- Review -

14.12.2011 LanOC.org

NH-D14 SE2011

We already know the NH-D14 is a great performing heatsink, my question is how well does it perform up against the Intel water cooling. Right from the beginning I knew that this solution would be quieter than Intel’s Water cooling but I wasn’t sure about the actual cooling performance. While using RealTemp to register temperatures on every core we let each sit for an hour to get our idle temperatures then ran prime95 for an hour for our load temps. We averaged each of the 6 cores temperatures together for our final scores. All of the testing was done at 69 degrees Fahrenheit ambient temperatures. Our results were surprising! The NH-D14 out performed in both idle and load testing by a considerable amount, all while running at a much lower noise level. The Intel Water Cooling does a good job considering the heat that the i7-3960X puts out, but the Noctua blew it out of the water, no pun intended.

"I know we have covered the NH-D14 before, but it still always amazes me both because of its size and its performance. Even when put up against the good performance of the Intel Water Cooling the NH-D14 still managed to look impressive. [...] This is a perfect heatsink for the enthusiast focused LGA2011 socket CPU’s." (Wes Compton, LanOC.org)