A Better Look at Things Continued

I examined the NH-C12P closely and was fairly impressed by its construction, you can see each fin is soldered to each heatpipe making for efficient heat transfer and a solid construction, the fins themselves are fairly thick and will not bend easily.

Here’s a bunch of other pictures looking at the NH-C12P while upside down, I wasn’t going to include all of these pictures but it just looks really cool.. sort of like a space ship..

and while we’re looking at the bottom we have to take a close look at the base, I was very surprised when I saw the base, it has a shiny, mirror finish, unlike all other Noctua CPU coolers with their ‘micro-grooves’. Very well done, there are faint polishing marks, but it still looks good and appears to be flat. In the last picture you can see I was actually able to focus my camera on the reflection in the base, here you can also see the polishing lines as well, looking at it with the naked eye those same lines are only barely visible.

BUT, yes there’s a but here… since this polished base was off the norm for Notcua I had to ask them about it and see what was going on and why they changed the finish of the base, this is what I was told:

“We’ve slightly modified the formula of our NT-H1 compound in order to give it a less viscous consistency. The micro-grooved base provides a bigger advantage when used with high-viscosity pastes and due to the slight modification of the paste’s formula, the risk of uneven dispersion is much smaller now.

Many customers seem to prefer the look of a polished base, so this modification enabled us to look into the possibility of shipping our coolers with a mirror finish. We’ve thus decided to produce one production run of coolers with a polished base in order to be able to investigate and assess the suitability of this type of finish in mass production. The first 2000 NH-C12P coolers stem from this production run, but we had to accept a comparably high reject rate in order to obtain 2000 pieces that were fully up to our quality standards. As we refuse to soften our strict guidelines in terms of overall base quality and flatness, we’ve decided to move back to the micro-grooved finish again. Temperatures are equivalent with both types of finish, so this is mostly a visual thing and we certainly don’t want to start trading quality for looks.”

SO, basically if you don’t order early and get one of the first 2000 pieces then most likely you’ll get the standard micro-grooved base that is common with all Noctua Coolers, but as he said there is no performance difference in the base, only aesthetic…