SPCR

Nice, the NH-D9DX i4 3U has the same 110mm height as the NH-D9L. The D9DX states it's made specifically to work in 3U cases. (hence the name) Which means the D9L should work as well for socket 115x servers. I built a 3U server a while back that we use for our backup system. I picked up the shortest tower heat sink I could find but it still didn't fit. I don't believe I was able to find any Minjas at that time. So in the end, I just used the stock HS. Blah. Nice to see an option for future reference.

Thanks for the review mike, very interesting cooler specially for small builds.

Thanks Mike, SPCR is always precious.

This is a superb review, as always. I'm always a fan of Noctua reviews.

How does the Noctua NH-D9L performance compare to the Scythe Ninja Mini? Better or worse?

I currently have an Antec NSK2480 HTPC case with a Ninja Mini using only the two 120mm case fans on an Intel Core i7-4790K overclocked to 4.7GHz.
It runs a little hotter than I'd like, though it doesn't thermal throttle under normal multi-threaded application benchmarks. It WILL thermal throttle very quickly under aggressive synthetic benchmarks like Prime95 however.

So I'm looking for better cooling options and it looks like the NH-D9L would fit the bill if it performs better than the Ninja Mini.

As an aside, I'm also considering lapping the CPUs heat spreader a little because it's very concave. I have to use quite a lot of thermal paste to get good contact on the heatsink.

It is difficult to find an exact comparison as they are from different eras. I would suspect the Noctua will be better by a few degrees particularly if you run 2 fans but how are you running your Mini Ninja as it can also run 2 fans? What fans are you running and what speeds?

edh wrote:What fans are you running and what speeds?

I don't have any fans directly attached to the Ninja Mini. I have two Arctic Cooling 120mm PWM case fans...
AF12PWM
300 - 1,350 RPM (controlled by PWM)

This is what it looks like...