NH-U12S Chromax Pure Black CPU Cooler

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My water cooler is failing. It's dying the slow death. I am nervous it may fail at any time.

Think is that I was planning to rehouse the PC in a few months so I thought this would be a great opportunity to try a good old fashioned air cooler.... it will help me work out what I want to do when I move to the new case.

Just wondering whether anyone has any thoughts about this particular cooler?
 
Brand overpriced for performance.
You can get beefier coolers for clearly less.

For example Scythe Mugen 5 would be beefier cooler with excellent clearances for memory and PCIe slots.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/search?sSearch=mugen+5
Also height fits to nearly any case.

Alpenfohn Brocken 3 would be another.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/search?sSearch=brocken+3
Though with not as good PCIe clearance (and more height) from 140mm size


Which one performs better could depend on CPU.
Scythe has traditional solid base, but with likely still Intel optimized convex base plate.
While Alpenfohn uses direct touch heatpipes with flat base from manufacturing method.

Intel's heatpreaders tend to be toward concavish.
So many coolers have some convexity in base to guarantee good contact at critical center area of heatspreader directly above CPU silicon die.
With too much heatspreader's concavity, flat based coolers start losing good contact in that critical center area.
And while thermal pastes are vastly better heat conductors than air, they're still well working only for filling "hair sized unsmoothness".

AMD again has flattish heatspreaders with possibly even tiny smidge of convexity in center.
And obviously two convex surfaces make good contact only in small area...
Which isn't good thing if heat source isn't under that spot, like in Zen2 and coming Zen3 with their chiplet design.
Though convex base of cooler can always be straightened with piece of glass/other really flat surface, some different grade sandpapers and some work.
 
Hmm! Yes!

I may have a go with the scythe. I am not planning to replace the case for at least three months, so I get to play with the scythe for that time. Thanks! This will be an interesting experiment.

Yep! I bought a Scythe. Thank you for the help. It will be fun to see how it performs. It is some time since I have used a air cooler!
 
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