendly at least until now
meet Noctua's first foray into a value
line of CPU coolers it's a trimmed down
version of the excellent nhu 12s called the nhu 12s redux
but do the cost savings correspond to a big drop in performance
historically Noctua has never let us down but just to be sure
we did the math just like ridge wallet did the math on a
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if someone were to ask me what's the best bang for the buck CPU cooler i
would say well your stock cooler because literally anything over zero is going to
be infinite bang for the buck if you ask for best in class however the
nhu 12s is a standout
and not because i'm some kind of fanboy it's just time and time again it's
proven to be reliable quiet and performant
there are cheaper options like the ever popular hyper 212 series but if you want
the full package this is where it's at and the new redux version
definitely makes some compromises giving you just what you need and not a lick
more think you might upgrade your CPU down the line
be ready to shell out for a tube of thermal paste because the pre-applied
nth-1 on the redux is a one-shot deal extra fan clips gone why splitter and
low noise adapters they're gone too everything extraneous has gotten the axe
and removing parts from the box isn't all they've done in fact the cooler
itself is completely different one of the five heat pipes has been dropped out
right and the soldering step that bonds those pipes to both the thin stack and
to the copper cold plate has been issued to keep costs under control
this absolutely will reduce the thermal transfer capacity i mean think about it
logically dropping 20 of your heat pipes can't be good for performance
and neither can downgrading your fan
although that one might not end up being a huge
problem when the first redux fans came out my biggest complaint was that while
they saved on cost and looked great in a gray on gray color scheme there was no
pressure optimized 120 millimeter version
fortunately that's been rectified with the new nfp12 redux the p is for
pressure and it runs it up to 1700 RPM
so that extra 200 rip hims should help make
up some ground in terms of performance but will almost definitely come at the
cost of more noise and here's why
to hit this lower price point not to cut some corners primarily by using their
older sso bearing design instead of the current sso2
sso stands for self-stabilizing oil pressure bearing which essentially means
that the fan center shaft rotates in pressurized oil with that pressure being
generated by the rotation of the fan itself so fundamentally it's an oil
supported sleeve bearing with some bonus magnetic axial support
sso2 is an evolution that mostly improves the startup characteristics of
the fan which happens to be where most of the wear occurs because the oil
hasn't had time to pressurize yet once they're up and running though the
differences should be minimal also absent is the inner surface micro
structure in the frame although the trailing edges of the blades do get
their vortex control notches which is great because while they don't actually
reduce the amount of noise the fan makes they shift the pitch someone that isn't
as annoying to the year thankfully the install experience of the redux is
exactly what i've come to expect from Noctua secufirm still makes everything
else feel cheap and confusing by comparison and another bonus that you
might not actually know about is that if you want to upgrade your current system
to the latest and greatest in the future you can
you'll probably have to cover shipping costs but Noctua will send out new
mounting hardware free of charge if your old knock to a cooler won't fit your new
build which by the way is going to be a
lot of their customers with both Intel and AMD set to change sockets for the
next generation but which one should you buy
to find out we pitted a chromax black u12s against one of the new redux units
over a 20 minute blender render with a steady 150 watts of load generated by a
core i7 8700k and
surprisingly both of them performed essentially the same with our results
falling into our margin of error of one to two degrees
when we added a second fan to each cooler the temps dropped two to three
degrees as we expected because we're
good boys and red knocked to his literature ahead of time
as a wee aside by the way the anti-vibration bumpers in the kit are
extra thick for some reason this spaces the fan off of the fins by about five
millimeters and we don't know exactly why at first we thought it could be
something to increase flow through the cooler but our performance numbers
didn't give us any conclusive answer so i suspect that it's an acoustic choice
speaking of acoustics that is where the meat of this
comparison lies we tested every possible permutation of fans single and dual as
well as measuring from both the intake and exhaust sides and the results at
idle show both coolers performing the same within .1 decibels
wow Noctua's quiet reputation holds up
perfectly as expected however when the going gets tough the redux's
fan's higher speed makes its presence known with a 5 decibel increase in
output now if you watched our previous chromax black video
check that out if you haven't by the way we explained that decibels are a
logarithmic value not a linear one which means that five decibels equates to
about a forty percent increase in perceived volume so it is definitely
noticeable but in low to moderate workloads you
probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference perhaps you could use the
savings to invest in a gaming headset with excellent noise isolation or if you
already have one of those some sweet tech gear from lttstore.com where does
that leave us then for noise a little worse that's definitely the low
light of this product but it only shows up when you're really
pushing things to the limit and with nearly a 30 savings in cost for almost
the same performance it is pretty easy to recommend that is
as long as you're not overvolting your CPU so in conclusion we don't review
coolers very often these days but we felt that this one was both important
and interesting enough to get the full treatment and i'm glad we did because
it's going to make a lot of bang for the buck system builders extremely happy
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forward slash Linus well that's it for this look at Noctua's
first budget conscious cooler uh finally there's a cheap option to get their
excellent hardware into your system if you guys enjoyed this video and you're looking for something else to watch
let's go to the polar opposite end of the spectrum where we did a build guide
in a case that has an integrated phase change cooler
so here's your budget that's your not so budget
but a sub-zero sub-zero wins