 For years, Noctua has sat basically unchallenged as the king of air coolers. But as they say, cost, noise, and performance, pick two. Their products have never been, well, budget friendly, at least until now. Meet Noctua's first foray into a value line of CPU coolers. It's a trimmed down version of the excellent NH-U12S called the NH-U12S Redux. But do the cost savings correspond to a big drop in performance? Historically, Noctua has never let us down, but just to be sure, we did the math. Just like Ridge Wallet did the math on a 10% discount and free worldwide shipping using Opera Code Linus for one of their great tradition-busting compact and RFID blocking wallets. Check them out down below. If someone were to ask me, what's the best bang for the buck CPU cooler, I would say, well, your stock cooler, because literally anything over zero is going to be infinite bang for the buck. If you asked for best in class, however, the NH-U12S is a standout. And not because I'm some kind of fanboy. It's just time and time again, it's proven to be reliable, quiet and performant. There are cheaper options like the ever popular Hyper 212 series, but if you want the full package, this is where it's at. And the new Redux version definitely makes some compromises, giving you just what you need and not a lick more. Think you might upgrade your CPU down the line? Be ready to shell out for a tombothermal paste because the pre-applied NTH1 on the Redux is a one-shot deal. Extra fan clips, gone. Y-splitter and low noise adapters, they're gone too. Everything extraneous has gotten the ax. And removing parts from the box isn't all they've done. In fact, the cooler itself is completely different. One of the five heat pipes has been dropped out right and the soldering step that bonds those pipes to both the thin stack and to the copper cold plate has been issued to keep costs under control. This absolutely will reduce the thermal transfer capacity. I mean, think about it logically, dropping 20% of your heat pipes can't be good for performance. And neither can downgrading your fan. Although that one might not end up being a huge problem. When the first Redux fans came out, my biggest complaint was that while they saved on cost and looked great in a gray on gray color scheme, there was no pressure optimized 120 millimeter version. Fortunately, that's been rectified with the new NFP12 Redux. The P is for pressure and it runs it up to 1700 RPM. So that extra 200 rip-ems should help make up some ground in terms of performance, but will almost definitely come at the cost of more noise. And here's why. To hit this lower price point, Noctua cut some corners, primarily by using their older SSO bearing design instead of the current SSO2. SSO stands for self-stabilizing oil pressure bearing, which essentially means that the fan center shaft rotates in pressurized oil with that pressure being generated by the rotation of the fan itself. So fundamentally it's an oil supported sleeve bearing with some bonus magnetic axial support. SSO2 is an evolution that mostly improves the startup characteristics of the fan, which happens to be where most of the wear occurs because the oil hasn't had time to pressurize yet. Once they're up and running though, the differences should be minimal. Also absent is the inner surface micro structure in the frame. Although the trailing edges of the blades do get their vortex control notches, which is great because while they don't actually reduce the amount of noise the fan makes, they shift the pitch, so one that isn't as annoying to the ear. Thankfully, the install experience of the Redux is exactly what I've come to expect from Noctua. Secufirm still makes everything else feel cheap and confusing by comparison. And another bonus that you might not actually know about is that if you wanna upgrade your current system to the latest and greatest in the future, you can. You'll probably have to cover shipping costs, but Noctua will send out new mounting hardware free of charge if your old Noctua cooler won't fit your new build, which by the way is going to be a lot of their customers with both Intel and AMD set to change sockets for the next generation. But which one should you buy? To find out, we pitted a ChromeX Black U12S against one of the new Redux units over a 20 minute Blender render with a steady 150 watts of load generated by a Core i7-8700K. And surprisingly, both of them performed essentially the same with our results falling into our margin of error of one to two degrees. When we added a second fan to each cooler, the temps dropped two to three degrees as we expected because we're good boys and Red Noctua's literature ahead of time. As a we aside by the way, the anti-vibration bumpers in the kit are extra thick for some reason. This spaces the fan off of the fins by about five millimeters and we don't know exactly why. At first we thought it could be something to increase flow through the cooler, but our performance numbers didn't give us any conclusive answer. So I suspect that it's an acoustic choice. Speaking of acoustics, that is where the meat of this comparison lies. We tested every possible permutation of fans, single and dual, as well as measuring from both the intake and exhaust sides. And the results at idle show both coolers performing the same within 0.1 decibels. Wow, Noctua's quiet reputation holds up perfectly as expected. However, when the going gets tough, the Redux's fan's higher speed makes its presence known with a five decibel increase in output. Now, if you watched our previous ChromeX Black video, check that out if you haven't by the way, we explained that decibels are a logarithmic value, not a linear one, which means that five decibels equates to about a 40% increase in perceived volume. So it is definitely noticeable. But in low to moderate workloads, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Perhaps you could use the savings to invest in a gaming headset with excellent noise isolation. Or if you already have one of those, some sweet tech gear from lttstore.com. Where does that leave us then? For noise, a little worse. That's definitely the low light of this product. But it only shows up when you're really pushing things to the limit and with nearly a 30% savings in cost for almost the same performance, it is pretty easy to recommend. That is as long as you're not over-volting your CPU. So conclusion, we don't review coolers very often these days, but we felt that this one was both important and interesting enough to get the full treatment. And I'm glad we did, because it's gonna make a lot of bang for the buck system builders extremely happy. Just like our sponsor is gonna make me and you both happy. 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Well, that's it for this look at Noctua's first budget conscious cooler. Finally, there's a cheap option to get their excellent hardware into your system. If you guys enjoyed this video and you're looking for something else to watch, let's go to the polar opposite end of the spectrum where we did a build guide in a case that has an integrated phase change cooler. So here's your budget. That's your not so budget, but it was sub zero. Sub zero wins.