Performance
Our test platform is the AMD Ryzen. It contains the 1700X and BIOSTAR X370GTN motherboard with the latest BIOS. Since thermal sensors were adjusted and various BIOS releases are showing a bit different temperatures then results in this review may differ from what we were publishing in the past.
As usual, mixed tests base on PCMark10 which is performing tests based on popular applications. High CPU Load test is based on AIDA64 stability test while Maximum Load is based on the Prime95 torture test.
Some of you may be surprised that all coolers in the comparison are Noctua. There is one good reason for that. Some coolers which we were testing had no AM4 mounting kit or couldn’t be installed on our test motherboard. We will try to add some more results from other brands but now let’s focus on what we have,
The NH-L12S is performing really good considering its small size. You can say that temperature isn’t much better than the smaller coolers like the NH-L9a or NH-L9x65 but difference in this case is in generated noise. Fan on the NH-L12S is spinning slower and even at 1500 RPM is really quiet. Smaller coolers are maybe not loud but you can clearly hear them in mixed load test.
On the other hand in full load test, higher Noctua coolers are nearly silent while the NH-L12S just can’t offer that because of higher fan speed.
AMD Ryzen is a platform which is not heating up much but at the same time is not overclocking well. On the NH-L12S we are able to set 4GHz without issues as long as we have good motherboard and stable voltages. For some reason BIOSTAR has still issues with BIOS and voltages are going up too much while any overclocking. It’s still possible to overclock our processor and keep it stable using the NH-L12S cooler but at least on BIOSTAR motherboards temperatures can be higher than expected. ASUS or ASRock motherboards have no issues with that so if you want to overclock AMD Ryzen processors then be sure that you pick good motherboard.
One more graph with fan speed results. Of course fan profiles or manual settings may change that but it depends on the motherboard and available settings. On our motherboard with given options results are as we see above.
The NH-L12S is really interesting cooler. It’s small but offers high performance and should be one of the best options for all who are thinking to build small but well performing PC.
