Noctua NH-L9a is a 37mm tall low profile cooler with no motherboard or ram compatibility issues. The NH-L9a is specific to AMD and NH-L9i to Intel. This is one of the few 37mm tall low profile coolers.
SPECIFICATIONS
| MODEL | NH-L9a-AM5 |
| DIMENSIONS | 114×92×37mm (L×W×H) |
| COMPATIBILITY | AMD: AM4/AM5 |
| MATERIALS | 2x 6mm copper heat-pipes, copper base (nickel plated), aluminium cooling fins |
| WEIGHT | 390g (heatsink only) |
| FANS | 1x Noctua NF-A9x14 HS-PWM, 600~2500 (+/- 10%) |
| RAM CLEARANCE | N/A |
TEST SYSTEM
Testing is carried out on BC1 Mini v2 (open testbench), using the following hardware, in 20°C ambient room temperature. We noise normalised the cooler fan speed to 35dB(A) at distance of 50cm. This helps eliminate brute force cooling from higher RPM fans.
| CASE | BC1 Mini v2 (Open Testbench) |
| MOTHERBOARD | Rog Strix B650E-I Gaming WiFi (paid link) |
| CPU | R7 7800X3D (paid link) |
| CPU COOLER | Noctua NH-L9a (paid link) |
| PSU | Extreme 850R (paid link) |
| RAM | 32GB Gskill Ripjaws S5 DDR5, 6000MHz, CL30 (paid link) |
BENCHMARKS
We run Cinebench R23 multicore (stability test), for period of 30 minutes. This provides worse case scenario for a given CPU. CPU coolers are typically tested across range of CPU’s for data validation and to reduce risk of errors in testing. This also helps account for variables between CPU platforms.