 We never actually intended to do a review of this cooler. Originally, I was just gonna use it to upgrade the stock cooler that I installed in Edzell's upgraded workstation back around the time I originally built it, almost a year ago. Since our whole room water cooling project is a thing now, though, Ed won't need an air cooler in his workstation anymore. So when Luke asked to borrow this for our MSI Nightblade review, I was like, sure, take it! And then, apparently, you guys liked it so much that you wanted to see a standalone review. So, here we are. With the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor, SSD, or NUC, you could instantly win an Intel gaming jersey and be entered in the draw for the Ultimate System. Click now to learn more. Let's start with a physical tour of the unit. You get the usual awesome NUC2A accessories. Thermal compound, splitter cable, two fans, two low-noise adapters, a mini ITX mounting kit, a case badge, and their standard Sec-Q firm mounting hardware. More on that later. Then you get the heatsink itself, which actually comes with both the NFF12 PWM 120mm fan and the NFB992mm fan pre-mounted to it. Now, the challenge with this little baby was keeping it narrow enough to avoid potential interference with nearby memory slots or VRM solutions on tiny MITX motherboards, while keeping height low enough for half-height or unusual-sized computer cases, and then achieving both of those things with adequate cooling for, you know, high-performance quad-core processors. So, NUC2A went with an aluminum fin array, soldered to four copper heat pipes, then soldered those, again, on the other side, to their, as always, beautiful and shiny baseplate. They then put a clean-looking nickel coating finish over the whole thing, and, I mean, that's tidy, it looks nice and all that, but it's not exactly groundbreaking. No. The really cool stuff with this cooler happens when we start looking at fan mounting options. You probably noticed, I said it comes with both 120mm and 92mm fans that are pre-mounted. Now, you can leave them both on there, giving the cooler a 92mm total profile, or you can actually remove that top fan for reduced performance, but a mere 66mm profile, which gives you some great flexibility in terms of mounting options. Speaking of mounting options, I guess it's time to hand off to Luke to give you guys the Performance Skinny... Get it? It's a joke? Because it's a slim cooler? Ha ha ha! Anyway. Sorry, the Performance and Mounting Rundown on the NHL-12 in both our standard test bench and the size Nightblade Small Form Factor Barebones PC, where we originally showed it to you. Installation of the NH-L12 was incredibly easy, and I was kind of surprised. You don't actually have to worry about that bottom fan. You can just leave it installed, because all you have to do is feed your screwdriver through the little hole on the heat fins on the top, and it goes in between the fins of the fan down below, and lets you screw in a pretty elegant solution, and they definitely thought about this while they were designing it. Okay, so, fairly obviously, it gets crushed in the C70 because it's going up against some pretty big dogs, some dual-rad coolers, and really big towers. When we put it in the Nightblade against the Intel cooler, it crushes there as well, and something to notice here is the zero on the Intel cooler under load isn't because the Intel cooler is magic given to us by some crazy demon, it's because it totally failed. It hit TJ Maxx under load, and I had to stop it before bad things started happening, or it throttled itself to hell. So, and that processor was not even overclocked. The only overclocked one was on the C70, where we were doing our standard test at 1.3 volts, 4.0 GHz, with small FFTs running on Prime95 and Combuster. So, I don't know, pretty good job for a small cooler, and a really good alternative in a small case to a stock Intel cooler, but if you have a full-size cooler, maybe not, but you probably knew that already. Speaking of fans, I am a fan of the way Ting provides their customers with affordable and reliable wireless coverage. They claim that their pay-only-for-what-you-use model will save 98% of people money on their monthly cell phone bill, but you don't have to take their word for it. If you head over to linus.ting.com, you can find their savings calculator, where if you enter your information from the last three wireless bills you've had, they'll let you know what you could have paid if you were on Ting. 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