Processors these days seem to be something of an enigma. While Intel and AMD are constantly working to make their chips smaller, the heat these chips produce continues to dramatically increase. Back in the day when an Intel Pentium processor was cutting edge, heat wasn’t much of a concern to anybody. This could be seen by the variety, or lack thereof, of heatsinks and aftermarket cooling solutions. Take a gander at some of today’s processors and you’ll find some of them are capable of dissipating over 110 Watts and producing enough heat to warm a small house in winter. In order to keep these spiraling temperatures in check, the materials, designs, shapes, and sizes of heatsinks have had to go through some major retooling.

Like any product market, everybody wants to get in on the action and as such there are new manufacturers popping up all the time trying to lay claim as having the best. We here at GruntvillE have reviewed an array of heatsink products from a variety of industry leaders including Thermalright , who quite often sets the mark by which all others are judged. With Thermalright’s XP-90C and Scythe’s Shogun heatsinks generally considered to be the current crème de la crème of the air-cooling market, it’s hard to imagine anything toppling them. So when a new company comes along claiming to have developed the industry’s best performing air-cooled heatsink, our interest was naturally piqued.

Noctua , a recent upstart in Austria , has entered the market with two, high performance cooling solutions; the NH-U9 and NH-U12. Both heatsinks utilize 4 dual heat-pipes joined to a copper base and attached to aluminum fins to disperse heat. The only difference between the two units is size; with the NH-U9 accepting 80 and 92mm fans while the larger NH-U12 is designed for use with 120mm fans. While heatpipe technology is nothing new to the cooling industry, the NH-U12 does look to have some of the longest running copper heatpipes I’ve seen to date. Due to their massive size, both heatsinks can operate without the aide of an attached fan but are capable of utilizing up to two fans for maximum cooling. So can these offerings from the new kid on the block really hold their own? Read on as we find out.