Noctua NH-D15 Silent Tower Heatsink
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,327 words · ~6 min read
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the NHD 14 has rained for over four
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years as one of if not the king of the
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castle for dual Tower heat sinks but nocta hasn't been sitting on their
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thumbs and finally we have a successor the nhd15 is
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here for the ultimate no compromises
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compact gaming PC look no further than the obsidian series 250d from Corsair
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click now to learn more now to fans of
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previous nocta products the family resemblance between the D14 and the D15
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will be fairly obvious they both feature six heat pipes soldered onto a flat
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shiny base they both feature two large towers with stacked aluminum fins and
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they are both intended to run in a dual fan configuration with high quality fans
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included in the Box in this case static pressure optimized
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nf5 140 mm pwm fans with integrated
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antivibration mounts and they are both capable of
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mounting a third aftermarket fan for even better performance when we look
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closer though we start to notice some differences first up is that the fin
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Stacks have been widened this allows the six heat pipes to have more spacing
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between them for better efficiency next we see that the bottoms of the fin
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Stacks have actually been cut away for better memory compatibility this gives
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you a ton of options you can populate both sides with fans and lowprofile RAM
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you can populate the center with a fan and put high-profile RAM on both sides
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of a dual Tower heat sink something I've never seen before or you can throw two
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fans in and have high-profile RAM on one side one last option is that you can
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actually raise the outside fan if you need a little bit more space for RAM
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just make sure your side panel is far enough away from your motherboard for
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this to work cuz it's going to stick up above the top of the heat sink Inside
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the Box aside from the high quality included fans with their six-year
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warranty you'll find low noise adapters for the fans that reduce them to from,
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1500 to 1200 RPM a y cable so that both
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fans can be pwm controlled off of a single motherboard header a tube of nth1
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thermal compound and knock to us
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legendary oh that's not as exciting as I thought legendary SKU firm 2 mounting
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hardware which they're renowned not only for creating but also for upgrading for
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free for existing customers when new sockets come out with only a couple of
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exceptions noct's mounting hardware is so much better than everyone else's that
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for once I really do wish that everyone would just copy their design so the
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entire industry could have better mounting hardware okay so I guess all
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that's really left at this point is how does it actually perform I will leave
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that to Luke to cover he will be putting the nhd15 up against the very best
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all-in-one liquid coolers on the market for a a battle royale of topend air
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cooling versus topend liquid cooling and and I think that you guys will be
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impressed by the results spoiler alert
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I'm still an OCTA Fanboy all right guys so for the test environment we have a
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4820k running at 1.3 volts at a speed of
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4.0 GHz we also have a GTX 580 in there
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overclocked a little bit running combuster just to heat up the place on
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the CPU we run Prime 95 to heat up everything there so that this is a very
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stressful environment and we're testing the cooler while under loadad in a
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really harsh kind of above the top situation we also have a C70 as our
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standard test benching case we run all of our coolers in this case and that's
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what this run was done in as well in terms of mounting the cooler with noct
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to skirm 2 mounting hardware it's pretty
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freaking easy uh judging by the size of the cooler you expect it's going to be
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really difficult but once you mount the anchor points in and with the custom
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screwdriver that they give you it's it's it's honestly a breeze I had no
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complications installing this cooler at all in terms of noise level it did great
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but then everything we test here does great because we standardize on KN to of
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fans all the other coolers we test get a nice little Advantage because we add
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value by adding aftermarket fans to their cooling setups these aren't
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aftermarket fans for Noctua because they're Noctua fans the exact ones that
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we're testing with are the ones that come in the Box because they're the exact same model before I jump into
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performance I would highly suggest opening a new tab not closing this one
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checking out Techquickie and watching Linus' video on liquid cooling radiators
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it's a really good watch and it'll help inform you about a few things about liquid cooling if you do know about it
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continue on watching and we'll talk about performance so the
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nhd15 performs really well I was kind of surprised that it beat an h110 although
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that being said noctu has been sitting on this for a really long time so I was
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kind of expecting Excellence from them um it doesn't Beat It by a lot though so
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it's an interesting kind of tradeoff if you need that being able to put it
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somewhere else in the case because you're worried about sizing because this cooler is fairly tall Maybe you need an
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aiio but if you're not worried about that and maybe you're a little bit scared of liquid being in your case
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maybe this is the way you go let me know what you guys think in the comments down below and I'll see you guys next time
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speaking of Silent performance audible.com actually I have no idea if
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Luke said anything about silence or performance because I'm shooting this before he does his part but I'm not too
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worried about it anyway my Segways rarely make much sense anyhow so you've
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my son when he's a little bit older it's great for kids and adults and I highly
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recommend it but if you want something else then you can of course pick out
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he