Noctua NH-D15 D-Type Premium CPU Cooler Review

Introduction Noctua are one of the best CPU cooler manufacturers around, their CPU coolers have pushed air cooling to new highs over the last few years and most importantly, their NH-D14 was and still is one of the best on the market. The rule generally goes that if something isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing, but the NH-D14 is getting a little older now and the competition from companies like be quiet! and Thermaltake (to name but a few) means that Noctua have to do something to stay relevant. The NH-D15 is based on the NH-D14 design, but brings with a it a few tweaks and improvements that Noctua hope will help them compete with many of the newer rival products. Noctua are a premium brand, and as a consequence, their products are often quite expensive. Price around £75 the NH-D15 costs about the same as most mid range AIO water coolers, many of which offer some pretty incredible performance figures in terms of CPU cooling and overall acoustic performance, so there is no doubt in my mind that the NH-D15 has got its work cut out. That being said, there may be a lot of benefits to water cooling, but the same is true of air cooling, not forgetting that fact that there are still those loyal to air cooling, or that are too afraid to dabble with liquid cooling. On top of all that, not all chassis have room for a radiator, so it will be very interesting indeed to see how the NH-D15 stacks up against its air and water cooled rivals, especially within such a premium price bracket. All major socket types are supported, the only tricky part being that this cooler is pretty large, clocking in at 165mm tall with the fans mounted and a weight of up to 1320g should you have all the fans installed, so you best check your chassis has clearance or you may not get your side panel back in place. The packaging is nicely design and features a quick run down of the major features on the front, as well as the full technical specifications down the right side (see above) In the box you'll find even more boxes, as every component is neatly packaged and protected. In the Intel mounting box you'll find a back plate with screws pre-fitted, two support bars, some spacers, screws and bolts, as well as a pair of easy to follow installation guides. The AMD box contains a few screws and two support bars. The main components box has some high quality thermal grease, rubber fan mounting pegs, four fan mounting screws, a Y-split fan cable, two low speed fan power adaptor cables, two fan mounting clips, a Noctua chassis sticker and finally an L shaped screw driver. The both of the included fans are typical Noctua, with their unique blend of brown and cream colours. Both fans measure 140mm and features rubber and vibration mounts and a 4-pin PWM braided cable. I can't say I'm a fan (no pun intended) of this colour scheme, but perhaps Noctua will release a revised edition that includes their new black and grey fans. A Closer Look Out of the box the cooler comes with one of the fans pre-installed, although this will have to be removed to aid with installation. The CPU cooler is designed to hold up to three 140mm fans, although only two are included you can obviously buy an extra one from most major computer retailers. The fins are really nicely designed, with groves cut in the back to help better channel the airflow. The 6 heat pipes pass right through the fin stack and you can see they've poking through at the top of the cooler. Here you can see one of the fan connector cables on the underside of the cooler. the contact plate is screwed in place over the heat pipes and features a large flat surface area with a mirror shine polish. The underside of the cooler features a pair of cutaways, this will help improve ram compatibility and reduce conflicts with motherboard components, especially welcome if you also have large VRM coolers. the fan can be mounted on either fin stack in the middle of the cooler, allowing you to direct the airflow in which ever manner best suits your build. There are a few millimetres clearance from the other fin stack. Here you can see the subtle Noctua logos on the top of each fin stack. Installation Since the back plate comes with pre-fitted screws, installation was super easy and the backplate dropped straight into place. The two Intel support bars fit easily over the four pegs from the back plate and are held in place with four easy to fit thumb screws, so far the whole thing has taken about 30 seconds. The CPU tower dropped perfectly into place, all I needed to do was put on some thermal grease and tighten the two sprung screws. The clearance down the middle of the cooling towers, combined with the L-shaped screw drive made this a very simple task, total installation time is now up to two minutes. The two fans clipped into place with ease using the four fan retention clips, total installation time was under five minutes, I could have done it blind folded. Test System and Methodology We always use the same test system and tests with CPU coolers that we compare against each other. The full specifications of our test system are as follows: Test system: ASUS P8Z77-V, LGA 1155 socket, Z77 chipset Intel Core i5 3570K with Gelid GC Extreme under the IHS 8GB G.Skill Trident X 2400MHz DDR3 128GB Kingston SSDnow V100 (Boot Drive) and Samsung F3 1TB (storage) Antec High Current Gamer 620W Cooler Master Test Bench v1.0 We’d like to say a big thank you to ASUS, Antec, Kingston, Cooler Master and Intel for providing components that makes this testing possible. Testing Methodology: We always use Gelid GC Extreme thermal paste to make sure testing reveals the efficiency of the tested coolers not the efficiency of the bundled thermal paste. Prime 95 is run for 10 minutes and then the average maximum temperatures as recorded by CPUID HWMonitor are noted The average temperature across the four cores is taken on our quad-core processor Fans are mostly left to operate at default PWM profile speeds and with maximum fan speed for reference.If PWM functions are not supported then fixed fan speeds are used and sometimes a low noise adapter if appropriate/provided. If fixed fan speeds or low noise adapters are used it will be clearly pointed out either on the graphs or in the write-up. All default result entries on graphs are for PWM performance unless otherwise specified. A variety of fan speed results are done for a particular product review and then removed from the graphs in future reviews of other products to avoid clutter. If you would like to see more fan speed results for a particular product please check its individual review. For watercooling tests all pumps have been operated at 12 volts directly from the power supply Delta temperatures are always used (Observed temperature minus ambient temperature) and we keep the ambient at 22 (+/- 1) degrees for all testing . Delta temperatures should correct for any marginal ambient differences between 21-23 degrees. Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled, hard drive in idle and power supply isolated. These are taken at desktop idle and Prime95 load. The cooling performance tests are run at stock 3.4GHz (with Intel Turbo up to 3.8GHz) and overclocked 4.5GHz (1.35v) settings. Voltages are fixed to prevent inaccuracy between comparisons. All other coolers in the graphs have been tested under identical settings so are fully comparable. Each test is repeated 3 times with 3 remounts for consistency of results There is approximately a 1 degree celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software CPUID HW Monitor There is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meter Software Used CPUID HWMonitor Prime 95 Since I recently took over our cooling reviews section we have started our graphs again to keep things consistent with my own testing methodology. If you wish to view any of the previous results you can do so on any of our prior cooling reviews in the Cooling section. We currently have four main categorisations for CPU coolers that are: Budget CPU coolers (sub £40 in typical RRP) Low Profile CPU coolers (Often top-down design, but any CPU cooler that is designed to be small) Water cooling AIO CPU coolers (Both closed loop and expandable water CPU coolers that come pre-built - no custom kits) Performance Heatsink coolers (Heatsinks designed for performance, typically cost upwards of £40) In all these graphs we may have a few "reference" results of particular products that do not fit within that category for comparative purposes. Performance Stock performance on the NH-D15 is really strong, the idle temperature is where we would expect it to be, but the impressive load performance is 1 degree cooler than the be quiet! Dark Rock 3 and cooler than no less than three AIO water coolers. Once again the NH-D15 impressed, with acoustics on par with the superb be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 and many whisper quiet water cooling units. This next set of numbers has me completely stunned, I had to re-test a couple of extra times just to make sure it wasn't an external factor screwing up my numbers, but what you're seeing is real, the NH-D15 is our coolest air cooling CPU by a huge margin. Not only is it cooler than the Cooler Master Nepton 280L, Corsair H105, Corsair H75, Nepton 140Xl and Zalman Reserator 3 MAX, all of which are high-performance water cooling units, but the nearest air cooled competitor (the GamerStorm Lucifer) runs 9 degrees warmer! The NH-D15 is also one of the quietest CPU coolers we've ever tested, clocking in just a fraction louder than the two latest be quiet! products and operating no louder than a whisper. Final Thoughts Price At time of writing the Noctua NH-D15 was £77.95 from QuietPC here in the UK, and no matter what way you look at it, that's very expensive. This is certainly a premium product and the high price tag may put some consumers off, but you only have to take one look at our performance figures to see that in terms of price vs performance, it's actually great value for money. It's cheaper than the 280L and the H105 by around £30 and it's £30 cheaper than the Enermax LiqTech coolers, but still almost matches their cooling performance. Overview Noctua have really out done themselves this time, the NH-D15 is a marvel in terms of performance and as you've seen in our benchmarks, it flattened the competition by a wide margin when it came to overclocking our CPU. 9c cooler than the nearest air cooled rival is like Lewis Hamilton coming out in a new car that shaves off 9 seconds a lap. Then there are the water coolers which were beaten by this cooler, several of which are more expensive than the NH-D15 and several of them are regarded as some of the best cooling solutions on the market. Water cooling is still a premium option and when done right, the Noctua NH-D15 doesn't stand a chance, especially for those using a custom loop, or the only coolers that offered better overclocking performance than the NH-D15, the Enermax Liqtech 120mm and 240mm. The only issue there being that all of those solutions cost more than the Noctua, especially custom looping cooling which could set you back hundreds. Build quality pretty decent throughout, and while I'm sure there are many of you that still have no love for the fan colour, their exceptional cooling performance and whisper quiet acoustics certainly makes up for that fact. The overall aesthetics of the cooler are very nice though and should Noctua re-release this cooler with their new black and grey fans, I think it may look even better. The installation process was one of the easiest I've ever had to do, everything fit perfectly the first time, there were no component conflicts, the overall design of the cooler made tightening of any required screws easy enough and for the one that was a little tricky, Noctua included a special screw driver to make it as easy as they possibly could. "Overall this is easily one of the best coolers on the market and should you need a high quality cooler that looks great, performs exceptionally well even when overclocking and offers good value for money compared to the competition (in terms of price vs performance), then look no further than the Noctua NH-D15." Pros Stylish aesthetics Great build quality Class leading performance Ultra quiet fans Performs better than most water cooling units Cons None Neutral It is a little expensive, but you get what you pay for Still not sure about their fan colour scheme Thank you Noctua for providing us with this sample.