If you’re the type who considers a trip to the BIOS standard fare for a reboot, and carefully considers the potential vdroop when choosing a motherboard; chances are that you may have heard of Noctua. Designed in Austria, Noctua has carved out an interesting niche - cooling products that strike the elusive balance between cooling power and silence. If you are the type who buys retail box CPU’s because the heatsink is included, perhaps you haven’t.
Today we will be looking at their latest NH-U series CPU cooler, the NH-U12P. When using the included NF-P12 fan, you’ve got a combo that promises cooler temperatures and lower noise at the same time. Since everyone talks about the packaging, I’ll touch upon it briefly. The NH-U12P comes very well packed. The shipping box was heavily damaged during shipping, but the contents within were securely packaged and entirely undamaged.

We’re going to touch on the marketing stat sheet first. Noctua builds the NH-U12P with:

The NH-U12P is large. If you’re working with a SFF (small form factor) or other pint-sized case, you can probably cross the Noctua off the list. The height of the heatsink is 158 mm, so if you aren’t sure if it will fit, measure the distance from your motherboard to the top of the case. If its less than 165mm or so, you are probably out of luck.
Noctua’s SecuFirm mounting system consists of a surprising variety of socket supports. With included support for LGA 775 (most modern Intel processors), AM2, AM2+, as well as Intel Xeon, AMD K8 (754, 939, 940) & Socket F on request. It is very straightforward to install, simply place the retention plate on the underside of the motherboard and then attach the legs on the top side. From there, you mount the cooler and screw it in using the high tension screws.

A bit of advice to those who end up purchasing the NH-U12P is to do the installation in this order:
Install all the hardware that directly attaches to the motherboard first, install it in your case, then attach the heatsink to the support legs. If you do a complete installation (heatsink attached) before placing your motherboard in your case, you may have a hard time screwing it on to the risers.

Because of its “raised fin-stack” design, there is plenty of clearance between the motherboard and the heatsink. This means that (depending on orientation), you aren’t going to have any issues clearing motherboard chipset coolers or RAM heatsinks.