Noctua NH-U14S CPU Cooler Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,532 words · ~7 min read
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the bit Phoenix Prodigy m is Compact and ready for anything click now to learn
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more welcome to my unboxing event seriously did you leave your plus minute
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vitamins on the table um of the nhu1 14s
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which is part of their award-winning U
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series which basically was what the Germans used to win the war Wait no
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that's probably not funny they're Austrian okay hold on uh so the nhu1 14s
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is a single Tower heat pipe cooler so
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not like the D series so their D14 is the Dual Tower one it retains the same
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performance as their previous U series coolers but does some does it a little
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bit differently so it has a Slimmer profile that allows the nhu1 14s to be
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installed on a motherboard even an LGA 2011 motherboard with fans with full
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height ramed and not have any interference so
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let's go ahead and pull this bad boy out of here as always noct toa's packaging
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is um excellent if a little bit plain so
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it's just plain cardboard packaging fully recyclable which I do actually
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like to see inside we see that they've included one of their NF a15 fans which
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is a 140 mm fan that actually uses 120
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mm mounting point so this gives it pretty good compatibility however this
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particular fan design you can tell just by looking at it was pretty much
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optimized for this cooler you can tell
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because you see right here the vibration reducing pads that are on the four
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corners of the fan are set up perfectly to sit on here you go this piece right
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here on the outside of the NH
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u14s now when it comes to product quality if you guys have been watching
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me for any period of time you'll already know what I think about the NH q1 14s
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what I thought about it before I even opened it it is the utmost Pinnacle of
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product quality Noctua makes excellent gear they back it up with a six-year
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warranty which you might say well on a heat sink that doesn't matter well on a fan it does they're saying their fan
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will not die for six years or they'll deal with it for you they use some of
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the best actually I would go as far as to just call their mounting mechanism
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the best in the industry uh you can see right here it comes in either this box
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right here for the Intel mounting system so it's going to have like you know
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Wicked solid hold down pieces that are made of like thick old steel it's going
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to have all the little screws and a nice little package here it's going to have a
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thick back plate I mean look at that thing it's rugged and it's going to uh
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it's going to have the option for you to upgrade it for free later in all
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likelihood because nocta has done that for years now offering existing
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customers new mounting hardware for future sockets so there's the AMD stuff
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in here as well as all the accessories in this box right here so this is where
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you'll find your see even their case badges are better than other people's
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case badges they include a gorgeous metal case badge as well as noise
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dampening strips so if you don't want to use nocu a fans they do include a couple
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of rubber strips so you can use different fans but you should probably use the Noctua fans a couple more metal
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retention clips for mounting different fans to the heat sink as well as their
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nth1 which is good I mean it's not the
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best thermal compound on the market unlike everything else about the product which does happen to be as good as it
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gets but it's not bad at all they've
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also got some additional Corner mounts that's kind of interesting for the fan
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presumably so that's kind of neat and then they've got a screwdriver so you
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don't actually even have to have any extra Tools in order to install the nhu1
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14s speaking of installing it on the
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base right here you will find that it is actually not that shiny of a base so
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we'll do the obligatory finger shot there you can see you can't make up my finger that clearly guys the the
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shininess of the base does not actually necessarily tell you anything about the
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thermal performance of it this has been true for years swifttech was one of the
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ones that had trouble with this because they used to do a very uh flat look on
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the bottoms of their blocks but it was flat even though it wasn't shiny and
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they sometimes got flat for that versus other manufacturers highly polishing the
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bases but they weren't actually flat which is not conducive to it being a
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better cooler this particular base doesn't happen to be completely flat
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it's a little bit bowed which has been shown with the high mounting pressures
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we use today to give slightly better performance than a completely flat base
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and you can see right here at the bottom they use six heat pipes and it should be
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noted that even though they're quite small heat pipes they're not you know super pipes like ASUS actually here I
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haven't happened to have it right here is using a 10 mm heat pipe on their
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latest GTX 780 cards you can see by contrast the 4mm pipes don't look that
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big but quality of heat pipes is actually terribly important where the
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size of them is important but is not the only Factor the overall manufacturing of
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it is of course perfect it has no blemishes on it whatsoever the fins are
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all completely straight exactly like you'd expect from noct's excellent
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packaging and check it out more on that hold down I mean look how thick that
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piece of Steel is on the top of this
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cooler so what is the advantage basically they've taken the U series
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they've upgraded it to 140 mm giving you better performance well the same
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performance performance but giving you better performance in a Slimmer form
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factor than what you can get elsewhere allowing you to use a nice high
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performance cooler to fans and full-size
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memory modules meaning that you can actually cool your memory directly with
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the fans on your CPU heat sink as well without further Ado I'm going to sign
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off and hand you guys over to Slick to talk about the performance of the NH
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u14s on our standard test bench so we're going to start with Idols at 20° C so if
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you want to see more details about our ambient temperatures and the rounding
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and everything that's going on you can check out the Google Doc that's Linked In the description but these are our
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temperatures at 20° C for idle so I was
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kind of surprised at how well it actually performed and now a few of you
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going to be looking at the zman results and be a little bit confused but what's
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going on there is I have that fan turned down to 1100 RPM and that fan actually
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naturally runs a lot faster now we can't replace the fan on that cooler so in the
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review of that cooler will'll have a couple of different RPMs going on there
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but I was really impressed with its performance on idle and we're going to move on to load now on to load
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performance which I'm a lot more interested in because honestly I know
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the cooler is going to work on idle it's load that I'm really kind of worried
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about and I'm interested to see how things will play out so that you can see
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the H Ai and this Elman reserator 3 kind of fight with themselves down at the
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bottom and then the interesting race is a little bit higher than that with this
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guy and the Corsair h100i again we'll have more numbers as time goes on
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because I have to rerun a lot of things but I was really impressed with it it
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did quite well and it makes sense because of how big it is and because of
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the fact that it has a much larger higher performance fan but I was still
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quite impressed like this video if you like it dislike this video if you don't
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like it and in the comments what are you going to go with now uh aios have been
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here for a while but there's still some perceived Terror over them now are you
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going to go with an AO or an air cooler that's up to you and if you like this
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video please subscribe