 They finally did it! 10 years ago, I complained to Noctua that their products were great, but simply too ugly to use for my own personal projects. Well, back in 2015, we partnered with them to launch their first all-black consumer fans, which was a big step in the right direction. And now, four years later, we're back at it with something even bigger. Not this, this is ugly. Meet the LTT editions of Noctua's first ever lineup of all-black coolers. The first 5,000 units of each, the ChromeX Black, NH-D15, and NH-U12S, will have some special extras included and will help support us here at LTT. So, in today's video, we're gonna give you guys a close look at them and also make sure that they match both the excellent thermal performance and low sound levels that we have come to expect from Noctua's ugly products. Speaking of things you should have come to expect, this segue to our sponsor, GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off at the link below. Now, it's no secret that I'm a huge Noctua fan boy. Sorry. Pond to side, any fandom that I have of any company is going to be out of respect, not because there's like an emotional attachment and there's a reason that I hold Noctua in such high regard. There's a reason that I hold Noctua in such high regard. There's a reason that I hold Noctua in such high regard. There's a reason that I hold Noctua in such high regard. Their Secufirm 2 mounting system, which by the way, like the fan included and the heat sink itself, is now all black down to every single mounting plate and screw is still by far my favorite solution when it comes to keeping a large, heavy tower cooler firmly planted on a CPU. And as we showed in our recent video, their performance is on par or better than AIO water coolers in the same price bracket or in some cases, even higher ones. And their ugly fans are the standard that other fans are measured to from a performance perspective anyway. The only reason that their products have been relegated to test bench duty for me is that I confess, I like a little bit of flash with my dash. And until now, they haven't had anything in their CPU cooler lineup that's even close enough to the visual appeal of other solutions to justify the couple degrees of better performance or a few decibels of lower acoustics, at least until now. Let's open it up. Oh, it looks so good. There's nothing on it that isn't black. Wires, sleeving, heat shrink, connectors, screws, even the retainers here are black, which is gonna kinda make you wonder, if this was such an obvious problem and such an easy solution, why didn't they hurry up and do this before? Well, because as it turns out, it's actually not an especially easy solution. Now, there are lots of different ways to attach heat pipes to a CPU cooler's base. And the heat pipes are what are responsible for quickly moving the heat away from your processor to the cooling fins, which are responsible for dissipating the heat to the surrounding air. But no way of attaching them is as reliant or performant as soldering them. Now, soldering heat pipes is already a tricky matter because think about it for a second. These are sealed tubes with fluid inside that are designed to transfer heat away from where it's being applied. So doing it safely without them exploding isn't as simple as whipping out a torch and just going for it. So then, wait, you wanna put a coating on these things, adding yet another layer of complexity? For what? Just for looks? Are you crazy? That's a very knock to a way of thinking. But I and the thousands of other enthusiasts who sadly do care about these things finally got through to them. So much of the R&D for this product went into finding a way to manufacture the ChromeX Black lineup with the same performance and consistency as the regular versions that don't have to deal with that added layer of complexity here. And knock to a claims that they did it. So to validate their claims, we have both the big boy NH-D15 dual tower cooler, and for the more space conscious of you, we also have the NH-U12S with a single 120 millimeter fan and a heckin' ton of clearance for your PCI slots and your RAM. There's an extra little note in the box, little letter from LTT, as well as some LTT stickers for the hubs of your fans, or you can throw them on your case if you want. And these sexy orange rubber anti-vibration pads. Of course, the original black ones are also included in the box. There's also an NH-D9i, but there's no LTT edition of that one. So that was some movie magic right there. We have replaced the stock black pads with the orange ones so you can see what they're gonna look like in their LTT edition goodness. Now let's head over to the workshop and make sure they're actually worth buying compared to the originals. So step one of putting these things through their paces is building up a test bench that is really going to challenge them. So this right here is Intel's furnace of a CPU, the Extreme Edition 9980XC 18 core. And we're gonna be using AIDA64 stress test to compare both the OGNHD 15 and U12S to their new all black counterparts. So for the sake of simplicity, we actually tested our products as they came in the box. So that is with only one fan installed and no low noise adapters. This way we can also have a look at how much benefit there is to having two cooling towers versus just a single one. All right, so now it's time for the results guys. First up, thermals. Each of our coolers was allowed to run for 10 minutes to hit thermal equilibrium. And we repeated the tests three times, remounting the coolers between each run. So between the two U12S's, our black cooler actually came out on top with an average temperature 1.7 degrees cooler than the raw version. With the NHD 15s however, we saw the opposite with the raw cooler beating out the black version by about 1.3 degrees. Now here's the thing guys, considering the 20% variability in RPM from one knock to a fan to the next, that's their manufacturing tolerance and the variance that we saw from run to run, particularly on our NHD 15s, we think it's safe to say at this point that buying black versus raw is not going to yield a performance difference one way or the other. But that doesn't answer the question of how they compare acoustically. The problem is we have no way of testing that here. I mean, even somewhere like this empty workshop has this transformer. You hear that buzzing? That is so much louder than these coolers that we would have no way of getting an accurate measurement of them. Fortunately, we've got friends in high places and our buddies over at Simon Fraser University graciously gave us access to their world-class Satomo antenna testing chamber. This chamber is normally used to map the transmission patterns of antenna designs for all types of devices, from tiny IOT things all the way up to satellites. And it's actually a happy little accident that it happens to work so well for acoustic testing as it's designed to prevent radio waves from reflecting around the room, as well as preventing any from entering from the outside. It's actually one big Faraday cage. So we're back and the data is really interesting. So once again, there is a difference between our silver and our black heatsinks, but this time the superior performance actually goes completely the other way around, which appears to validate our previous theory that the temperature differences that we observed yesterday pretty much came down to the fan spinning a little slower or a little faster, depending on the manufacturing tolerances. So then bottom line, they're as good as they're supposed to be. So how do you get one? Great question. The first couple batches of units out of Noctua's manufacturing facilities are all going to be LTT edition with the extra stickers, the orange mounting pads, and all that good stuff. And these will exclusively be available on Noctua's official Amazon stores while supplies last. After October 22nd, 2019, Noctua will begin shipping regular ones that are just all black. And those may end up being mixed in with the LTT edition ones at the Amazon warehouse. After that time, you'll need to check Noctua's eBay store where they're gonna try and keep a few of these around even after that date for anyone who's a little late to the game. Speaking of late to the game, I'm never late to the Segway game. Make your walls look awesome with our sponsor for today's video, Displate. They're posters made out of metal. They're three millimeters thick. They've got bent edges so that you don't accidentally slice open your fingers. And they've got a matte finish that looks absolutely fantastic. The best thing about Displate though, is the mounting system. They use a magnetic mounting system that makes it easy to swap out the art in your place, make small adjustments if something, you know, could stand to be shifted to the left or adjusted a bit. And this is really cool. They've got over 15,000 artists who have contributed to over a quarter million different designs. For each Displate sold, they will plant 10 trees. They offer hassle-free returns, they're pre-gift wrap, and they've actually partnered with Cyberpunk 2077 to do a collection of Cyberpunk themed artwork. So go check it out and use code LTT to save 15% at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. I hope you're as excited about the LTT edition coolers as we are. If you're looking for another video to watch, maybe check out the one where we actually compared the raw versions against water coolers with some pretty surprising results.