Results

Prepare your mouse wheels again! At "full fan" the Noctua NH-U12P is one of the best heatsinks we've seen to date, but because the NF-P12 fan is only 19dB it's wholly tolerable unlike any of the other heatsinks performing around its level. The only thing remotely close to this is the Thermalright 120 Ultra eXtreme, which still performs quite a bit better as that used the NF-S12 sound optimised fan, not the performance one that's now bundled with the Noctua.

All the other heatsinks at the top of the table had their fans at full speed and were exceptionally noisy; you have to drop 3.3˚C DeltaT with the Zerotherm Nirvana NV120 running at its lowest fan speed to match the same 19dB full speed Noctua NH-U12P result.

However, saying that, that's only 2˚C deltaT difference – that’s not much at all. The performance difference between this Noctua NH-U12P and the last Noctua NH-U12F is pretty vast – nearly half the table, but is this because of the improved fan, or simply an improved heatsink as a whole?

We tested the new NF-P12 fan on the older NH-U12F heatsink (highlighted in the graph below) and found that the newer fan also improved on the previous result by a couple of degrees.

Using the U.L.N.A. to drop the fan speed to its lowest setting makes it almost entirely inaudible – you have to put your ear right to the blades to hear it. It is literally the next best thing to a passively cooled heatsink, but unless you run a passive PSU, a solid state hard drive with no other fans (or at least, all other identical fans with U.L.N.A.) and work in an acoustically controlled environment there's no way you'll ever even tell this thing is spinning without actually looking at it.

The performance clearly does suffer though, but at this speed it's not really surprising since it has to cool a 130W CPU with very little airflow and it still managed to keep it at a very respectable 50˚C.