- Review -

02.02.2011 ElitePcReviews.com

With a fair bit of room left within our personal comfort zone for load temperatures we bumped up the voltage and speed once again and ran IntelBurnTest one more round. As we expected, both the stock cooler and the Corsair H50 failed to perform. To our surprise, the Notcua NH-C14 once again passed in both configurations. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner! There's one more thing that we think is worth noting. Because the Noctua NH-C14's fans blow directly down on the motherboard, and the combined airflow and greater cooler capacity, lead to lower internal case temperatures. Overall system temperatures were much lower than the other coolers. In fact, we noticed that the PWM temperatures as shown by AIDA64, were a good eight degrees cooler than with the H50, due to the added airflow, and fifteen degrees cooler than with the stock cooler. All together, this makes the Noctua NH-C14 the best cooler in the house. [...] Sometimes the removal of a fan is necessary in order to run your RAM in dual channel. But even with a fan removed, it still does a good job of keeping the CPU cool and also the ambient temperature of the case itself. The high performance mode, with both fans, managed to cool our i7 870 @ 4ghz, which both the stock cooler, and the Corsair H50, failed to do. Clearly this heatsink offers cooling that not many other coolers can, and with that in mind, it will become a regular on our test bench when we need to push our Over Clock to the max.

"The Noctua NH-C14 has proven to be one of the most effective cooling solutions we have had our hands on. It’s multiple mounting options ensures full compatibility with almost any board out there." (Dave Rennie, ElitePcReviews.com)