GoKawiilIt was a long wait for Noctua’s NL-LC1 liquid cooler to come to market, but the reward is greater than I imagined. If you prize silence and performance, there is no better AIO.
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For a very long time, many of us have been begging Noctua to build a liquid cooler. In a time when CPUs are becoming ever more powerful, their power consumption is also rising, and air-coolers are often no longer up to the task. However, this was a problem for Noctua’s customers, as the brand has stubbornly not built a liquid cooler – at least until now. Meet the NL-LC1-36, Noctua’s first liquid cooler.
Today we’re reviewing the 360-mm variant, but it also comes in 240mm and 420mm flavors.
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Let’s start with the elephant in the room: At its core, this is not a liquid cooler designed 100% in-house by Noctua – it’s an Asetek cooler with some Noctua touches. This may be a bit of a let-down, especially for Noctua purists – up until now, every product that had a name in Noctua’s nomenclature, such as NL-LC1-36, or NH-D15 G2, or NF-A12x25 G2, was 100% designed and built in-house by Rascom and Kolink, the two owners of the Noctua brand.
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Keen readers will note that there is a Noctua case, Noctua PSU, and Noctua GPUs, but that’s not entirely accurate. The Antec Flux Pro Noctua Edition, Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition, and Asus Noctua Edition GPUs are all, as their name implies, Noctua-Edition products, which are not strictly speaking a core part of Noctua’s own lineup, and they do not carry Noctua’s typical nomenclature.
What’s really going on here is something we’ll get into later, but for now, let’s dive into the box and see what we’ve got on the test bench.
Specifications
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