I cant believe that photo...sorrii I am with you only a nutjob would use or test it in that configuration!!!
Noctua clearly state orientation of their coolers and that is ass about.
Every other review I have read rates the NH-U12F much more highly... always near best in class
your numbers of near 70C on every cooler is outrageous, if those numbers are true not a single one of these coolers would keep a computer stable in a closed case outside the northeast. and a couple minutes isnt a good measure of cpus final temp, if u look over a temp log after a long game session you know it creeps up. to many factors.
If my Artic silver 5 + Scythe Katana 2 cooler(for only a massive price of 25 USD! I can keep my outdated Pentium D under 100 degrees fahrenheit,infact around HALF of these tests,even under water cooling? Wow,according to this,I should actually worry about getting a quad core because of the heat.And no,I don't have any fans in my case,it's open,only fans are from my GPU,CPU,and my PSU.
No extra 4 250mm performance fans.And an X38? That's just unbelievable.
Do you guys get the point? They maxed out everything, so the cooler could show off the best that it could do in the most extreme conditions.
A good article, i especially like the tests for installation and sound, as those are what i would look into most when purchasing a cooler, and unlike CPUs, there are usually no charts to go along with.
eaglestrike... do you see mounting the noctua fan in the wrong direction as good testing???
They have it on the top side of the sink flowing in a downward direction!!!
it goes against basic laws of physics and logic.
alot of the coolers listed of a particular design are installed all goofy like, Of course on their open setup it doesn't make much difference(i think)
but when installed in a normal ATX case, would be detrimental to the coolers performance. Especially coolers designed similar to the Noctua and Scythe Ninja plus.
I can't be certain about others but Arctic Cooling's Freezer 7 Pro is supposed to be installed like this(one would assume others of similar design would be the same)
http://bigrockies.com/media/cooler.jpg
cliffro I think to some degree you are correct but it still does not follow good practice when supposedly collecting data to represent consumer products.
As these have published manufacturer recomended installations why would you reverse it.
I recently read a review of the latest Noctua cooler at Legitreviews
where Noctua actually contacted them on this very issue... as a result they retested and found some improvement in cooling.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/741/1/
