- Review -

02.01.2015 LanOC.org

While I currently the trend has been to go with water cooling, most people don’t seem to believe that air cooling can compete. This obviously isn’t true, a lot of great heatsinks will still out perform the 120mm water cooling kits that most people are picking up. Even when you step up to 240mm kits the biggest heatsinks like the NH-D15 tested today are still out performing them in most situations. It really isn’t until you get into custom water cooling loops that you really see performance that isn’t possible in air cooling. The NH-D15 proved that today in all of our testing. On top of that I found it to be deceptively quiet and easy to install. There really isn’t anyone else who makes the installation as simple as what Noctua does with their heatsinks. This is also why their haven’t changed their mount design in years now, it just works. Beyond all of that there was one other thing that I hadn’t really considered in the past with Noctua heatsinks. With all of their heatsinks they include a full stick of thermal paste. This might seem small in comparison to the price of the D15, but it really does add value to all of their heatsinks and it is something that almost no other manufacture does.

"So starting with cooling performance, how did the NH-D15 perform? Well as you can see below, in three of the four tests it performed better the everything else we have tested. That includes a short list of popular water cooling kits as well. A few of those water cooling kits are 240mm kits to give a good idea of just how good the NH-D15 is." (Wes Compton, LanOC.org)