Cooling
Keeping everything cool in your PC is always important but it is doubly important when you are working in a case as small as the TU-100. Last time I went with a heatsink from Thermalright and it performed perfectly. This time around I was hoping to save a little more space so I went with Noctua’s low profile heatsink, the NH-L9i. The I means this is the Intel model, Noctua also offers an AMD specific model. I could have made the Thermalright cooler fit, but the Noctua has a total height of 37mm’s including its fan leaving as much room as possible in the case itself for overall airflow. With everything being packed into such a small space, having room for air to move is very important. The NH-L9i is noticeably shorter than a stock cooler even and from the look of it there is actually has more heatsink surface area.
The NH-L9i came in a much smaller box than the normal Noctua heatsinks. When you open it all up everything is perfectly in order with each part having its place cut out in the foam. There are a surprisingly low number of parts all together actually, partly due to Noctua splitting up the models between Intel and AMD. You get a low speed fan adapter, metal painted Noctua case badge, four mounting screws a full tube of Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste, and the heatsink itself of course. The installation instructions are tucked up in the lid of the box as well.
With the heatsink out I can finally see how amazingly low profile the design is. To go with the short heatsink Noctua used a new low profile fan design as well that fits the heatsink perfectly. Each corner of the fan has rubber pads to keep any vibration the fan might create from vibrating anything else in your PC. This is especially important with this design because if you flip the heatsink over they used an extremely simple mount design that isn’t going to absorb any vibration. I will talk a little more about the actual installation in our final article though.
