Top Tier CPU Air Coolers Q3 2015: 9-Way Roundup Review
by E. Fylladitakis on July 6, 2015 8:00 AM ESTThe Noctua NH-D15
Noctua is one of the world's most renowned cooler manufacturers. The company is especially well known for their high end and specialty products, aimed to those seeking extreme performance and or very low noise solutions. The cooler that the company provided us for this review is no other than the NH-D15, a behemoth based on the highly popular NH-D14.
The NH-D15 is supplied in a large cardboard box with a minimalistic, elegant design. Highlighting the main features of the cooler is the primary focus of the entire artwork. Inside the main box, we found the bundle packed into separate cardboard boxes and the cooler protected within a polyethylene foam construct. The bundle consists of the hardware necessary for the mounting of the cooler, an L type Philips PH2 screwdriver, a fan power cable splitter, two fan speed reducers, a tube of NT-H1 thermal grease, a metallic case badge, four rubber fan mounts and four wire clips for the two cooling fans.
Many people erroneously think that the NH-D15 is just a little larger version of the very popular NH-D14. The NH-D15 is a reverse-symmetric dual tower design based on the NH-D14, but there are numerous improvements. Noctua technically merged the core design of the NH-D14 with the fin design of the NH-U14S, which has the first seven fins of each tower shortened. This way, the NH-D15 can offer much wider compatibility with RAM modules if only the center fan is installed.
The rest of the fins are symmetric, meaning that both their sides are identical, which is mostly straight with a single small triangular notch at the center and a few more similar notches near the sides. In order to install/remove the NH-D15, the center fan needs to be removed. Another interesting point is that the fans can be moved upwards, several centimeters if needed be. Moving the front fan upward can allow the installation of tall RAM modules for a small impact on performance but it also requires a very wide case to do so.
Noctua provides two of their own NF-A15 140 mm fans alongside the NH-D15. Their brown/beige color is Noctua's trademark and unique to Noctua's products (or copies of them). These are very high quality fans, with SSO2 bearings (advanced liquid lubricated metallic bearings with magnetic stabilizers), rubber anti-vibration pads and ridged blades for airflow manipulation. For those that do not want to install the second fan on the cooler, because either they need to retain compatibility with certain RAM modules or they are simply satisfied with the performance of a single fan, Noctua provides rubber mounts for the installation of one NF-A15 as a case fan.
The base of the NH-D15 is relatively small in comparison to that of other coolers, yet obviously large enough to cover the entire surface of current CPUs. Most of the base is made out of copper, with steel parts used for retention, all nickel plated, along with the copper heatpipes as well. There are "only" six 6 mm heatpipes, the same number and size as with the older NH-D14, as Noctua clearly does not believe that enlarging the base and adding more heatpipes would make a notable performance difference. The contact surface is smooth and fairly well polished but not machined down to a perfect mirror finish.
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'nar - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I know right? I was so looking forward to a W/C vs A/C comparison after an intro like that.Margalus - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
why didn't you test these all with the same fan? Then we could see how the cooler performed independent of the included fans? Like the Thermalright, it comes with no fan, apparently you got a super quiet slow fan and put on there, but that isn't fair to Thermalright saying they are hotter, when it could be because it doesn't have the amount of air moving over the fins as others.Beany2013 - Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - link
Thermalright provided the fan, so they can't grumble at the results.trandoanhung1991 - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
When you talk about ultimate cooling, you should've at least tested the True Spirit 140 Power Edition with a TY-143 fan, or the Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme. Those are the most interesting products from Thermalright, not the Macho Zero.Maybe as an addendum at some point? I'm very interested to see how the Silver Arrow and the 140 PE fare against the D15.
Impulses - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Apparently the Macho is what TR themselves chose to send AT, if the intro is accurate... Big /facepalm on their part. They probably have some of the best value coolers in the TRUE Spirits (I have the original Cogage version myself), and the Silver Arrow might've ranked up there with the Noctua and Phantek. The article did make me pretty curious about the latter tho, call me vain but the color choices are cool.Calculatron - Monday, July 6, 2015 - link
Thanks for doing a heatsink round-up. They are refreshing to see these days.It is a shame that Thermalright did not send in its top-tier performer. Then again, the Macho Zero is nothing to sneeze at. ~40C over ambient for a 340 watt load is still a good result. (Perhaps, instead, they could have thrown the TY143 performance fan instead? Har!)
siberus - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I actually wish they would have sent 2 of the current fans so we could see if push/pull could push it up a performance bracket.rrohbeck - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I'd like to see the measurements all with the same fan(s) - whatever is considered "the best" fan. That would give an indication of how much you could get out of the cooler with aftermarket fans.'nar - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I wish there was more review cross-over with water coolers, these two camps seem to be at odds with each other. They never seem to be compared effectively to each other, so it is difficult for consumers to determine the "best" cooler for themselves. With Noctua getting up to $93, there are water coolers out there for less. I bought my Noctua NH-D14 for $75 and thought that was high for a HSF.I strictly used air coolers until I got an AMD APU, among them are several Noctua models. It was apparent to me that this CPU, after a bit of easy O/C, got hot much too fast for an air cooler to absorb. It would crash after just 4 seconds of starting Tomb Raider and the cooling fins were still ambient temperature. I tried three coolers including the Noctua NH-D14. Fan speed did not matter as the rapid increase in temperature exceeded the heatsinks' ability to draw the heat off the CPU itself. I would guess that it take anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute for the heat to actually get to the fins, so if your heat sink cannot "sink" the heat all by itself, no fan, for a full minute, then it has inadequate heat transfer and no fan will fix that.
I installed a Corsair H100i and that works very well. I had previously thought that any cooler with less surface area would have less cooling performance, but I have found that if you cannot transfer the heat to the fins, they make no difference. I think a Corsair H60 would have been fine now. I heard that water coolers were "better" and more efficient, but nobody ever explains WHY.
From this experience at least, it appears that water coolers have better heat transfer performance. Fan speeds and fins are secondary to that, as they do not matter until the heat gets to them. If they get hot, then low speed fans can easily remove that heat as higher temperature differentials generally allow for greater heat transfer. If you run high-power and high-heat for a long time, then higher fan speeds help.
How quickly can your test bench ramp up in power? Was that tested? Was that considered? CPU's can hit maximum power in nanoseconds, and crash in milliseconds. Only the base of the HSF would see anything from that event. I think this test is more academic, and not very relevant in the real-world with actual CPU's. It only tests for maximum heat generation over time, like when running benchmarks, not the dynamic nature in which CPU's operate for most useful loads. But then, that's just my perspective.
Pissedoffyouth - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I agree with you. I think the heat transfer through heatpipes takes quite some time to get to the fins