Great review.

Since mounting contact is such a critical aspect of heatsink performance, I was wondering if you'd able to give it a wishy-washy rating (say 1-10). I'm curious what the weight/mounting quality/performance correlation would look like. My gut feeling tells me it will be quite strong, unless there's a major flaw in the design.

Good to see another well-performing compact heatsink.

I wouldn't start separately rating the mounting, as it gets rated as part of the efficiency already (poor mounting, poor efficiency), but it is a critical aspect.

Is there a single Noctua fan whose specifications aren't an explicit lie? I've been through all the Noctua reviews on this site and not one has matched up against their so-called 'specs.' Even funnier, the fan is beaten by a fair margin at the ~12dB level by the Nexus, despite it being about one-third of the cost. Noctua's fan ratings are truly a marvel of German 'engineering'

I also had a good chuckle about the newest NB fan, which rattled off a slew of impressive traits, like 'world's best fan', 'first bionic fan', 'funded by the minister of blah blah', only to get beaten by an aged Japanese fan without all the boisterous bullshit.

I have no special love for Noctua (defending a company is wasting one's breath), but the bashing is getting tiresome.

The fan specs not matching has been discussed many times. Different specs result from different measurements, it's subjective data since there is no well-adopted standard. Products getting slapped with marketing bs is just how it is. Oh, and Noctua is Austrian - not the first time a spiteful person has confused the two countries.

So why all the hate, Koldun?

Because their fan specs are obviously exaggerated to make themselves look better than they are, as opposed to having some super precise measurement system that only they are privy to.

This all sounds quite negative. Have you got any experience with Noctua yourself? I'm basically with Das_Saunamies on this - note that they're Austrian not German, noctua.at kind of tells you this.

As Das_Saunamies alluded to, they may have put their sound-meter at 2 meters distance and didn't follow ISO-Blah. And even if you knew their dB(A) values followed a certain norm, the bearing could still reproducibly growl like an airplane and you would be non-the-wiser from the dB(A) figure. That's why you read the tests here.

Noctua has very clever marketing and built a perceived high-quality brand, just like Apple, BMW or Mercedes. There are many cheaper equally well performing alternatives out there.

Good to see review of this very interesting heatsink.

Though what this review misses is comparison to NH-U12P.
Would have been real interesting to see how one additional heatpipe fares againts possibly increased airflow impedance.
In this user made comparison U12S wins when using Noctua's fan and 1850rpm Gentle Typhoon at full speed.

I think this point is good to bring up again. With these performance figures, it makes little sense to put these heatsinks in together with the really compact ones - "these" being the Noctua NH models, both of which get closer to 30 °C compared to the over-40 and over-50 of the compact heatsinks.

Any chance of a rematch with the Big Boys? And if not... how much?

Looks like the new SecuFirm2 mounting system is a step backward from the NH-U12P SE2 SecuFirm and the HSF is more expensive as the NH-U12P SE2 can be had for $43 CAD. NH-12S is pretty disppointing and dropping the 775, 1366 support is silly. The only improvement is the PWM fan you get with the cooler over all. Seems Noctua is going backward in quality, this really lacking compared to the D14 and NH-U12P SE2.

Eh ? NH-U12P SE2 uses SecuFirm2 too.

There are actually three different versions of SecuFirm2. The one fitted to the NH-U12S is the 1150/5/6 compatible simplified version which Noctua designate as NM-i115x. The original SecuFirm2 remains as the NM-I3 which fits 775, 1150/5/6 and 1366. The third SecuFirm2 is the NM-I2011 for the Sandy Bridge-E 2011 socket. All of these variants should be available as separate kits through retailers, for example a search on Amazon.com should find all three for around $10. However as the 775 and 1366 sockets are obsolete the continued availability of the NM-I3 is probably questionable, so if you want one the clock is ticking.

LGA775 was basically completely obsolete already two years ago and similarly Sandy Bridge E also made LGA1366 and its Nehalems old tech.
So nitpicking on dropping support of these ancient sockets just shows lack of better arguments.

And that comes from someone who's using LGA775 platform, Q9550 E0 undervolted to 1.2V and overclocked to 3.7GHz. So don't think on blaming me being someone who's constantly buying the newest components.

The whole shifting around of mounting holes is annoying. Just get an ATX standard and be done with it. If PCB designers can cope with new sockets, I'm sure they can cope with constant holes. Damn you planned obsolescence!

I'll be interested to hear what the review team think of the U12S's big brother, the U14S. I have just used one in a Haswell build, and I ended up choosing to mount it 90 degrees from the usual orientation because I was concerned about it overlapping the first PCIe slot on a MicroATX board. It is blowing upwards (not a bad thing), and I opened the ceiling vent in a Fractal Design Define Mini to give the hot air a suitable path (I'm not usually a fan of ventilation in the top of the case, but it may be the best solution here.

I've used a variety of Noctua coolers over the years (the D14 is a favourite), and I have to agree with the comments that one of Noctua's big advantages is availability I can get Noctua coolers anywhere, but many of the other good ones are only available online.

The hole position for LGA 115x has been constant for quite some time, surviving the 1156, 1155, 1150 sockets. I'm sure that's no accident.

Those holes don't suit LGA 2011, but fair enough - it's a significantly bigger socket. As I understand it, the Ivy Bridge E CPUs are expected to use LGA 2011 as well.

More annoying to me is motherboard designers who put stuff on the back of the motherboard in the area that the Noctua backplate covers - there are a number of Gigabyte motherboards I won't use for that reason, and one ASUS, too. I had to use an L9i for a mini-ITX build because the L12 backplate would have been on top of some components: voltage regulators and other surface-mount components (capacitors? resistors? - who can tell when they are surface-mount?)

This is something I haven't run into yet, but can see how it would be an issue - it's annoying enough when it happens with video or other add-on cards, which is a serious consideration in compact builds. I hope the backside-component trend goes away, or they at least recognise users need that space.