- Review -

14.05.2013 Guru3D.com

Both coolers perform excellent within its range. The 120mm based NH-U12S simply is good. With higher overclocks and increased processor voltages however it becomes a little more "mainstream" in the heatpipe segment. Adding a 2nd fan will help, albeit we noticed only a little temperature decrease. The product comes standard with one fan though. So yes, the big winner in my eyes is the NH-U14S, I seriously like it. It doesn't have that huge dual-radiator design opposed to some of Noctua's other models like the D14. This one has a single radiator design with that sincerely cool NF-A15 fan, the combo kicks ass. The NH-U14S performs really well, even with Ivy Bridge at 4600 and 1.3 Volts for a heatpipe based cooler that performance is impressive. Noise levels: ...WOW! Granted we have our motherboard PWM controlling the fans. But for both coolers combined with one or two fans the sound levels are just not an issue. With the lwo RPM fans both the NH-U12S and NH-U14S under normal operation are silent, even more silent then liquid cooling. I can write an entire paragraph about this fact, but let's just call it what it is and get it over with, the noise levels are darn good and thus extremely silent, even with two fans in push-pull configuration noise should not be an issue whatsoeve

"Noctua is a company that has grown a name based soley on their quality product and after sales. I don't think we ever have tested one product that we didn't like. As such it should be no surprize that this is the same for the products as tested today. Noctua CPU coolers have a lot of capacity, we like that very much. The result as such is that the cooler becomes even more impressive when you start to overclock and then observe the sheer (low) noise levels. [...] Noctua cooler are just fantastic in terms of performance versus silence. The NH-U12S we like, the NH-U14S we like the best. The latter one is a just great in terms of cooling versus sound versus size." (Hilbert Hagedoorn, Guru3D.com)