I was the I king of going for the Noctua NH-U12S, although I’ve also been recommended a Scythe cooler. Would the Noctua give me good temps when my CPU is overclocked?
When overclocking there's no such thing as too much cooling power and you'll want the best cooler fitting into your requirements.
And you don't really overclock Ryzens in traditional sense.
At least if you play games.
Ryzens boost the most heavily loaded cores automatically very agressively (depending on also how well CPU is cooled) compared to silicon's capabilities and reaching similar speeds with manual all core overclocks is very hard.
Especially with higher core count CPUs.
And shouldn't be surprise that if clock speed doesn't reach same, that causes easily performance regression in games.
Again fast memories help to boost especially minimum framerates.
don’t want a massive air cooler to take up most of the space inside it.
Overpriced brand hype Noctua is worser in also that compared to Scythe Mugen 5.
Which has actually better DIMM clearances, because of Noctua failing to master the dark magic of offset finstack:
https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php...scythe-mugen-5-rev-cpu-cooler-review_full.jpg
https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php..._32_noctua_nh_u12s_cpu_cooler_review_full.jpg
Yeah... Despite of being anorexic in comparison NH-U12S is worser in those because of Noctua using more money into marketing hype than actual product.
https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8320/scythe-mugen-5-rev-cpu-cooler-review/index5.html
https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5417/noctua-nh-u12s-cpu-cooler-review/index7.html
Scythe even bundles proper screwdriver, while "poor" Noctua gives bent piece of wire, which is clumsy to use.
(and using normal short screwdriver is nightmare for skin of the knuckles)