Noctua, not many people really know who they are, but I’m sure with time you will, as they make some of the best products I have seen. The quality of their products is exquisite, as is the performance of them all. I’ve reviewed quite a few Noctua fans, but today I have the NC-U6 Chipset Cooler, it is essentially a mini heatpipe tower cooling system for your chipset, one thing that makes it really special is that it cools with no fan. Read on to learn more…

Noctua NC-U6 Chipset-Cooler

Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio AkA Dracos

Sponsor: Noctua

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:

Noctua NC-U6 Chipset-Cooler

The NC-U6 implements a miniature-version of the well proven design of Noctua’s award winning NH-U coolers to cool mainboard chipsets.

Sporting 2 Dual-Heatpipes, 29 aluminum fins and soldered joints for optimal heat-transfer, the NC-U6 is the ultimate solution when it comes to silently cooling today’s high-end chipsets

Features:

2 Dual-Heatpipes for optimal heat absorption

Using 2 u-shaped Dual-Heat-Pipes, the NC-U6 has sufficient capacity to reliably dissipate even the heat generated by overclocked high-end chipsets.

29 aluminum cooling fins for optimal heat dissipation

Thanks to a surface area of more than 500cm, the cooling fins dissipate the heat extremely fast – without the need of an additional fan!

Soldered joints for optimal heat-transfer

Unlike many other coolers, whose heatpipes are stuck to the base and the fins, the NC-U6 possesses high-grade soldered joints to ensure optimal heat transfer.

Easy installation on Intel and AMD mainboards

The NC-U6 comes with mounting parts for Intel and AMD mainboards and uses the existing fastening hooks or push-pin mounting holes.

Can be turned by up to 120 for maximum compatibility

In order to achieve maximum compatibility with mainboards, VGA cards and CPU coolers, the NC-U6 can be turned by up to 120.

Specs:

Height: 85 mm

Width: 70 mm

Depth (cooling fins): 23.5 mm

Depth (socket): 33 mm

Weight : 130 g

Material Copper: (base and heat-pipes), aluminium (cooling fins), soldered joints

Mounting System: Push-Pins & Mounting-Hooks

Scope of Delivery: NC-U6

Included:

Mounting Parts

Thermal Paste

Installation Manual

Warranty: 6 Years

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A Better Look at Things

:

The packaging, it looks to be a clamshell but it isn’t, just plastic on the front and a cardboard backing that slides into the plastic front. You can plainly see the NC-U6 and the mounting hardware through the package.

The back of the package has the full specs and features listed in several languages.

Included with the NC-U6, besides the mounting brackets that we saw earlier, is the instruction manual, one screw for mounting, a pack of thermal grease and a chipset protector pad.

The NC-U6 truly does look like a standard CPU heatpipe cooler, only a lot smaller.

My first impression was that it reminded me of something Thermalright would make, the quality and the style of it.

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A Better Look at Things

Continued:

There is one large hole in the very center of the NC-U6, this is used to get a screwdriver down into the cooler to attached the mounting bracket.

The entire Noctua NC-U6 is made very well, and has a nice solid feel to it, other heatpipe coolers I’ve had, the fins were flimsy and sharp, these are fairly thick and sturdy.

Each fin is securely attached to the other, and soldered to the heatpipes as well for maximum thermal conductivity.

The bottom of course is where we find the heatsink base, and of course it comes with the protective covering that needs to be removed before using.

The actual base of the NC-U6 kind of surprised me, it really isn’t finished that well, it could use a very good lapping to make it smoother.

I was really disappointed but the base of the NC-U6, but we won’t know how much of an effect it has till we get to the testing section, so let’s just jump right into that…

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Installation, Testing and Comparison

Well first off I have to saw that anytime you need to remove the motherboard to install anything the installation procedure is a pain, but thankfully Noctua offers you two options for doing the installation. The thing is though, your motherboard needs to have the correct hardware or holes in the board to utilize the hardware. Now most motherboards do have holes for mounting the chipset cooler, so this isn’t a problem, but that is the type where you need to remove it from the case to do the installation. Some, like mine have little hooks, or eyelets that hold the chipset cooler in place, my motherboard actually has both types, the hook type for the Northbridge and the hole type for the Southbridge, so I decided to do both installs for this review.

The first type of install is where I immediately ran into problems, the Southbridge chipset is located between the PCIE slots and to the rear past them right next to the SATA ports of the motherboard. Incidentally the motherboard is an ASUS P5WD2-E Premium with Intel P4 Extreme 955 CPU, in case you are wondering, installing the NC-U6 on the Southbridge puts it either in the way of the SATA ports or your PCIE cards.

Thankfully on that board I don’t use the SATA slots, but if I did this would become a major problem. I had originally intended on installing the NC-U6 on my ECS motherboard in my main system, but I have three SATA drives and I just could not hook them all up, so I changed my mind and installed on my ASUS system. So that was the installation using the holes in my motherboard.

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Installation, Testing and Comparison Continued:

The Northbridge of my ASUS motherboard has the eyelet style of mounting system.

Where the NC-U6 is installed is fine, and there were no clearance issues with anything else on my motherboard, especially since you can turn the NC-U6 around different ways to get the right angle for your system.

Here’s another quick shot of the NC-U6 installed next to the new Noctua NH-U9F CPU Cooler, that review will be up shortly, so be sure to watch for it…

Being that the ASUS motherboard already has passively cooled chipsets, I didn’t see any difference in sound levels, the ECS mobo does have a fan cooled chipset, that’s why I wanted to install it on there originally…

Now for temps:

Idle:

Stock: 28c

Noctua: 33c

Load:

Stock: 35c

Noctua: 33c

As you can see at idle the temp for the ASUS stock chipset was better, but at load we see the Noctua come into play with better temps overall, essentially this is where we really want to know what the temps are, under load, especially when overclocking. The heatpipe setup does a much better job of heat dissipation compared to a stock block of aluminum.

I want to jump back for a moment, when I first received the NC-U6 I was going to install it on my ECS motherboard, well at that time I had my 7800GTX video card installed and it has a Thermalright V-1 Ultra cooler on it, and the NC-U6 would not fit at all with the after market cooler on my video card. So I swapped it out for my 7900GT OC with stock cooling and that’s when I found out about the problem with the SATA connectors. So the NC-U6 does have its disadvantages or installation problems overall, this is something that will need to be kept in mind for anyone thinking of purchasing a cooler like the NC-U6.

Maybe re-designing the NC-U6 with angled top and bottom could solve the clearance issues I came across, sort of so it would look like a diamond, just trim the top and bottom few fins in a bit.

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Summary:

While the NC-U6 performs well, it does have its drawbacks or disadvantages like not being able to use an after market video card cooler, or possibly loosing the use of your SATA ports, the NC-U6 is an overall good choice to cool that hot chipset. The NC-U6 cools well with no fan, and that is a big bonus for me.

DragonSteelMods gives the Noctua NC-U6 Chipset-Cooler a 4 out of 5 score

Pros:

-Excellent quality

-Easy installation

-Versatile installation

-Good performance

Cons:

-Blocks SATA ports on some motherboards

-Could conflict with VGA coolers

I would like to thank Noctua for the chance to review the Noctua NC-U6 Chipset-Cooler and for their continued support of DSM.

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