Stefan Mileschin

Over the past eight years of reviewing, even with all of the different heatsinks and water cooling options we have covered there has been one constant. In nearly every build or test bench if we weren't going with water cooling Noctua coolers have been at the top of our list. Recently as far as full sized builds go everything that wasn't a test bench has been water cooled, but the small form factor builds have nearly all been sporting Noctua NH-L9i's. This has partially been because I like Noctua's low noise but more than anything the NH-L9i just kept them all cool and took up less space than even a stock cooler. Recently though I have been working on building a new Lunchbox project build, we have been collecting parts and covering them in various reviews. Well when I got everything together the NH-L9i just couldn't handle the higher heat output that the i7-6700K was putting out. This wasn't a big shock given the coolers 65 watt cooling rating and the heat issues that same CPU gave us even with a full sized cooler on our test bench. So this gave me the chance to test out the slightly larger NH-L9x65 from Noctua. Today I'm going to talk about how it performed and run through its features. You can also get a sneak peek at our upcoming build!

http://lanoc.org/review/cooling/7205-noctua-nh-l9x65