Noctua NH-D9L And NH-U9S Reviews And Giveaway

NH-U9S

As mentioned, the U9S features a single tower fin array and comes equipped with an NF-A9 fan right out of the box. It is worth noting the fan will have to be removed during installation but that is easily managed.

On the top of the cooler, we can the top of the 5 U-shaped heat pipes as well as a nice Noctua logo pretty much front and centre. The fins are made from aluminium and the heat pipes are made from copper.

Taking a look from the back and side, we can see the shape of the individual aluminium fins. On the sides, they are designed to allow fans to be clipped on. The fan is easily removed / installed with a small retention clip that just pulls off, or is clipped into place.

Flipping it onto its side and we can see how the heat pipes pass through the nickel plated base plate. The base plate is what will sit on top of your CPU and will allow for the dissipation of heat.

As we can see, the base plate does feature a highly reflective surface, though I wouldn’t consider it a mirror surface. These nickel plated base plates have pretty much become the normal standard these days, rather than the old copper base plates we used to see.

NH-D9L

As mentioned the main difference between the D9L and U9S is that the D9L has dual fin arrays. The D9L also only has four heatsinks so it will be quite interesting to see the results of our testing in the next section. When taking it out of the box, the fan is placed in between the two fin arrays. Now, depending on your plans, this is easily changed if need be! 

While they have left out the Owl logo, this time, Noctua has still included their name on the top of each array.

The four u-shaped heat pipes protrude through the top fins on each side to allow for maximum heat dissipation.

Looking at one of the sides, we can see the fan tells us which way the air from it will blow. This will come in great handy when installing it so we can make sure to keep the airflow in our case just how we want it.

Looking at the fin arrays from the sides and we can again see how they are designed to allow a fan to be clipped onto either side. The cool thing about the D9L is should you want to have some fun, you could actually put three fans on this bad boy!

The heat pipes pass through the base plate of the D9L almost identical to that of the U9S, except for the fact there is only four and not five.

Again, we see a semi-reflective surface on the bottom of the D9L on its nickel plated base plate.