Items tagged with Noctua
It's been a long time since we saw much innovation in thermal interface materials. Back ten years ago, when OEMs tended to use pads made from camel hair, companies like Arctic Silver burst on the scene with compounds that offered significantly improved performance compared to stock solutions. As CPU TDPs increased and die sizes shrank, manufacturers began offering better thermal pastes by default and the buzz generally quieted down. Claims that adding diamond dust improves thermals, for example, are based on remarkably poor physics and exploiting a margin of error. Today, Maingear has launched what they claim is a genuine advance over existing thermal pastes. The Epic T1000 kit uses a PCMA (phase...
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A few months back, we examined the performance of four liquid coolers for the Sandy Bridge-E socket LGA 2011 platform: Corsair's H80 and H100, Maingear's Epic 180, and Intel's own reference cooler. Liquid coolers are popular with high-end OEMs and some enthusiasts, but they aren't cheap -- and there's a certain group of enthusiasts who aren't comfortable with flowing liquid in their systems. Recently, we spoke with the team at Noctua, who offered to send us one of its high-end air coolers for comparison. We've been curious about the company since it came across our radar with its upgrade offer for anyone upgrading to Socket 2011 last year. The Noctua DH-14 is a mammoth air cooler that competes...
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A few months back, we examined the performance of four liquid coolers for the Sandy Bridge-E socket LGA 2011 platform: Corsair's H80 and H100, Maingear's Epic 180, and Intel's own reference cooler. Liquid coolers are popular with high-end OEMs and some enthusiasts, but they aren't cheap -- and there's a certain group of enthusiasts who aren't comfortable with flowing liquid in their systems. Recently, we spoke with the team at Noctua, who offered to send us one of its high-end air coolers for comparison. We've been curious about the company since it came across our radar with its upgrade offer for anyone upgrading to Socket 2011 last year. Before we get started, we can't resist sharing the following:...
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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...
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