As with most anything, time and consideration needs to be taken when designing a PC build. There are so many components that need cooling and sometimes the stock cooling isn’t enough to keep up with our needs. You can’t likely overclock your CPU as far on a stock cooler as you could on a more robust cooler using heat pipes to pull the heat away from the processor. The same can be said for the video card and chipset coolers as well.

We have seen manufacturers release more and more products with heatpipes on them and nowhere is this more obvious than on today’s motherboards. Just last month, Rob took a look at the Asus P5K3 Deluxe, Asus’ latest offering of the DDR3 variety. One look at that board will validate the heat pipe as the preferred method of cooling in today’s hardware.

What if your board doesn’t use heatpipes to keep itself cool? Many motherboards still use the heatsink and fan method while others can get away with passive cooling and there are advantages and disadvantages of both methods.

The primary advantage of the heatsink and fan pairing is that you have a constant flow of air across the chipset’s heatsink. The trade off is often is sound. The small fans can create a lot of noise and over time, are susceptible to failing. With a passive cooler, the sound issues of a fan are gone but so is the cooling performance of direct airflow.

Today we have a trio of products from the Noctua, a cooling company based out of Austria. We are looking at their uniquely designed 80 and 120mm fans, as well as their NC-06 chipset cooler.