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Noctua NH-D15 CPU Tower Air Cooler Review

Cooling/CPU Cooling by leeghoofd @ 2015-01-27

Austrian company NOCTUA, known for their silent yet efficient processor coolers, released last year their behemoth NH-D15 cooler. The successor of their successful NH-D14 had to have even more performance while keeping the noise level still comfortable for day to day living room operations. This cooler is designed to handle the heat output of the latest hexa and octa-core crunching processors without breaking a sweat, thus for people who don't overclock or for those that don't run high wattage setups this cooler is pure overkill. Time to pop the package and see what Noctua has in store for us with their flagship NH-D15 tower CPU cooler.

Test Setup and Methodology

The Madshrimps testbed comprises of the following parts:

ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition X79 motherboard
Intel i7-3960X stock and OC'ed at 4500MHz 1.35Vcore
Corsair Vengeance Pro 32GB 2666C11 kit
Western Digital 1TB Green Caviar HDD
eVGA GTX 780 Classified
Corsair HX1050 Power supply
Ambient air temperature is 20°C

The Noctua NH-D15 review sample is tested in a single and in dual fan setup configuration.

Prime95 is our CPU torture test. By selecting the Custom test and setting 12-12K, we force the CPU to go straight flat out. After 60 minutes we verify in RealTemp the maximum load temperature results across the 6 cores. For the idle temperatures we just allow the system to warm up during a period of 15 minutes. Just basic idling at either stock for the air cooled setups and/or 4500MHz when we include the different AIO units, doing nothing more then just monitoring the temperatures.

The monitoring software we use is RealTemp Version 3. And the output results are the average out of three runs.

We compare the Noctua D15 versus some other air coolers: the single fan Alpenföhn Matterhorn Pure, two mid-range Noctua coolers, Thermalright True Spirit 120M, Scythe Ashura and the Zalman XPS14. This chart is only with the I7-3960X at stock clocks (3900MHz due to the ASUS Turbo implementation). Once we add the different All In One Cooling liquid solutions in the mix, the CPU speed gets cranked up to 4500MHz.

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