- Review -

08.12.2009 PureOverclock.com

Wow. Not only does the Noctua NH-D14 continue to easily be the top performer, but it pulled away from the nearest competitor even further and stretched its lead to 4°C at load. That is outstanding. The more it's pushed, the better it seems to do. And not only did it manage to handily beat every single other cooler, it's running near silent and allowing us to push some very good overclocking results on our LGA1156 chip. [...] Normally top air cooling performance means louder noise levels, but in this instance that's not entirely correct; top performance results in slightly higher noise, but it is still very quiet overall, and utterly impressive when compared to other top cooling fans that are indeed loud.After seeing the performance results, the best way to sum up the Noctua NH-D14 is that it is an absolute juggernaut of a cooler, plain and simple. It utterly crushed the competition, and keep in mind, these were not second-rate heatsinks that were beat; these were top-class CPU coolers. It is not unusual for a top cooler to outperform competitors by one degree Celcius, as illustrated in our charts, but to jump ahead by several degrees is unheard of.

"The Noctua NH-D14 is quite simply the best performing air cooler we've ever seen. It is massive and expensive, but no other cooler can come close to matching its prowess, and certainly not at these low noise levels. You will not find a better CPU cooler on the market than this." (Jake Mete, PureOverclock.com)