Review on Noctua NH-U9S: Exceptional Premium 🧱 CPU Cooler with NF-A9 92mm Fan (Brown) by Allan Duman

Before I start the review, I would like to list the components that I used in my computer: Case: Silverstone GD08 motherboard: Gigabyte GA X99 Ultra Gaming CPU: Intel Core i7 5820K @3.3GHzRAM: 16GB (4x4) Corsair Vengeance LPXGPU: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1070Boot SSD: Samsung 960 EVO 250GBGaming SSD: Mushkin Reactor 1TBHDD: 3x WD Red 4TB Bluray Drive : Asus BW - 16D1HTBluray drive: LG WH16NS40 I've had a large case on my TV stand for the last few years (Fractal Define XL R2). Sitting under the TV was an eyesore (nice closet but ugly in the living room) but it was incredibly spacious, with excellent cable management and housed all my components with no issues. In this case I used an ARCTIC Liquid Freezer 240 to cool my CPU. Computer is a workhorse (gaming, video encoding, Plex servers, etc.) so a quality CPU cooler is a must. TV stand and insert (SilverStone GD08B). However, the smaller case size meant that I could no longer use a 240mm cooler for my CPU. Its HTPC form factor limited my choice of a new cooler due to its height limitations. I researched a lot about small coolers and finally settled on the NH-U9S. I knew I wouldn't get the same cooling performance as my AIO, and I knew the airflow in the new case wouldn't be good given the number of drives installed. With my old setup, I had a maximum temperature of around 62°C under full load. Installing the radiator was incredibly easy; I did it in less than five minutes. As soon as I installed everything in the new case and started up, I immediately saw an increase in idle temperatures. Where I used to have 28°C-35°C, I'm now seeing 39°C on the low end but averaging around 40°C at idle. Not great, but to be expected. As soon as I started encoding my first video, I saw the temps soar to the high 70s and in some places 80s, which was far from ideal. But I knew the trade-offs with the new setup and it was still safe so I was ready to deal with it. I decided to manually adjust the fan speeds and curves to slightly improve cooling. So I went into my bios and looked at the fan setting. For some reason it reported that my CPU fan was running at 0 rpm no matter how I set it. So I opened up the case, expecting I'd done something stupid like forgot to plug in, only to find one of my SATA cables stopping the fan (anyone using the GD08 with optical drive bays and SSDs installed) . know that cable management is tight). So I put it back in and the fan started spinning again. I booted back into Windows to see if that made a difference. Sure enough, now I've seen the idle temps drop into the mid 30's (I've adjusted the fan curves to run at 20% even when idling). main difference. I saw even more improvements under load. I've been coding for the last 4.5 hours (95-100% utilization all the time) and the CPU sat in the mid 60s most of the time with only one core maxing out at 70°C (but on average around 68). °C). In other words, without a fan on that heatsink, my CPU kept temperatures below or below 80C at full load, and now I'm only seeing a few degrees more than my old AIO. I might even be able to overclock my processor (very moderately) in a new case. I'm incredibly happy with the performance of this cooler given the space constraints I was working with and the limited airflow inside the case due to the amount of stuff I crammed in there. I would definitely recommend this cooler to anyone looking for a low height or small form factor cooler.