Noctua announced today that its multi-socket coolers will now include AM4 mounting hardware for AMD chips at no additional cost.
AM4 mounting hardware is now included with the following Noctua coolers:
- NH-C14S
- NH-D15
- NH-D15S
- NH-D9L
- NH-L9x65
- NH-U12S
- NH-U14S
- NH-U9S
The company released AM4-specific coolers in 2017, but anyone looking to use one of its multi-socket coolers with an AMD Ryzen processor had to order a separate mounting kit to do so. Those upgrades were made freely available, which was a nice gesture, but ordering them could still feel like an unnecessary step.
Noctua CEO Roland Mossig explained the company's reasoning in a statement accompanying the announcement:
“As with Intel’s LGA115x and 20xx platforms, our customers have greatly appreciated our free upgrade policy. We’ve provided many thousands of free mounting kits and quite a few customers have migrated 10-year-old heatsinks they had already used on several socket generations. This means a lot to us, and we’ll continue to offer the free kits. of course. However, with AM4 becoming more and more popular, we think it is time to also include the mountings with our existing models so that customers have everything at hand when they purchase new coolers.”
This announcement came with a few pleasant surprises. Noctua said it's actually been shipping models with this hardware for months, so any of its coolers you find on a store shelf should have AM4 mounting hardware right in the box. If not, the free upgrade is still available, and that's also true for existing Noctua owners.
Noctua also didn't raise the prices of its coolers now that it's packaging the AM4 mounting hardware with them. That makes sense--why ask people to pay for something that's already freely available? Plus, the company probably benefits from this arrangement, as now it shouldn't be managing shipping logistics for nearly as many free kits.
The company said these coolers support all previous-gen AMD sockets as well as Intel's LGA sockets, which means they "are now compatible with all current mainstream platforms out of the box."
