Noctua Showcases 145mm Tall NH-D12L Air Cooler With 120mm Fans

Noctua has presented the NH-D12L, an air-cpu cooler that can be equipped with one or more 120mm fans and is 145mm high. Other brand’s 120mm air coolers are 158mm high. The cooler comes with a round-frame version of the NF-A12x25 fan.

The manufacturer says that it is not a lowered regular 120 mm air cooler, because this would cause problems with, for example, heat sinks on motherboards. That’s why Noctua has created a new dual tower design and designed a round-frame version of the NF-A12x25. That new fan can be placed lower between the radiators, making the entire cooler less high than other Noctua 120mm CPU coolers.

That lower cooler comes in handy in certain enclosures where fans are up to 150mm or 145mm in height, such as SFF-Mini-ITX and certain server enclosures. Noctua claims that the cooler outperforms 92mm air coolers and also outperforms Noctua’s own 120mm air coolers. According to Noctua, the NH-D12L cools better than the NH-U12S and often comes close to Noctua’s 120mm top model: the NH-U12A.

The design of the air cooler is asymmetrical, so the cooler doesn’t hang over the memory slots of Intel’s LGA1700, 1200 and 155x, or AMD’s AM4 and AM5 motherboards. As a result, according to Noctua, those slots are always accessible and the cooler does not limit the consumer to use memory with high heat spreaders or RGB lighting.

Noctua’s NH-D12L comes standard with an NF-A12x25r PWM fan: the round-frame version of the NF-A12x25. That fan is also available separately and the cooler is equipped with an extra pair of clips. Buyers can therefore attach an extra fan to the front or rear. Noctua notes that this fan will ‘usually’ hang above the memory or the I/O panel, ‘bringing the total height above 145mm’. The two mentioned products are available from today. The NH-D12L costs 90 euros; the NF-A12x25r PWM costs 30 euros.