Extreme Cooler Showdown Corsair H70 vs Noctua NH-D14 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
735 words · ~3 min read
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the Noctua nhd14 widely regarded as one of if not the
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best air cooler on the market this is a six heat pipe dual tower cooler that
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includes a 140 millimeter fan in the
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center between the two towers a 120 millimeter fan on the outside of one of
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the towers and then should you show so desire i believe you can actually
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install an additional 120 millimeter fan
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on the other tower so this isn't a push pull kit well rather
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push pull push configuration because this one's doing pushing and pulling
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through radiator or heat sink fins
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and uh down here make contact with the CPU somewhere in there you can see that
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they've cleverly designed the height to be just barely acceptable for high
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high profile memory modules such as the mushkin
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red lines that i am using here today
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all right so i have for the longest time wanted to test this CPU heatsink against
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this CPU liquid cooling unit so this is
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the Corsair h70 it is a high fin density
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high thickness single 120 millimeter radiator liquid cooling system so i can
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tell you guys right now any thin low profile radiators uh system such as a
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cooled eco or an h50 is going to get smoked by this bad boy i mean it's
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fairly simple science at this point more surface area
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far less surface area for the uh for the thin profile
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radiator liquid cooling units so that's that ain't going to happen for them but
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the h70 might stand a chance so what i'm going to be doing today
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is i'm going to take the h well first i'm going to test the nhd14 on my 4.7
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gigahertz uh core i7 2600k this is with
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a fair over fair bit of over voltage so we've got a fair bit of heat to
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dissipate here i'm going to first test the nhd14 in its stock configuration
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then i'm going to take this 120mm fan
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another nfp12 i believe it is a 1300 or whatever
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it's called the the 1 1300 RPM um
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pressure span so the one with the blades like that not the other one and i'm going to
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install two of those on the h70 and see how it performs compared to the
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nhd14 i'm very excited about this because the ah 70 is the highest
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performance single 120 millimeter liquid cooling pre-filled unit and the nhd14 as
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i mentioned before is one of the highest performing air coolers on the market so
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let's see which one wins in this heavyweight tilt
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so here i am running eight instances of prime95 on my core i7 2600k so my max
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core temperature is 74 degrees and the minimum one is 68 so we're going to call
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it sort of somewhere in that 68 to 75
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now 68 to 75 degree range
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on the nh d14
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so i just put the h70 with the two Noctua fans onto the CPU you can see
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temperatures are a touch higher already and you have to note that unlike an air
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cooler where the heat pipes basically reach their maximum temperature heat
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carrying efficiency etc right off the bat a liquid cooling unit actually takes
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a while to reach equilibrium where the liquid inside has to heat up to the
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point where it increases the efficiency with which the
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radiator can exchange the heat between the water and the air
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and the higher the temperature of the liquid inside the more heat is able to
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be exchanged until it reaches a point where it no longer continues to rise
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with a constant heat load so i'm going to give it some time to see
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how high it goes but i think we can already see that the d14 comes out ahead
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with the same fans all right well looks like we've settled into a max
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temperature here 88 degrees on the highest core 81 degrees on the lowest
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core running prime95 eight instances of small fft
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and thank you for checking out my video of the nhd14 versus the Corsair h70
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don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
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other computer videos yeah that's pretty much it don't forget
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