Noctua NH-D15 D-Type Premium CPU Cooler Review

Peter Donnell / 10 years ago

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