Just a few weeks ago I had the chance to tell everyone about the Noctua heatsink that we have been running on our LGA 1155 test bench for almost a year. Because of how happy we have been with it we decided to give another Noctua heatsink a chance for our new LGA 2011 test bench. We went with the NH-D14 for the ultimate performance. We have actually taken a look at that same heatsink before in the past HERE, but with the special edition we decided to go over the new brackets and compare the NH-D14 to Intel’s water cooling. Will the monster air cooling outperform water cooling? Let’s find out.

Product Name: Noctua NH-D14 SE2011

Review Sample Provided by: Noctua

Review by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Specifications

Packaging

Noctua packed the special edition in the same packaging that we saw before with only one real difference, the special edition for LGA2011 sticker. Inside you have three easy to pull out boxes, Noctua included small holes on the top of each to make sure you wouldn’t have any trouble pulling them out. One of the three boxes is empty and is just filler; the other two contain the heatsink and accessories. 

This special edition only comes with brackets and instructions for LGA2011 CPU’s. Typically Noctua heatsinks come with AMD and Intel heatsinks but this model is right to the point. All of the other goodies are packed away in the common parts bag. Inside you have all of their Low-Noise Adaptor’s, case badge, Vibration-Compensators, and thermal compound.

Installation

One of the reasons we went with the NH-D14 for our new test bench was how simple Noctua heatsinks have been for us in the past. With the new socket brings an all new design, completely different than when Intel has done on any of their CPU’s.

Noctua’s new setup has three parts to it. You have four bolts with different threads on each side, two brackets, and four nuts. The bolts attach to your motherboard, the two brackets go on top of those, and then the four nuts hold the brackets down. Beyond that everything else is the same as their old designs. The bracket gives the heatsink two attachment points. The NH-D14 has both of those spring loaded bolts c clipped to the heatsink where they won’t go anywhere. Installing the heatsink from here requires removing the middle fan and using the screwdriver included with the heatsink to tighten everything down.

Our Test Rig

Intel i7-3960X
Asus Rampage IV X79 Motherboard
Kingston 1600Mhz DDR3 Quad Channel Ram

Kingston Hyper X 120
Seagate Constellation 2tb Hard drive
Intel Water Cooling
Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU
http://www.highspeedpc.com/ Test Bench

Performance

We already know the NH-D14 is a great performing heatsink, my question is how well does it perform up against the Intel water cooling. Right from the beginning I knew that this solution would be quieter than Intel’s Water cooling but I wasn’t sure about the actual cooling performance.  While using RealTemp to register temperatures on every core we let each sit for an hour to get our idle temperatures then ran prime95 for an hour for our load temps. We averaged each of the 6 cores temperatures together for our final scores. All of the testing was done at 69 degrees Fahrenheit ambient temperatures. Our results were surprising!

The NH-D14 out performed in both idle and load testing by a considerable amount, all while running at a much lower noise level. The Intel Water Cooling does a good job considering the heat that the i7-3960X puts out, but the Noctua blew it out of the water, no pun intended.

Although the performance was amazing there was one thing that was almost an issue after getting out test rig all together. The side of the NH-D14 is just out of this world. Because of that with everything back together the heatsink was very close to our top PCI Express slot on the Rampage IV. The two fan clips holding the pans on are just millimeters away from touching things on the back of our GTX 580’s. This is something that we may have to adjust in the future. A slight bump on the video card could leave us with a shorted out video card.

Overall and FV

I know we have covered the NH-D14 before, but it still always amazes me both because of its size and its performance. Even when put up against the good performance of the Intel Water Cooling the NH-D14 still managed to look impressive. I doubt that we find many heatsinks that match or beat its performance. With that you still have Noctua’s sound performance and quality. I’m not sure that you could ask for anything else. If you are running a board like our Rampage IV that has the PCI Express slot directly at the top you might still run into fitment issues as it does get very close to our video cards. But that’s not a typical setup. This is a perfect heatsink for the enthusiast focused LGA2011 socket CPU’s.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.