Noctua NH-U9S, Premium CPU Cooler with NF-A9 92mm Fan (Brown)

I needed a replacement for the crappy stock cooler on my Dell Xps 8950. The cooler came with free thermal paste so no need to purchase that. Assembly is straightforward and easy, but I needed to purchase M3 screws to put the cooler on (not a nocuta problem, more of a dell problem).

Even though I’ve built systems for several years, this was my very first non-stock-cooler install. I usually go with Intel’s stock cooling solutions, which typically work fine for non-overclocked purposes. Since the i5-9600k doesn’t come with a cooler, I decided to venture outside of my comfort zone and go for a third-party cooler.

After reading many reviews, I decided on this Noctua solution. The primary factors that drove my decision:
1) Air cooler.
2) Single fan.
3) Small profile, so I wouldn’t have to worry about overhang/selecting specific components.
4) Quiet. Be very, very, quiet.
5) Excellent build quality and compatibility, so it might last between several system upgrades.

I just finished installing it earlier today, and so far the results have been fantastic. On my old CPU (i5-4440), with the stock cooler, my low-stress temps (web-browsing, music playing) were about 65C. With this new cooler on my new i5-9600k, I’m seeing about 38C on average under a similar load. That’s in a fairly warm room, with a hot case (Antec Sonata III – I’m going for a quiet, subdued system.) Also, it is even quieter than my old system! I can’t tell that the computer is even on (in terms of noise level) unless I turn the ceiling fan off, which is what I was going for – near silence.

NEWBIE MISTAKES TO AVOID:
I did all of the silly things I’m about to list – if this is your first time installing a more complicated cooling solution, hopefully this will help! If you’re an experienced system builder, then here’s hoping you have a good chuckle.
1) Hey, look at this nice full-glossy instruction sheet! Guess what you should do before step 3 – you should make sure the CPU is LOCKED IN. I still had it unlocked after dropping in the new CPU, and had all sorts of trouble.
2) Step 4 – yay, time to apply the thermal paste! Only.. how do I get it out of the tube? The old paper-clip to the cap trick, right? NO – that cap unscrews with moderate force. Don’t punch a hole through it!
3) Step 5 – Man, tightening that one screw down with a regular screwdriver is a real pain in the patoot. They should have included a specialized screwdriver to help with this. Guess what, they did! I mentally discarded it after mistakenly thinking it was a piece for AMD CPU installation when I first opened the box. In fact, that odd piece of metal *was* a screwdriver. Oops!

Overall, my first adventure into non-stock CPU cooling has been refreshing and rewarding. This Noctua kit seems well made, the packaging was great, and so far it’s working like a champ, despite the mild levels of accidental abuse I dispensed during the installation process. I’ll be looking at Noctua in the future if I need any more cooling for my rig.

I purchase many of these for several Intel and AMD builds and have yet to have one fail. The quality is top notch. When my game machines are hitting 140FPS – the CPU stays at 125F under load. All of the extra mounting hardware for different scenarios is a real nice feature. Noctua makes a great CPU cooler.

Comes with a bunch of screws, brackets for AMD/Intel.
I had to modify mine because I didn’t want to remove the motherboard. If they had just made a bracket screw that was thin on both sides, and added additional thumbscrews for that thin screw, then you could just mount this bracket without having to take apart your motherboard, because this is light enough that a front bracket can support it.

Aside from that, it runs great, very cool and essentially silent. The fan it comes with is just a high quality one, and it comes with like 5g of thermal paste. It’s not worth buying a thermal paste separate, unless you find some like extremely good one that’s better than Grizzly. I wasted $10 on Grizzly (gonna return it) and tested the paste on the stock cooler and there was no temp difference for me, and people say the Noctua pastes are about 90% as good anyway.

I added some example pics. The Handbrake picture is essentially a stress test or worst case scenario. My CPU throttles back to 3.8ghz because I’m using all these goofy Dell BIOS settings and then overriding them with Throttlestop to get an overclock. (I might have to manually adjust my machine to 4ghz or 4.2ghz to keep the temps low while encoding) You can see that 4.5ghz on low usage has great temps, 54C on 20% usage, so for gaming this will probably work very well and stay well below 75C, since you won’t hit the CPU usage you’d hit while encoding. In Nier Automata for example it’s staying around 60C at 4.5ghz, so pretty great. Some games may be more optimized for CPU and may push it hard. Not quite sure how they’re made these days, but generally they’ll all leave a certain % of your CPU aside so you can use your computer well, meaning your temps won’t get crazy.