Noctua S Series CPU Cooler

If it's time to replace your old CPU cooler, you might want to read this review of the Noctua S Series at PC Perspective today.

Noctua took a unique design tactic with the NH-D15S and NH-C14S, refining existing designs for expanded compatibility with a variety of motherboards. Both coolers feature the aesthetics common to Noctua coolers - chromed bodies with tan and brown fans. They also feature all of the design aspects we've come to expect from Noctua - nickel-plated copper base plate and heat pipe assemblies, aluminum radiators, and attention to detail with respect to their construction.

Th emost interesting part of this article to me is this
"The overclocked Hawell-E processor proved too much for the NH-D15S cooler, whereas the NH-C14S had no problems keeping the CPU temperatures under control and throttle-free. The NH-D15S quickly became overwhelmed by the Haswell-E's heat output, spiking to 105C across all cores with a the processor throttling as high as 25% for runs where the system remained stable. The downward airflow of the NH-C14S may have contributed to its better handling of the Haswell-E processor."

So the downward firing fan style heatsink worked better than a large duel tower.

It's more than interesting. It doesn't stack up logically. One has to wonder where the inconsistency is. Obviously the tests only shows their system performance with different coolers, not the actual performance of the coolers.

Their test procedures say room ambient between 23c and 27c with all results Delta. The pics of D15S and C14S look like they are in a case, but I didn't see a case specification. Nothing is said about air temp going into cooler is. My experience is that down flow coolers make it much harder to supply cooler with air at or near room ambient, even when testing on open bench. Reason is rather simple. Air goes down through cooler, turns out when it reaches motherboard, then turns up when it reaches things like GPU, RAM, case, etc., and as it comes up past the fan is drawn back in warming the airflow into cooler.

Only thing that might have some effect on cooler ability is the orientation of heatpipes in base. The C14S is at right angles to what D15S is,

I just find it rather unbelievable that 6x double ended heatpipes into 2x fin packs perform worse than 6x single ended heatpipes into a single fin pack. Especially with the twin pack being a tower and the single being downflow.

I was just reading an article about TIM and the author said that due to the long slender design of Intel's CPU core, compared to the wider and fatter core of an AMD processor, a heatsink with heat pipes running lengthwise (i.e. one heatpipe runs long way down the core residing under the IHS) may show worse cooler performance than a heatsink with pipes running across the the narrow core, meaning, more heatpipes come into contact with core. This might explain why the downfiring heatsink performed better.

Funny, I have this exact cooler (+1 fan per, those clever money grabbers...) on my 8 core Ivy and Haswell, no problems. Pretty much cream of the crop and lets me use all those precious pci-e lanes without dimensional issues.

Not even thinking about water unless I manage to get my hands on one of those double-digit core count unlocked xeons (D²C²UX™).