Noctua NH-D14, Premium CPU Cooler with Dual NF-P14 and NF-P12 Fans (Brown)

In addition to the power supply and case, I now consider a good CPU cooler as an investment. Well, at £65 it's certainly the most I have ever spent on a heatsink. But wait. You don't just get a heatsink, but also two of the best fans available, which sell for around £35 each. So £30 for the heatsink doesn't sound so outlandish, especially when you discover that it will keep the processor cool at moderate loads with only the draught from the system fans. It is also of very high quality, with soldered heatpipes for optimal heat transfer and very nice plated finish.While also supporting Intel CPUs, I was particularly taken by how simple and elegant it was to fit this to my AMD processor. No need to remove the motherboard, the whole job was very easy. Plugging the fans into the motherboard was a little tricky as there's not much wiggle room, but I found the square end of a chopstick most helpful in pushing the connectors home. Fitting the rear case fan on its rubber mounts was awkward for the same reason. Please understand, these are not criticisms by any means, merely points to consider for installation. All coolers have to comply with the laws of physics, and if you want good cooling you need a large surface area, QED large heatsink. If you don't like the sound of that, take a look at water cooling but be prepared to spend more money for probably similar performance and more noise and more things to go wrong.Unfortunately, neither of the CPU fans are PWM controllable. Given that the performance of the heatsink is so impressive, this is a pity, since it would otherwise yield a virtually silent system for most tasks. Noctua do produce PWM versions of their fans, but why they don't see fit to supply them with their flagship cooler I'm not sure. I do have a Zalman four-channel fan controller, but having just upgraded my motherboard to the quite lovely Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0, I was keen to use the built-in fan control capabilities and do away with the external controller altogether. Some motherboards (Gigabyte, for example) allow speed control of 3-pin fans. My Asus supports this on 3 system fans, but unfortunately not on the CPU fan. It requires a 4-pin fan and otherwise just runs on full speed. Being handy with electronics, I knocked up a simple little circuit which connects between the 3-pin fan and 4-pin motherboard header to take care of this. It is now perfect.Clearly the primary task of a CPU cooler is to, er, cool the CPU. There are two main designs of air-cooler, known as top-flow and tower. A top-flow cooler is what all stock heatsinks are, sucking cool(er) air down through the heatsink and onto the motherboard, where it flows outwards and through/around other components. The most important of these on a high powered system is the Voltage Regulator (VRM) which has to deal with very high current (albeit at low voltage), and so can generate a lot of heat itself. The difference here is that the VRM can safely run at much higher temperatures than the CPU. It will perform better if it is kept cool, however, as will the Northbridge/Southbridge chipset. If you want the best top-flow cooler, get the Noctua NH-C14.A Tower cooler, on the other hand, is typically fitted so that the air flows through from front to back, inline with case airflow. This method has the advantage that the general airflow is in the same direction, with cool air being sucked in through the front of the case, through the CPU cooler and then out the back. All the fans work together and are therefore more effective and this arrangement provides the very best cooling performance of any air cooling solution. The main disadvantage of tower coolers is that the air is typically blown above the level of the motherboard heatsinks (rather than through them), which means the VRM and chipset get less airflow and therefore less cooling. Perhaps the biggest difference between the Noctua NH-D14 and other tower coolers is how the main 140mm fan sits low between the two cooling stacks, blowing air at a lower level directly over the VRM. The air also gets disrupted slightly by the heatsink heatpipes, so there's a little turbulence which helps things too.As I mentioned earlier, the D14 is a very good heatsink in its own right, so it's very good at sucking the heat out and away from the processor without any fans running. I consider this a very nice safety feature, on the off chance that a fan fails or stalls the CPU is still protected. There are other air coolers with performance similar to this one (Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E, Phanteks PH-TC14PE, BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 2, Silverstone HE-01), but despite the fact that the NH-D14 has been around a lot longer does not mean it's out of date or needing an update (although PWM controllable fans would be nice). If anything, these other coolers just show how good a job Noctua made first time around. My overall impression is that these coolers all attempt to emulate the Noctua, but only mangage to exceed it by increasing airflow and therefore noise. Also, none of them make any mention of motherboard airflow.If necessary, this whole issue of motherboard airflow could be managed by adding a fan over the VRM and/or over the chipset, but that seems very messy and inelegant and just sloppy. It occurs to me that with a strong flow of air in one direction, front-to-back, a better way to deal with possible hotspots is to put little cardboard 'diverters' in to pull the air onto the bits that need it. I've done that with the northbridge and it seems to help.So, having considered all the available coolers, the deciding factors for me were as follows:1. AMD mounting system - uses existing mounting plate so motherboard doesn't need to be removed2. Additional motherboard cooling through positioning and performance of central fan.3. Build quality - superb. And no mucking about with fancy colour schemes or making things pretty. This is an example of beauty through function.4. Fan mounting system - both fans can be adjusted up or down as required with great ease.5. Noise - what noise? Even on full whack I could never describe this cooler as noisy.6. Noctua NT-H1 thermal compound supplied is very good7. 6 year warrantyThe Noctua NH-D14 is pretty much the best air cooler. Period. Many other (cheaper) coolers are quite poor at this and I would have felt it necessary to add yet another fan specifically to keep the VRM cool. Noctua also have very good customer support. For example, they will the supply an Intel socket 2011 mounting kit free-of-charge for this cooler. You can imagine they'd do the same if/when AMD bring out a new socket. I have quite a collection of CPU coolers, which is a bit silly. Now I have the Noctua NH-D14 I doubt I'll need another one for many years.

It's a little hard to write an accurate technical review of this product because I'm not sure what the load temperatures are. And that's fantastic. Let me put it this way - using an i5 3570k overclocked to 4.2 GHz, idle temperatures in a room that hovers between 18-22 degrees rest somewhere around 26-30 degrees. I tried some real-world testing using games in a window next to a system monitoring program. Running games like Assassin's Creed 3, Metro 2033 and Skyrim at 1280x720 made the temperatures jump to around 34 degrees, and then immediately drop back to idle when I quit the games.I couldn't tell you what the temperatures were at 1920x1080 because by the time I've alt-tabbed out of the game to look at the temps they've already dropped back to idle. I can't see them going above 40-45. That's fantastic performance, but like I say, it's annoyingly good because I don't know just how high I can push it before the temperatures get dangerous. Someday I'll push it to 4.5GHz and we'll see how it fares then, but right now I'm enjoying the safety that comes with extremely low temperatures.It's also extremely quiet. Unless you've got a case with no fans in it, you won't be able to hear the noise of it over the case fans. I tested this by turning on the computer with the fans unplugged and I couldn't tell the difference. The fans run at a static 1000rpm, so they aren't PWM enabled (though you could replace them with other fans, or if you've got a socket 2011 motherboard there's a version for that which has PWM fans. But if you are going to replace them, get Noctua fans because otherwise you'll regret it). To be honest, given the amazing performance of this beast, it doesn't matter so much.Installation was easier than expected. You have to remove the fans, which is toolless since they're held on by metal arms that you simply unhook and lift away, and it's held in place by two very large, long screws linked to a backplate on the motherboard. I reckon the best way to do this is to install the backplate first, screw the motherboard down, then for crying out loud get all the cables installed because you DO NOT want to be fiddling around trying to sort them out later. Trust me. That would be bad. Once you've done all that it's a cinch to screw it down and it holds very well after that. It even comes with a tube of Noctua's own high-performance thermal paste, which is fantastic because I'd totally forgotten to buy some.Some cons, to go with the size problem - it's incredibly heavy, weighing the better part of 1kg. It installs solidly with hardly any wobble so I'm going to put my faith in good engineering, but I can see how someone might not want a chunk of aluminium hanging sideways off their motherboard. Up to you. It also covers every single RAM slot and the first PCI slot on my Asus P8Z77-V PRO motherboard, so be wary of that. it's not a problem because I bought some low-profile RAM and I don't use the top PCI port which is a legacy 1.1 slot, but it may affect you. I doubt bigger form factor motherboards will have this problem.So, to sum up, this is a fantastic, if slightly unwieldy, product. It gives much more expensive closed-loop water coolers a run for their money, so if you don't want the noise or expense of one of those, get this. They're obviously easier to manage, but that's about the only advantage. It will never be as good as a custom water-cooling job, but then it's also cheaper and more compact. If you're looking to build a large, self-contained, quiet(ish), extreme-performance PC, this is what I'd recommend.