Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 chromax.Black, Premium Low-Profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM5 (Black)

There is a lot of confusion out there regarding AM5 processors and the higher temps being seen by people, regardless of the cooling solution they use.Noctua are the kings of air cooling in a lot of regards, and I use their products in almost all of my air cooled builds. I recently converted a tower mATX build into a rack mounted chassis so I could free up some desk space. Thus I needed a low profile cooling solution to cool my 7600X since the chassis I built in was only 2U. I obviously went with a Noctua solution, the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5.The server is used to run a Minecraft and Valheim server simultaneously, so there is always some load on the processor even when nobody is actively logged into either server.Temps at "idle" are usually around 60-65C, with spikes going as high as 95-100C. However those higher temperatures are only spikes, with the processor generally settling around 65-75C.The way these AM5 processors work is that they will ramp up power and clock speeds until they hit ~95C under a load, and then scale back so as to not ever go over that thermal maximum and cause damage the processor. It will go as fast as it can without going beyond that ~95C mark. So in a sense, the AM5 processors will fight against the cooling solution in order to get you the most performance without damaging the processor. This leads to higher idle and load temperatures.Some of this can be artificially controlled using BIOS/UEFI settings to limit what kind of temperature target you want to hit. Some of these options may vary depending on your motherboard manufacturer.However, the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 is not doing a "bad job" if you are seeing higher than "normal" temperatures (i.e. temperatures you saw with AM4), as some reviewers would have you believe. The processor will be adjusting its power consumption and clock speeds so that it gives you the most performance that the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 (or any cooler) can handle, unless you make changes to the default behavior of the processor manually. THAT is why people are seeing idle and load temps between 65-100C.All in all, I am happy with the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5's ability to cool my 7600X in such a small space with limited airflow. I did swap out the included low-profile fan for a Noctua NF-A9 to give it a little more fan power, but I can't really tell the difference in temps between that and the included fan.

I bought this for a new PC build with limited space. It was simple to install. A little frustrating getting the screws in the threads. Not an issue with the product but it was tough to line it up. It is very quiet also. That was important because I plan to have this PC in my entertainment center.

You kind of have to awkwardly wobble it to screw it, seems they could've come up with something to make it a tad less annoying but I wouldn't really know.Other than that it's really silent and keeps low temps! great low profile cooler.

Cools my 7500f perfectly

Easily fit into my 2U chassis. The stock cooler was well above the size for my chassis. This fit right in no problem. I did some research and it's a bit warmer than stock, but not by too much, so it's not a big deal. This isn't meant for extreme overclocking, it's mostly meant for tight spaces, which this excels.

The fan comes with four sets of screws. The screws go in the back of the MB. It is VERY tricky holding the fan on the chip after applying thermopaste while setting the screws. In defense of Noctua, you can't expect a low profile fan to have a clamping system. What would have been helpful is a plastic "frame like" device to keep the fan centered or maybe some click-in guides at the holes.

I'm using this cooler on a R7 7800X3D in my mini ITX build. I replaced a thermalright axp90-x47 full copper with it, not because it performs better (it doesn't, but its not much worse and considerable shorter), but because the axp90-x47 got too close to my side panel and produced a lot of turbulence. If you can fit the axp90-x47 full copper I'd go with that and replace the fan with the one that comes with the NH-L9a, but otherwise you can't go wrong with the noctua.

I had purchased a highly recommended NH-U14S for use with my B650E Taichi AM5 motherboard. I got it all set up and it just barely fit with enough room to close the side of my case again. After about an hour of running my new 7700X with it, I couldn't take the constant spin-up of the fan everytime I so much as opened a webpage, so I bought this cooler and waited for it to arrive.The installation for this was incredibly easy on my AM5 board. You just put 4 screws through the backplate into the fan (after you apply a dot of thermal grease) and tighten.Unfortunately the fan speed-up continued to happen even when doing the smallest task like opening VSCode or Firefox. Browsing from page to page in Firefox lead to an extremely irritating fan-speed rollercoaster that is quite distracting not just for me, but anyone in the living room trying to watch TV.It turns out the 7700x and above run on much higher wattage than is necessary and you can adjust the power + critical temperatures down without sacrificing much if any of the performance.After first installing this cooler the temperature of my cpu bounced around from 75 to 95 celsius pretty much constantly. Idling almost never went below 70 which is not great because the fan spins pretty decently at that temperature and it isn't dead quiet. This was basically the same as the previous much larger fan and heatsink.Once I adjusted the BIOS power settings I'm now able to type this review up at a decent 48 degrees with no discernable fan sound.It will still spin up hard if I fire up a game, but I'm not sure there's a fan out there that will be able to cool an AM5 processor without making any sound because they just run so hot. All in all this is a good deal, I'm just bummed that AMD made it such a hard problem to have a quiet fast machine with their new designs.