NT-H1

Personally I’ve found the Noctua naming scheme to be a little hap-hazard, but I’ve recently been enlightened to how they name their products. They all start with ‘N’ for Noctua, followed by the type of product (e.g. ‘F’ for fan), in this case ‘T’ for thermal compound. Then you have a hyphen which is followed by a letter that determines the best attribute of the product. For example, the fans we recently tested have a ‘P’ which stands for pressure. For the heatpaste it’s an ‘H’ for hybrid as the heatpaste contains many different particles creating the paste. The last part is always a number, and tells you either the model number or the size.

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Now that’s covered, we can have a look at the familiar colour scheme of the packaging. In all honesty, the packaging seems a little over-the-top for a small 1.4ml tube of heatpaste, but it does give Noctua the chance to list every single feature of the paste, in every language.

All you get with the package is the tube of heatpaste itself, with no spreading tool unlike with Jetart heatpastes. We still use the mini spatula today that we received with it, and it’s easily the best tool for the job. Without it you’ll either have to use the ‘put some in the middle and squash with your cooler’ method, or ruin a perfectly good bank card spreading the paste. Either way, it would have been nice to see some kind of spreader supplied with the NT-H1.

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The stats make for interesting reading, as the paste is electrically non-conductive which means if you get a little excited and spray too much on and it makes contact with any bare metal, you’ll be safe in with the knowledge that it won’t conduct. Unlike Artic Silvers’ well known 200 hour burn in time where it ‘sets’ and performs its best, the Noctua paste doesn’t need any such time to be working at its peak which makes it ideal for quick tests, although actually a pretty unneeded feature if you think about it as most will be using it for a more permanent solution giving the paste time to burn in. Have you ever checked to see the difference in temperature from first application to a week after?

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The rear of the packet explains the correct way to apply the heatpaste, which is exactly the same as any other, but a boon to anyone who has yet to use heatpaste. You can read about the different methods in our glossary article here