Noctua NH-P1 Passive CPU Cooler – Fanless

An excellent, well made product that performed as promised. It occupies quite a bit of space, although it fits well on the motherboard.

Da der Lüfter in meinem Mini-PC ZOTAC IQ01 mit Intel I7 Prozessor und 1150 Sockel immer lauter wurde und jetzt zum dritten Mal getauscht werden wollte, habe ich mich entschlossen, eine passive Kühlung zu montieren.
Die Umrüstung ging relativ einfach, dank der sehr guten, dem Kühlkörper beiliegenden, Beschreibung.
Es war nicht ganz leicht, das Motherboard aus dem PC auszubauen. Das ist notwendig, um die rückseitige Montageplatte des Kühlers zu installieren. Das Gewicht mit > 1KG schon enorm für so einen kleinen PC.
Trotz sommerlicher Temperaturen liegt die Temperatur der CPU zwischen 43° und 53°.
Im Büro herrscht jetzt wohltuende Ruhe! 🙂 und ich frage mich, warum in den Kühlkörper nicht schon viel eher gekauft habe. Sollte ich mir mal einen anderen PC zulegen, kann ich den Kühlkörper auf ganz viele verschiedene CPUś motieren – das Geld ist also langfristig sehr gut angelegt.
Mein Fazit ist eine klare Kaufempfehlung!

This heat sink was exactly what I was looking for and it probably just comes down to personal preference for most. I honestly wish passive cooling was more prolific in the PC building world. I was trying to go for a quieter build and the stock AMD cooler is pretty loud and would fluctuate constantly. This keeps my average temps lower and less fluctuation. It fit in my case(Antec P180 mini) perfectly with my semi-passive setup. 3800X and 2070S. Noise and temps are lower plus no moving parts, which was worth $120 to me. I also like the look of it. No more stupid RGB.
Update: upgraded to 5700X3D and 4070S. Noise and temps still superb.

We don’t have a ton of passive coolers on the market anymore, but I’m glad we have this one. The tolerances are tight, it’s easy to install, and it works much better than I expected.

I’m running a 5800x3D in the same case as a 3080 ti. This isn’t the coldest running system, but this cooler has kept my cpu under 65 C while under load. I do have two Noctua fans in the front of my case that provide a small amount of airflow, but that seems to be more than enough in side of my NZXT 510. This case is notoriously bad with air flow, but this cooler handles it like a champ.

Keep in mind that higher end chips with higher TDP will require a tower that has some sort of active airflow. If you’re looking at purchasing this cooler you should already know how to set your fan curves accordingly.

If you plan on using this in tandem with a totally passive build proceed with caution when dealing with any cpu that has a TDP higher than 100 watts. It will run well for a while, but you will fall out of boost clocks when the cooler gets heat soaked.

I’m a big fan of this cooler, because I can set my fan curve to keep my fans off under most light to moderate loads. This also has the added benefit of no moving parts. No fan to go bad, no pump to clog, and no water levels to maintain. I will be long gone before this cooler goes through enough heat/cooling cycles have an effect on performance.

Having already done a couple of water-cooled systems, and a couple of air cooled NH-D15 systems, I wanted to do something different. This thing is massive, and the heat pipes on the side look like Freddy Kreuger’s claw is holding up this massive heatsink. It does exactly what it is supposed to: dissipate heat upwards with little to no assistance from fans. Paired with a properly ventilated case, it’s a more than viable solution. I paired it with an I5-12600K that is not overclocked, and load temps are in the mid 70’s. My computer has 5 fans that are truly “silent” meaning less than 7 decibels. A lot of fans are sold as “quiet” or “silent” that are banging out 19 db which is preposterous. Anyway, with minimal airflow this thing is working exactly as intended. It is not meant for high TDP processors, or high voltage, overclocked systems. I am probably going to undervolt my system at Intel stock clocks to bring down the temps a little bit. Noctua wins again.

I bought this to build a 100% silent PC using an Intel Core i5-12600K CPU. It works much better than I expected. Although my initial plans were to buy a Core i5-12600T, I had so much trouble finding one that I decided to get a 12600K after realising it has the 4 efficiency cores, and manually limit the power. I started out limiting PL1/PL2/Tau to 40W/80W/40 sec, but I very quickly realised that I could run the CPU at the default power limits with only minimal overheating issues, so then I experimented with undervolting the CPU, and I have settled on a stable system using Adaptive voltage mode and an offset -135 mV. At these settings, I have been able to hit a Cinebench R23 multicore benchmark of 17513, with max power draw of about 100 W and a max CPU temp of about 87-88 C under sustained 100% load. My PC has no moving parts and is dead silent. 0 dBA SPL.

This is the first time I’ve actually installed a CPU cooler from bare metal. All previous CPUs I’ve bought had the stock Intel cooler. Although I was a little nervous about getting the thermal paste right, it seems to be working perfectly on the first try. I’m using a Gigabyte Z690 UD AX DDR5 motherboard and a Thermaltake Core P3 chassis, with a Seasonic PX-500 fanless PSU.