Noctua NH-D9L, Premium CPU Cooler with NF-A9 92mm Fan (Brown)

I replaced the OEM fan and heatsink on my old i5-2500 CPU as I was getting concerned about the 70+C temperatures I was seeing when playing games or transcoding video in Handbrake (which runs all four cores at 100%) with the Noctua NH-9DL cooler.As my inexpensive tower case does not have access to the underside of the motherboard I had to remove it completely in order to fit the bottom plate that the cooler uses for support. Of course, if I had been doing a new build or had a modern processor with an LGA 2011 socket I wouldn't have had to do this.Noctua provide absolutely everything you need in the well thought out packaging, including clear instruction leaflets for each processor type, together with high-quality thermal paste and all the tools, parts and cables you need to finish the job. If you take it slowly and follow the instructions carefully it's hard to get it wrong.The cooler is designed to fit in 3U cases and works very nicely in mine. It doesn't overlap the memory slots, so there's no problem with my tallish RAM sticks. But how well does it work? The answer is that it fits my needs perfectly. At CPU idle the fan spins at just over 800 RPM (I'm not using the silencer adapter cable) and at full stretch the speed rises to around 1200 RPM. This is with my BIOS set to Silent mode. At all speeds it's very quiet - in fact I'm unable to hear it. My CPU never gets any hotter than the mid-50s even when doing a big transcode taking over half an hour.In summary, this is an excellent CPU cooler for the smaller case. If you're an overclocker you might want to consider a bigger cooler or even a water-based solution but for occasional heavy use at stock speeds this works just fine.

I had problems cooling my Intel i7-14700K CPU and getting a suitable fan to fit inside my medium sized case. The Noctua NH-D9L proved to be an ideal solution. It seems exceeding well made, easy to fit (although I had an old case so I had to enlarge the cutout behind the CPU to fit the mounting plate), very quiet, and is able to easily control the CPU temperature between 30-40 deg C in normal use. Considering the problems i had with other fans I think it is good value for money.

Very quiet with the "low speed" adapter cable.With a closed case below my desk I don't even notice it in my silent room.I'm using it with its low fan speed adapter cable with 1 middle fan on a Gigabyte Z370M D3H motherboard with an i5 8600K processor (currently without overclocking @3.6Ghz).After 5-10 hours of StarCraft 2 gameplay the CPU is always below 40C usually 36-37C only 1-2C above idle temperature.Since my GPU hasn't yet arrived (damned crypto miners) I'm playing StarCraft with integrated GPU only with high settings @30-40fps (surprisingly smooth for casual gaming) which might give the CPU a bit easier time.Before manually tweaking the BIOS settings my motherboard automatically overclocked my CPU to 4.1-4.2Ghz.With those settings the idle temperature of my CPU was usually around 40C.EDIT (19 Jun 2018):After installing a GTX 1060 GPU and switching to a 144Hz QHD (1440p) monitor (which involves higher framerate and thus CPU usage - 144 or 120 instead of 60) my CPU usage has increased and this, along with the epci slot that holds the GPU near to the CPU socket generated quite a bit of heat. The builtin thermometers haven't detected very high temps (at most 40-50 celsius in most cases) but something still got overheated and this caused immediate machine reboots sometimes, mostly while playing Overwatch that uses ~80% GPU with my settings and usually 50% CPU. This reboot happened sometimes 10-20 times in a row, sometimes only once per day but I rarely had a day without a reboot. This can be very annoying during competitive gaming where you lose points for this.Took quite some time to find out what causes the occasional reboots. I was experimenting with custom fan speed settings, removing the low fan speed adapter, lowered game graphics settings and the framerate, plugging cables to different slots in my modular PSU, etc but nothing really worked. The usual suspects in case of such reboots are overheat, bad motherboard or bad PSU. In my case it was overheat because since replacing my nh-d9l to a much larger nh-d15 I haven't had a single reboot for more than 10 days despite playing almost fulltime.Conclusion:- This is a quality piece of cooler but for stronger CPUs buy a the largest cooler that can fit onto your motherboard.- The thermometers of your motherboard might not be very accurate or might not be placed that well.

I purchased this cooler as it has a fairly low profile and I intend to change my PC case to a HTPC case fairly soon. It should fit inside a 150mm height case (I hope). I've previously had issues with the temperature on my PCs AMD FX-8530 cpu with it ranging between high 58c -75c using an old Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7. I had read that these CPUs do run hot so I was more than a little surprised by the improvement.It now runs at around 25c to 35c even when gaming.This cooler does have an option to have 2 fans (the 2nd purchased separately) which I chose to do due to the previous problems I've had.Also, on my PC this cooler is orientated so that it sits directly inline and butted up to the case rear discharge fan. This may be helping to lower the temperature further. The orientation of previous cooler may have been circulating the heated air back around the case before being picked up by the case discharge fan. I am happy with the sound level. The whole pc is at about 45db measured off an iphone app and the other case fans seem to be the main cause of that.Installation required removing the standard AMD bracket that came with the motherboard and fitting a bracket specific to this cooler but this wasn't much of a chore and seems more secure than the original.It comes with a tube of thermal paste. Probably enough to refit it 3 or 4 times.Excellent value for money. I'm very happy with my choice.