Noctua NH-D15S CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

The cooler certainly looks impressive, with two huge cooling towers that are going to do a great job of shifting heat from the CPU.

As you can see, the left and right sides of the cooler are symmetrical, with two large cutaways on the bottom that will help prevent any conflicts with your ram modules. This means we can have a mostly thicker cooling tower to allow for better heat dissipation, while not having to sacrifice larger RAM modules.

The build quality is superb throughout, with a flawless finish from every angle. There’s a set of grooves on each side of each tower, allowing you to mount the fan on either side of either tower. Since there are extra fan clips included, you could easily run this cooler with three fans although I suspect that one will be more than enough for most.

The heat pipes pass right through each tower and come out a little at the top. There’s a small Noctua logo stamped on, giving some subtle branding that doesn’t spoil the overall aesthetics.

The contact plate is huge, and polished to a mirror finish to ensure a clean contact with your CPU of choice.

Every millimeter of the contact plate is taken up by all six extra thick heat pipes, with pass through both sides of the block and through both towers for optimal cooling performance.