When it comes to air cooling and fans Noctua has been extremely reliable over the years and has been an easy go-to when doing builds. Especially because noise is very important to me. Keeping noise down in the office helps with testing and more importantly helps with my sanity. So with builds it's not unusual for me to change fans over to Noctua. With them having nice blacked-out fans has helped with that as well. For my wife's last PC I went with a crazy custom water cooling loop which looked amazing. But I would have to take it all apart and clean everything multiple times a year and performance would drop as the “show” coolant would fall out and clock things up. That’s fine for my PC maybe, but when it's my wife’s PC it needs to just work. So this time around I went with an air cooler, Noctua’s NH-U12A chromax.black. It was the largest cooler I could fit in her system and I knew it would meet our needs for cooling and noise performance and it has. But before doing that I did bring the NH-U12A over on to our test bench to see how it performs in an even more demanding situation. Let’s go see what the NH-U12A is all about and how it performed.