3-Way Low Profile CPU Cooling Shoot-Out: Reeven, Phanteks, & Noctua

Testing Results, Low Fan Speed (7 Volts)

Switching things up, let's take a look at cooling performance with the fans brought down to 7 Volts, for a look at performance with quieter operation.

As you'd expect, the average thermal resistance rises with the reduced airflow. The Noctua is still in a league of its own here due to its size. Meanwhile the Phanteks struggles some, as it comes in at the bottom of this chart.

Core temperatures still look good, though. With the Noctua well in the lead, the other two coolers are only about 19C over ambient at 60W, which bodes particularly well for quiet computing at stock clocks.

While we had to skip two of our highest wattage tests here - these low profile coolers simply aren't meant for highly overclocked & overvolted processors - ultimately the results from our tests show that all of the coolers are sufficient for their jobs. Though smaller, neither the Phanteks or Reeven coolers would have any issue cooling a modern processor running at stock speed, even in low airflow environments. Again, the Reeven Steropes has the advantage over the Phanteks TC12LS in terms of raw thermal performance, but the latter is significantly quieter, reaching virtually inaudible noise levels.

As for the Noctua NH-C14S, with its fans running at low speed, the performance gap between the NH-C14S and the other horizontal coolers widened greatly, to the point that it would be unfair to make any comparisons at all. The NH-C14S is only comparable to large tower coolers, thermally outperforming even very large coolers with much greater mass. The noise output of the NF-A14 fan under these conditions is very low and should be barely noticeable in a very quiet room.