- Review -
NH-U14S
The NH-U14S is the heatsink featured in this review, and it did surprisingly well. One would expect that it would not be able to keep up: not only cooling less well than the D15 but falling behind the DF14, the Megahalems and the Genesis as well. Instead, this little one tower heatsink surpassed all our expectations and beat out three top heatsinks, with the stock U14S only falling behind the stock D15 by 2.1 °C (59.3 vs 61.4). If we look at the single-fan options the U14S is only 1.4 °C behind the D15S (60.0 vs 61.4). How does it do its magic? Who knows? It is a fine heatsink that won’t interfere with tall RAM. You could improve the cooling by little more than a degree by buying an NF-A15 and putting it on the back side of the heatsink as a pull fan. But the Noctua engineers think gains to be had over the single fan is not worth the cost. However we are all about limit pushing here, so Noctua includes a second set of fan clips with the NH-U14S kit.
"How can you expect a single-tower heatsink to keep up with dual-tower competitors, especially doing Linpack with AVX2 at 5 GHz? First, the double-fan setup (1500 as push, 1200 as pull) finished only 1.5 °C behind the leading D15 combination. This is an amazing result." (Ed Hume, overclockers.com)
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