the Noctua nhd14 widely regarded as one of if not the
best air cooler on the market this is a six heat pipe dual tower cooler that
includes a 140 millimeter fan in the
center between the two towers a 120 millimeter fan on the outside of one of
the towers and then should you show so desire i believe you can actually
install an additional 120 millimeter fan
on the other tower so this isn't a push pull kit well rather
push pull push configuration because this one's doing pushing and pulling
through radiator or heat sink fins
and uh down here make contact with the CPU somewhere in there you can see that
they've cleverly designed the height to be just barely acceptable for high
high profile memory modules such as the mushkin
red lines that i am using here today
all right so i have for the longest time wanted to test this CPU heatsink against
this CPU liquid cooling unit so this is
the Corsair h70 it is a high fin density
high thickness single 120 millimeter radiator liquid cooling system so i can
tell you guys right now any thin low profile radiators uh system such as a
cooled eco or an h50 is going to get smoked by this bad boy i mean it's
fairly simple science at this point more surface area
far less surface area for the uh for the thin profile
radiator liquid cooling units so that's that ain't going to happen for them but
the h70 might stand a chance so what i'm going to be doing today
is i'm going to take the h well first i'm going to test the nhd14 on my 4.7
gigahertz uh core i7 2600k this is with
a fair over fair bit of over voltage so we've got a fair bit of heat to
dissipate here i'm going to first test the nhd14 in its stock configuration
then i'm going to take this 120mm fan
another nfp12 i believe it is a 1300 or whatever
it's called the the 1 1300 RPM um
pressure span so the one with the blades like that not the other one and i'm going to
install two of those on the h70 and see how it performs compared to the
nhd14 i'm very excited about this because the ah 70 is the highest
performance single 120 millimeter liquid cooling pre-filled unit and the nhd14 as
i mentioned before is one of the highest performing air coolers on the market so
let's see which one wins in this heavyweight tilt
so here i am running eight instances of prime95 on my core i7 2600k so my max
core temperature is 74 degrees and the minimum one is 68 so we're going to call
it sort of somewhere in that 68 to 75
now 68 to 75 degree range
on the nh d14
so i just put the h70 with the two Noctua fans onto the CPU you can see
temperatures are a touch higher already and you have to note that unlike an air
cooler where the heat pipes basically reach their maximum temperature heat
carrying efficiency etc right off the bat a liquid cooling unit actually takes
a while to reach equilibrium where the liquid inside has to heat up to the
point where it increases the efficiency with which the
radiator can exchange the heat between the water and the air
and the higher the temperature of the liquid inside the more heat is able to
be exchanged until it reaches a point where it no longer continues to rise
with a constant heat load so i'm going to give it some time to see
how high it goes but i think we can already see that the d14 comes out ahead
with the same fans all right well looks like we've settled into a max
temperature here 88 degrees on the highest core 81 degrees on the lowest
core running prime95 eight instances of small fft
and thank you for checking out my video of the nhd14 versus the Corsair h70
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