More heatpipes the better

The heatsink comes packaged is a cardboard backed plastic box. The heatsink is on show, and on the back you’ll find a random red haired smiling woman.

Included in the box, you’ll find a press mount bracket, a clip mount bracket, the cooler itself, a spacing foam sticker, thermal paste and an installation manual.

The spacing foam is used if your chipset doesn’t have an integrated heatspreader. This stops the edges of the chipset silicon being chipped and damaged. Nice to see that Noctua are supporting both varieties of chips.

There are two standard ways of installing a heatsink on a chipset. The first is to have 4 holes around the chip and use screws or push clip mounts that hold the HSF in place. The other method is to have loops on the board in similar positions which the HSF hooks underneath. Some motherboards don’t have either or only have 2 loops or holes. If you have a motherboard with neither of the two mounting options, you won’t be able to use the NC-U6.

The cooler is well made, and everything is finished well, and you can see the thought that has gone into it, and the quality of manufacturing.

The bottom of the heatsink is shiny, but there are obvious machine marks. As the chipset is far from the hottest part of your PC, the machine marks shouldn’t be a huge issue. The bottom of the NC-U6 is smooth to the touch however.

Recently, heatpipes have been the de facto standard for a good cooler, and Noctua have put these thermal carrying pathways into their chipset cooler. Often times, even a seasoned gamer and overclocker will leave the stock heatsink onto their chipset, which often limits the max overclock that you can acquire.