- Review -

19.01.2012 Overclockers.com

The numbers do not lie, the Noctua NH-D14 kept the 2600K quite a bit cooler than the CoolIt Vantage. At stock speeds the NH-D14 bested the Vantage by nearly 13% or 7 °C. If you are like me and only run at stock speeds when you have to reset CMOS because you gave the CPU more than it could handle, then you definitely do not care about stock performance. Moving on to what really counts, increasing the vcore and CPU speed led to significantly higher temperatures. Once again, the NH-D14 flexed its muscles keeping the CPU 7 °C cooler than the competition. This is nearly a 9% difference! It’s been difficult for me to strike that old adage from my brain that water will always trounce air cooling. These days, it is simply not true with introduction of all these self-contained water cooling units. What I do like about them is the price, being able to jump into watercooling without doing a ton of research and the lack of noisy fans. However, in many ways the NH-D14 offers similar perks.

"The Noctua NH-D14 performs admirably even under high heat situations. This heatsink allows for a solid 4.5 GHz 24/7 overclock, maybe even a bit further with the right chip and proper case airflow. [...] In short, the Noctua NH-D14 is most certainly Overclockers.com Approved." (Matt Ring, Overclockers.com)