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.

Bought this cooler as a stop gap after my AIO watercooling loop failed. Needed something relatively cheap with quick delivery. Hooked it up to my i7 3930 @ 4ghz (LGA2011, yeah I need a new machine). Wasn't really expecting much.Whilst it's quite cold at the moment being winter, I am seeing 32-35C idling and 40-50~ under load with 'High on Life' (a game recently released at the time of writing).Good form factor, not too big, not too small. Installation took about 20 minutes, including cleaning up the CPU etc. The thermal paste seems pretty good.Certainly recommend this HSF. Would be interesting to see how it performs on Gen 13 intel machines.

I purchased this cooler as a replacement for the stock one I received last year and now it's been installed I'm more than happy with the instant result.My one main issue came in the fact the screws which came with it didn't work on my motherboard due to it already having a bracket fitted on back. As a result I ended up having to wait for 4 grub screws to be delivered before I could fit it. Once these had arrived, the install was really quick as everything fitted like a dream. The only slight annoyance was getting the fan and clips reattached.With this one change my temperatures have already dropped nicely when playing certain games which I great to see.