Review on 🖥️ Noctua NH-U12S Chromax.Black CPU Cooler - 120mm Single-Tower Cooler in Black by Sondra Sikes

I want to congratulate Noctua on improving the aesthetics of their coolers. With its matte black finish and black fan design, it is sure to become one of the most popular air coolers. And with Noctua's credibility in the air cooler market, buyers can rest assured of its cooling potential. However, my PC consists of an Asus ROG XI Gene with an Intel i9-9900k processor. And I wanted to connect this Noctua NH-U12S as it takes up less space compared to the NH-D15. Looking back, I should have picked it for the 9900k. Noctua's CPU compatibility website for this cooler mentions that it supports "medium headroom for turbo/overclocking". That's technically correct, but I have to say that this gets pretty subjective. For Asus ROG XI Gene with Load Optimized Defaults option selected; and no other settings are changed. "Multi-Core Enhancements" will be enabled automatically. And with this setting, Vcore applied with this BIOS setting will cause the CPU to peak in the range of 90-100 degrees Celsius (around 25 degrees Celsius) on this cooler with the "Standard Fan Profile" setting . too high. But I entered this temperature in the Asus BIOS settings in the "Overvoltage" setting. And I must repeat that the Noctua NH-U12S dissipates heat very well and has a barely audible fan (even at a maximum speed of 1500 rpm). This is impressive in many ways; and serves as a very good cooler for other supported processors (except OC 9900k). Temperatures are immediately acceptable with MCE disabled or after using the Asus 5-Way Optimization, ranging between 80 and mid-90 degrees Celsius. Disabling MCE triggers severe CPU temperature/frequency limits that aggressively impact CPU performance. With the 5-way optimization, the Asus Vcore "adjusts itself" to an "acceptable" temperature limit; and after that I got "All cores" turbo boost at 4.8GHz at 1.14. I'm currently using the default setup (single fan) for this cooler. I'll be trying different fan (and dual fan) settings soon. And of course, with the help of Noctua fans, my current favorites. Other good ones are Corsair ML fans or old school Sycthe Gentle Typhoon. Bye Ken