Closer Look / Product Photos
The cooler arrived in a retail package which is a classic, white, black, and brown box.
As always, in the case of Noctua coolers, the box’s exterior has a full product specification, so we don’t have to check any details on the manufacturer’s website.
Inside the box, we will find everything we need for the installation, including manuals, AMD and Intel mounting kits, and additional clips for the optional, second fan. The cooler is fully compatible with the LGA1700 and the upcoming AMD AM5.
At the first sight, the cooler isn’t really small. It’s a twin-tower design that is equipped with one fan. The second fan is optional, but I wouldn’t count it will help much in the performance. As you can see in our performance tests, it gives about 2°C lower temperature. Additionally, fans are spinning a bit slower.
The most interesting is the cooler’s height. Most tower coolers have about 160mm while the NH-D12L has 145mm. It means we can use our favorite PC case that doesn’t have to be really large. Also, many ITX cases will have enough space for this cooler. The NH-D12L is filling the gap between small towers with 92mm fans and typical tall towers with 120mm or 140mm fans.
The cooler is as always in the case of Noctua, top quality. Everything is perfect and there was no problem with the installation.
I assume that if sales will go well then the cooler will be also released in a black version. We have to wait and see what Noctua decides.
Below you can see how the NH-D12L looks on the recently reviewed Colorful CVN Z690M Gaming Frozen V20 motherboard.
We will show you how the NH-D12L performs with the i5-12600K processor on the next page.
