Noctua NH-U12P SE2 CPU Cooler and NF-P14 FLX 140mm Fan

A Closer Look

Luckily for us, our Gladiator 600 mid-tower case has an access port so one can change out any CPU or CPU cooler without having to remove the motherboard and we love this feature.  Now let’s prepare for installing the Noctua NH-U12P SE 2.

As you can see the backplate is installed easily and the bolts are ready to install the spacers on for the mounting bars.

Now to install the cooler onto the CPU cooler’s mounting bars and to tighten them down with the supplied thumbscrews.

As you can see, the cooler itself has only two screws to tighten down.  They hold the Noctua cooler securely so it cannot move at all – unlike ThermalRight Ultra 120 and Hyper 212 Plus which will move slightly on the contact plate if you twist it.  There are also two rubber strips on each side of the cooler that insulate it from the fan to reduce any vibration.

This time we had no issues installing the fans onto the clips even with a lack of room in our mid-tower Gladiator 600 case.  The clips are designed so well that it is relatively easy to install both fans.  It is very similar to our ThermalRight Ultra120 which clips on easily also and quite unlike the nightmare we encountered with the clips for Hyper 212 Plus.

In just a few minutes we easily clipped both fans to the heatsink.

Here it is with the side case panel on:

As you can see, the case side panel will not accommodate a fan inside your case although you could install it on the outside of your case (for a rather ghetto look).  Here we are using the Noctua NF-P14 FLX 140mm fan as a quieter replacement for a Cooler Master 120mm case fan to direct more air toward cooling the GTX 280 plus 8800-GTX in PhysX pair of hot running video cards and also our hot Core i7 920 overclocked to 4.0 GHz .  Four case fans are cooling our Gladiator 600 case.