Noctua showed off many gigantic CPU air coolers at Computex 2024. However, the new coolers for Nvidia's GH200 Grace Hopper superchip and Ampere's Altra processors are among the biggest and most interesting ones at Noctua's stand.
Since it's still in the prototype stage, Noctua doesn't yet have a name for the GH200 cooler. In the meantime, we're referring to it as the Nvidia GH200 cooling solution. GH200 comprises a Grace CPU with 72 Arm Neoverse V2 cores and a Hopper GPU so there are two components to cool. The GH200 offers flexible power tuning, allowing vendors to tweak the values between 450W and 1,000W. Therefore, air and liquid cooling are both viable cooling solutions.
In the case of Noctua's cooler, the manufacturer has bonded two customized NH-U12A heatsinks to cool the CPU and GPU, along with a sizeable proprietary base plate to cool the memory. The NH-U12A is Noctua's 5th-generation iteration from the NH-U12 series of 120mm CPU coolers. The cooler features seven heat pipes and up to two premium NF-A12 cooling fans. Due to the design, Noctua has to drop one of the fans, so the GH200 cooler only features three NF-A12. Two NH-U12A CPU coolers can cool up to 1,000W of total heat emission, complying with GH200's power requirements.
Noctua is positioning the GH200 cooler as a product for consumers who need to keep the working environment's noise level within acceptable limits. The vendor cites examples, such as local HPC applications, self-hosted open-source LLMs, or fine-tuning LLMs. The GH200 cooler will be available in the fourth quarter of the year. Pricing is unknown as of now, and these will be B2B purchases on a per-order basis.
Ampere Altra processors are becoming more popular, so it's understandable that cooling vendors are releasing products for them. Noctua has released the NH-U14S AMP-4926 and NH-D9 AMP-4926 4U coolers for Ampere Altra processors. These new coolers are based on the models Noctua previously released for Intel Xeon, AMD Ryzen Threadripper, and EPYC chips, but with some customizations. For example, the coolers feature a customized contact surface for Ampere's Altra and Altra Max chips, which can scale up to 128 cores.
The NH-U14S AMP-4926 is a single-tower 140mm cooler that borrows inspiration from the DX and TR5-SP6 family of coolers for Xeon and Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC processors, respectively. It utilizes two NF-A15 cooling fans.
The NH-D9 AMP-4926 4U, on the other hand, has a smaller footprint. Part of the 92mm category, the cooler wields a twin-tower design with two NF-A9 PWM fans for active cooling. Both Altra coolers feature Noctua's award-winning SecuFirm2 mounting system for LGA4926 for the Altra coolers, so installation should be easy and quick. They also come with pre-applied NT-H2 thermal paste.
The NH-U14S AMP-4926 retails for $139.90, and the NH-D9 AMP-4926 4U costs $129.90.
