Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 chromax.Black, Premium Low-Profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM5 (Black)

This review doesn't exist in a vacuum, as I tried almost every other cooler at this size constraint, and the others don't perform as well. The total mass of the unit, the AM5-optimized hot-spot dissipation, and the manufacturers obsessive commitment to noise reduction = the best AM5 CPU cooler under 40mm. The competition is both louder and less efficient, as they either haven't optimized for the AM5 hot-spots or don't have enough total mass to soak the heat for air transfer. And just to add more QOL improvements, the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 has the easiest installation, the best fit and finish, clear and detailed instructions, field-leading thermal paste, and additional hardware for mounting taller fans. As always, they include their "low-noise" adapter cable, in a tidy little package that exude quality.

This has been my cooler for my daily driver PC. I have had no issues with heat throttling, noise levels are fine. Build quality is what you would expect from anything Noctua. Installation process is quick and easy.

Great quality which you'd come to expect from Noctua as always. Very much meant for the smallest of small builds as it barely clears a basic vram heatsink in terms of height. Noctua level of quiet, barely can tell the fan is spinning sometimes. Can be a bit tricky to install but a lot easier than some other coolers on the market. If you need an incredibly small cpu cooler for the smallest of small pc builds, this is the one without a doubt.

There is a lot of confusion out there regarding AM5 processors and the higher temps being seen by people, regardless of the cooling solution they use. Noctua are the kings of air cooling in a lot of regards, and I use their products in almost all of my air cooled builds. I recently converted a tower mATX build into a rack mounted chassis so I could free up some desk space. Thus I needed a low profile cooling solution to cool my 7600X since the chassis I built in was only 2U. I obviously went with a Noctua solution, the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5. The server is used to run a Minecraft and Valheim server simultaneously, so there is always some load on the processor even when nobody is actively logged into either server. Temps at "idle" are usually around 60-65C, with spikes going as high as 95-100C. However those higher temperatures are only spikes, with the processor generally settling around 65-75C. The way these AM5 processors work is that they will ramp up power and clock speeds until they hit ~95C under a load, and then scale back so as to not ever go over that thermal maximum and cause damage the processor. It will go as fast as it can without going beyond that ~95C mark. So in a sense, the AM5 processors will fight against the cooling solution in order to get you the most performance without damaging the processor. This leads to higher idle and load temperatures. Some of this can be artificially controlled using BIOS/UEFI settings to limit what kind of temperature target you want to hit. Some of these options may vary depending on your motherboard manufacturer. However, the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 is not doing a "bad job" if you are seeing higher than "normal" temperatures (i.e. temperatures you saw with AM4), as some reviewers would have you believe. The processor will be adjusting its power consumption and clock speeds so that it gives you the most performance that the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 (or any cooler) can handle, unless you make changes to the default behavior of the processor manually. THAT is why people are seeing idle and load temps between 65-100C. All in all, I am happy with the Noctua NH-L9a-AM5's ability to cool my 7600X in such a small space with limited airflow. I did swap out the included low-profile fan for a Noctua NF-A9 to give it a little more fan power, but I can't really tell the difference in temps between that and the included fan.

keeps the cpu cool and runs quietly

Got this to fit in the terra fractal SFF case, fits great and runs mostly quiet. Temps are around 40-60 under light load and gets up to 70 under heavy load. I keep the pc at my feet and dont hear it at all during idle and cant hear it through my headphones while gaming.

You kind of have to awkwardly wobble it to screw it, seems they could've come up with something to make it a tad less annoying but I wouldn't really know. Other than that it's really silent and keeps low temps! great low profile cooler.

works just fine, no issues