now this is a product that I've been excited about ever since I heard about
it Noctua uh needs absolutely no introduction they make some of if not
the best air coolers on the market all
right so this is a brand new product from them that is a bit of an evolution
on their NHC 12 and it is called the nhc1 14 so as you might well imagine
that means we've gone from a 12 CM fan to a 14 cm fan it uses a c type Flow
Design which means that this is a d draft cooler and you know what I I know
this one pretty well so I don't need to really talk too much about what's on the outside of the box and I know there's
going to be lots of mounting accessories and fans and all kinds of stuff inside
here that we're going to have to have a look at so I'll have plenty of time to
yak about all the different things about this product so the first box inside we
find a set of Intel mounting hardware and I've said this before but it's been
a long time since noct's released something new so I'm going to say it
again I love Noctua mounting hardware it
is some of the best on the market and here I'm just going to show you guys
something I mean even though their coolers are big and heavy their mounting
hardware is built like a tank I mean look at this thing it's got a thick
thick rubber coating so no matter what kind of uh components are mounted on the
back of your motherboard PCB they're not going to pierce through there and make
contact with the metal and short anything out they've got a removable
rubber piece here so that makes room for an integrated back plate if your CPU you
has one all right uh so for example LGA
1156 does have one so you'll have to pull that out and then you put this on
the rubber makes contact with the back your board very nice the overall build quality of all no to a products is just
outstanding all right let's move along here we've got more like solid solid
metal pieces once you attach this thing it's not coming off no matter what okay
here we have a manual which shows you Intel and AMD mounting instructions it
is a color some semic color manual all right very very detailed it's very easy
to install these things I could pretty much do it with my eyes closed despite
the fact that they are massive coolers here we have the AMD mounting hardware
real simple for that one and then we have the shared pieces so in here you're
going to actually find a lot of different accessories that are all very
useful in their own ways and I'm going to tell you all about them so first we
have uh low noise fan adapters as well
as ultra low noise fan adapters so those are uh 7 and 5vt fan adapters depending
on how quiet you want your fan and how
much cooling you want out of it next we have a splitter so that's so you can
plug both fans because this is a dual fan cooler into the single CPU
motherboard header then we have some anti vibration mounts for a fan we have
some non- antiv vibration mounts for a fan and we have some anti vibration
little brackety guys here I'm not actually sure what those ones do I
haven't seen those before noct to a case badge even nocta case badges are like
better built than anyone else look at that it's like metal it's like a thick
piece of metal awesome okay next we have
packing okay oh cameraman somehow ended up on the
other side of me I'm not quite sure when that happened while we were filming this
video all right now this is it I I haven't seen this in
person yet so I'm I'm actually like pretty stoked right now so I can already
see there's H six heat pipes built into
this cooler sorry about that Esther filled up my
memory card and I didn't realize it was full because I didn't know that there
was a bunch of footage on my camera so I deleted all her stuff hopefully she
didn't need it and I'm just trying to figure out how to get this box open love
environmentally friendly packaging and you can see that Noctua has not a single
piece of foam in their entire package it's all perfectly recyclable corrugated
cardboard love it all right so the first thing we see is the bottom view of the
heat sink where we will find six heat pipes this is not a heat pipe direct
touch heat sink although that's never stopped Noctua from being at or near the
very top of the performance charts in the past because they do use a very high
quality heat pipe as well as the pretty
much the best manufacturing that I've seen everything is always really really
really tight to whatever their specification happens to be just looks
really sharp okay so right on the bottom you can see we've got our six heat pipes
we've got the whole base is uh s soldered together all right you can see
there's a small fin on the bottom so I guess you'll get a tiny tiny bit of
cooling out of that you actually got trying to figure out what that is but uh
hold on oh okay it looks like it can actually be removed somehow okay okay
sorry guys sorry guys I got I got a little distracted there okay so the noct
toell mounting mechanism that I that I love so much so it's a solid piece of
metal that's actually screwed in here I've seen some of their coolers in the
past where you actually have to attach this piece but um what you'll have to do
is you install the mounting hardware around the outside of whatever your CPU
uh type is and then you just screw these two onto the mounting hardware that goes
onto the motherboard so how are you going to do that you might ask because
clearly looking at it you're not going to be able to to to screw that in very
easily but there is a solution nocta has thought of everything so I'm going to go
ahead and show you guys how this works and I actually really like their system
for mounting fans too it's uh quite a bit easier than a lot of the other ones
that I've seen you just do that okay so
they've actually built in holes here and they give you an included screwdriver
that is long enough and slim enough to
reach that's it that's their solution to the problem so you can reach all the way
through even with that fan installed you can access the screw and then you can
screw it in from the top just like
that very very nice love noct to his
design now they've got a huge cooler here for what is a downdraft CPU Cooler
they've got very thick fins and they've actually used what is um traditionally
Noctua uses a wider spacing on a lot of their coolers but they've got a very
narrow fin spacing and I think the reason they've done that is they've got
two High Press fans so while these are not high RPM fans these are NFP 14
and they are designed along the same lines as the original uh 120 mm version
of this fan and that means that they've got optimized static pressure whereas
they're not optimized for high air flow where there's no resistance to the air
so what that means is that if you've got a very high density heat sink you've got
two fans that spin at low RPM but are optimized for lots of pressure you're
still going to be able to push air through those tight fins so I'm actually
going to remove the other fan and I want to talk a little bit about the advantages of using a downdraft CPU
Cooler versus something like the D14 which is um as far as I know to this day
the Undisputed performance king of CPU
coolers so the advantage of this is that
we get most of the performance of a monster like the D14 in a form factor
that is a more likely to be compatible with your case because you don't have to
deal with um any clearance issues with the side panel cuz the D14 is huge I
mean it's like like this tall right off the CPU socket you also get the
advantage of cooling all of the components around your CPU now what that
means is that depending on how you position this you're going to be able to
cool your vrm you're going to be able to cool your North Bridge you're going to
be able to cool your RAM that sits under it and that makes for maybe not quite as
good CPU temps like I said it doesn't perform as well as the D14 but it makes
for much better temperatures for all of the other things
that are around it so you're looking at better overall system reliability if you
can keep everything well within spec and running nice and cool nocta also builds
in like I've seen some pretty cheesy approaches to anti vibration I mean
nocta is all about silence so they build in these little rubber mounts that are
going to uh to stop the fan vibrations from being passed along to the heat sink
and then by extension the CPU motherboard and then case so that's a
really nice touch that I've seen on a lot of no to heat sinks and oh I figured
out what that uh what that screw is so that screw bolts in this bracket which
seems to provide some kind of uh additional support for the oh oh I get
it okay so I guess if it's on this way it makes it so that it has a little bit
more support and doesn't put pressure on the heat pipes from uh from the weight
here in shipping if it gets bounced around that's another thing NC ships a
lot of PC systems and one of the ones that we've had the most success with
when shipping or transporting systems is Nota that's when some of the reasons I
like their mounting system so much so I
want to look at the Box quickly see if there's anything I missed high clearance
mode oh yeah high clearance mode versus low profile mode haha that's smart so
you don't have to mount two fans on here you can do one or two so you can
actually do one on the bottom and that turns this Extreme Performance heat sink
into a very lowprofile solution so you can fit it even in some htpcs as long as
you've got enough clearance or you can put it in up on the top if that works
better for you let's say you've got something under it like tall RAM modules
down here that you need to make room for so now you can put the fan on the top
and then if you've got lots of room all around then you can put on both fans so
there we go we've covered that particular aspect of it and then we've
also got dual fan configuration yeah
yeah we've talked about that and I think that's pretty much everything on here oh
yeah they include their nth1 thermal compound which is pretty good stuff
I totally missed that as we were unboxing all the accessories so thank
you for checking out the unboxing and first look at the Noctua
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