Noctua Offers Free LGA2011 Upgrade Kit To Customers

Noctua is a high-end Austrian company with a decided focus on the upper-end of air cooling—the company's cheapest heatsink/fan combo is the NH-U9B for $59, while other coolers run as high as $86. Considering that one can buy lower-end water cooled rigs for $59.99, that's definitely rareified air the company's fans are blowing. Perhaps in recognition of that fact, Noctua is offering its customers that rarest of rare gifts—a free upgrade.

Anyone who owns a Noctua cooler dating back to 2005 and who upgrades to one if Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge-E processors will receive a mounting conversion kit, free of charge. "We feel that product quality and service quality should always go hand in hand, so we're determined to give the best possible support to our customers. Having provided free mounting upgrades for the last generations of Intel and AMD platforms, we're happy to announce that we will continue this tradition with the NM-I2011 kit for LGA2011", says Mag. Roland Mossig,

Noctua CEO. "We always like to think of our coolers as safe long-term investments, and even if you bought one of our first models six years ago, you'll still be able to upgrade it to the latest socket technology free of charge."


We did a bit of digging in the company's press archive (we've not heard of these upgrade plans before) and found the CEO's statements entirely accurate. When LGA11366 and LGA1156 debuted, Noctua offered upgrades for both CPUs (again, on all heatsinks shipped since 2005). AMD's socket mount system has barely changed in seven years (we've got heatsink/fans that old that still work on modern AMD hardware), but Noctua introduced a free upgrade kit in 2010 designed to allow AMD owners to change the heatsink mount 90 to accomodate different airflow configurations.

The company's history and the excellent reviews its various coolers have earned make the company's products worth a second glance. When AMD's FX-51 debuted in 2003, it carried an 89W TDP. A high-end aftermarket cooler from seven years ago, therefore, is every bit as capable of handling a modern 125-140W CPU as it was then. Evaluated as a single purchase, the idea of paying $60-$90 for a single heatsink/fan sounds absurd—but it makes a lot more sense when you consider paying that much for a cooler you could still be using seven years from now.

Any of you who currently own Noctua coolers can apply for the upgrade kit here. Note that you are required to provide both an invoice proving your ownership of a Noctua cooler *and* an invoice showing the purchase of either an LGA2011 CPU or motherboard.