Noctua NH-C14 Silent Heatpipe Heatsink Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,126 words · ~10 min read
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now this is a product that I've been excited about ever since I heard about
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it Noctua uh needs absolutely no introduction they make some of if not
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the best air coolers on the market all
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right so this is a brand new product from them that is a bit of an evolution
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on their NHC 12 and it is called the nhc1 14 so as you might well imagine
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that means we've gone from a 12 CM fan to a 14 cm fan it uses a c type Flow
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Design which means that this is a d draft cooler and you know what I I know
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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
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going to be lots of mounting accessories and fans and all kinds of stuff inside
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here that we're going to have to have a look at so I'll have plenty of time to
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yak about all the different things about this product so the first box inside we
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find a set of Intel mounting hardware and I've said this before but it's been
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a long time since noct's released something new so I'm going to say it
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again I love Noctua mounting hardware it
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is some of the best on the market and here I'm just going to show you guys
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something I mean even though their coolers are big and heavy their mounting
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hardware is built like a tank I mean look at this thing it's got a thick
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thick rubber coating so no matter what kind of uh components are mounted on the
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back of your motherboard PCB they're not going to pierce through there and make
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contact with the metal and short anything out they've got a removable
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rubber piece here so that makes room for an integrated back plate if your CPU you
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has one all right uh so for example LGA
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1156 does have one so you'll have to pull that out and then you put this on
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the rubber makes contact with the back your board very nice the overall build quality of all no to a products is just
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outstanding all right let's move along here we've got more like solid solid
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metal pieces once you attach this thing it's not coming off no matter what okay
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here we have a manual which shows you Intel and AMD mounting instructions it
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is a color some semic color manual all right very very detailed it's very easy
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to install these things I could pretty much do it with my eyes closed despite
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the fact that they are massive coolers here we have the AMD mounting hardware
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real simple for that one and then we have the shared pieces so in here you're
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going to actually find a lot of different accessories that are all very
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useful in their own ways and I'm going to tell you all about them so first we
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have uh low noise fan adapters as well
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as ultra low noise fan adapters so those are uh 7 and 5vt fan adapters depending
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on how quiet you want your fan and how
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much cooling you want out of it next we have a splitter so that's so you can
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plug both fans because this is a dual fan cooler into the single CPU
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motherboard header then we have some anti vibration mounts for a fan we have
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some non- antiv vibration mounts for a fan and we have some anti vibration
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little brackety guys here I'm not actually sure what those ones do I
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haven't seen those before noct to a case badge even nocta case badges are like
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better built than anyone else look at that it's like metal it's like a thick
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piece of metal awesome okay next we have
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packing okay oh cameraman somehow ended up on the
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other side of me I'm not quite sure when that happened while we were filming this
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video all right now this is it I I haven't seen this in
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person yet so I'm I'm actually like pretty stoked right now so I can already
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see there's H six heat pipes built into
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this cooler sorry about that Esther filled up my
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memory card and I didn't realize it was full because I didn't know that there
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was a bunch of footage on my camera so I deleted all her stuff hopefully she
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didn't need it and I'm just trying to figure out how to get this box open love
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environmentally friendly packaging and you can see that Noctua has not a single
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piece of foam in their entire package it's all perfectly recyclable corrugated
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cardboard love it all right so the first thing we see is the bottom view of the
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heat sink where we will find six heat pipes this is not a heat pipe direct
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touch heat sink although that's never stopped Noctua from being at or near the
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very top of the performance charts in the past because they do use a very high
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quality heat pipe as well as the pretty
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much the best manufacturing that I've seen everything is always really really
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really tight to whatever their specification happens to be just looks
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really sharp okay so right on the bottom you can see we've got our six heat pipes
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we've got the whole base is uh s soldered together all right you can see
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there's a small fin on the bottom so I guess you'll get a tiny tiny bit of
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cooling out of that you actually got trying to figure out what that is but uh
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hold on oh okay it looks like it can actually be removed somehow okay okay
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sorry guys sorry guys I got I got a little distracted there okay so the noct
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toell mounting mechanism that I that I love so much so it's a solid piece of
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metal that's actually screwed in here I've seen some of their coolers in the
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past where you actually have to attach this piece but um what you'll have to do
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is you install the mounting hardware around the outside of whatever your CPU
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uh type is and then you just screw these two onto the mounting hardware that goes
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onto the motherboard so how are you going to do that you might ask because
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clearly looking at it you're not going to be able to to to screw that in very
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easily but there is a solution nocta has thought of everything so I'm going to go
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ahead and show you guys how this works and I actually really like their system
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for mounting fans too it's uh quite a bit easier than a lot of the other ones
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that I've seen you just do that okay so
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they've actually built in holes here and they give you an included screwdriver
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that is long enough and slim enough to
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reach that's it that's their solution to the problem so you can reach all the way
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through even with that fan installed you can access the screw and then you can
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screw it in from the top just like
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that very very nice love noct to his
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design now they've got a huge cooler here for what is a downdraft CPU Cooler
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they've got very thick fins and they've actually used what is um traditionally
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Noctua uses a wider spacing on a lot of their coolers but they've got a very
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narrow fin spacing and I think the reason they've done that is they've got
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two High Press fans so while these are not high RPM fans these are NFP 14
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and they are designed along the same lines as the original uh 120 mm version
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of this fan and that means that they've got optimized static pressure whereas
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they're not optimized for high air flow where there's no resistance to the air
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so what that means is that if you've got a very high density heat sink you've got
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two fans that spin at low RPM but are optimized for lots of pressure you're
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still going to be able to push air through those tight fins so I'm actually
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going to remove the other fan and I want to talk a little bit about the advantages of using a downdraft CPU
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Cooler versus something like the D14 which is um as far as I know to this day
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the Undisputed performance king of CPU
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coolers so the advantage of this is that
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we get most of the performance of a monster like the D14 in a form factor
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that is a more likely to be compatible with your case because you don't have to
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deal with um any clearance issues with the side panel cuz the D14 is huge I
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mean it's like like this tall right off the CPU socket you also get the
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advantage of cooling all of the components around your CPU now what that
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means is that depending on how you position this you're going to be able to
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cool your vrm you're going to be able to cool your North Bridge you're going to
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be able to cool your RAM that sits under it and that makes for maybe not quite as
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good CPU temps like I said it doesn't perform as well as the D14 but it makes
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for much better temperatures for all of the other things
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that are around it so you're looking at better overall system reliability if you
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can keep everything well within spec and running nice and cool nocta also builds
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in like I've seen some pretty cheesy approaches to anti vibration I mean
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nocta is all about silence so they build in these little rubber mounts that are
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going to uh to stop the fan vibrations from being passed along to the heat sink
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and then by extension the CPU motherboard and then case so that's a
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really nice touch that I've seen on a lot of no to heat sinks and oh I figured
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out what that uh what that screw is so that screw bolts in this bracket which
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seems to provide some kind of uh additional support for the oh oh I get
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it okay so I guess if it's on this way it makes it so that it has a little bit
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more support and doesn't put pressure on the heat pipes from uh from the weight
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here in shipping if it gets bounced around that's another thing NC ships a
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lot of PC systems and one of the ones that we've had the most success with
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when shipping or transporting systems is Nota that's when some of the reasons I
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like their mounting system so much so I
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want to look at the Box quickly see if there's anything I missed high clearance
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mode oh yeah high clearance mode versus low profile mode haha that's smart so
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you don't have to mount two fans on here you can do one or two so you can
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actually do one on the bottom and that turns this Extreme Performance heat sink
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into a very lowprofile solution so you can fit it even in some htpcs as long as
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you've got enough clearance or you can put it in up on the top if that works
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better for you let's say you've got something under it like tall RAM modules
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down here that you need to make room for so now you can put the fan on the top
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and then if you've got lots of room all around then you can put on both fans so
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there we go we've covered that particular aspect of it and then we've
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also got dual fan configuration yeah
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yeah we've talked about that and I think that's pretty much everything on here oh
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yeah they include their nth1 thermal compound which is pretty good stuff
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I totally missed that as we were unboxing all the accessories so thank
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you for checking out the unboxing and first look at the Noctua
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nc14 don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
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