Reviews & awards

The Noctua NL-LC1-42 delivers excellent overall performance, coming very close to beating all the liquid coolers in our testing. However, it’s neck and neck with its 360mm counterpart, the NL-LC1-36. The 420mm model was only marginally better in our 200W heat-load test at full load, while both coolers performed virtually identically in our noise-normalised thermal results.

A bigger radiator doesn’t always translate into better performance. One could argue that the 140mm fans on the 420mm radiator should have an advantage over the 120mm fans on the 360mm model, but the situation is a little more complicated. As our charts show, the 120mm NF-A12x25 G2 fans demonstrated better efficiency than the 140mm NF-A14x25 G2 fans.

This is mainly because 120mm fans can naturally generate higher static pressure and are generally better suited to pushing air through restrictive surfaces, such as the dense fin stacks found on radiators. The fans on the NL-LC1-42 can move more air, but they may not push it through a dense radiator as effectively.

Our results also show that the NF-A14x25 G2 fans are almost 5 dB(A) louder than the NF-A12x25 G2 fans. In a nutshell, both coolers performed almost identically in our stress tests. However, that doesn’t make the NL-LC1-42 useless, nor does it automatically make the NL-LC1-36 the better buy. Ultimately, it comes down to the use case.

If you’re pushing your CPU under extreme loads, such as 270W or even 300W+, the larger 420mm radiator can help thanks to its greater surface area. However, even at those higher power levels, the difference between the two remains relatively small.