Before I mounted it on the DFI infinity board I did check to see if it would fit on my Gigabyte microATX board that is currently in the GT3 sport case. The limited room that you have with the GT3 case does not interfere with using the NC-U6 cooler.
Before changing out the chipset cooler I made sure that everything was running at the default settings. I used the ITS Smart Guardian to read the temperature of the northbridge.
I then stressed out the system using Orthos once again to get the temperatures up in the system. This raised the northbridge up to 55 degrees in 4 hours.
Upon initial boot up...
Stressing out the system over night (10 hours), I was able to get the temperatures lower on the northbridge than the idle standard temperatures.
Now that things were heated up and then cooled down for a while, the idle temps started to stay around 41 degrees after 5 days. I did set the system to once again run Orthos overnight to see what the northbridge would creep up to after the thermal paste burn in time.
With the full load going about a week later, I am still getting better cooling on the northbridge than with the stock heat sink at idle temps.
Noctua has improved the cooling on the northbridge with a small design. With the motherboard I used for testing I know you would not be able to use every type of heat sink. You need units that don’t overlap the northbridge (Zalman CNPS 9700 for example). The information on the fins is off by one. It says 29 but I counted 28 on the cooler. I would like to see the next ones to come out with a smoother finished surface.
I would like to thank Noctua for sending this sample out.
