Installation and Performance

Before I can do performance testing I did have to install the NH-D15 into our testbench. Seeing that we use Noctua heatsinks on almost all of our test benches, this didn’t take to much time of effort. First things first, I did have to pull the motherboard tray out to gain access to the back, in most cases you don’t have to do that though. With back access I slide the backplate in through the holes. Then on the flip side I dropped one spacer on each bolt then the two backets, then I screwed down each of the four bolts. What I love about Noctua’s setup is that the backplate comes with the four long bolts already installed so installing the backplate doesn’t require two people or a third hand.

With our brackets installed, from there we just needed to add thermal paste to the heatsink and then use the included long screwdriver and screw down the heatsink to get things secured. Noctua keeps things simple here by preinstalling the spring loaded hold down bolts, the same hold downs work with AMD and Intel so there aren’t brackets that need to be swapped out.

Last but not least we just needed to install our two fans. The clips have easy to grab sections in the middle, you just line them up on the heatsink and pull the clip up over the edge on the heatsink. From there you just have to hook up the two fans to your motherboard. If you only have one CPU fan header they do include a fan splitter. As usual installing even the biggest Noctua heatsink really only takes a few minutes and no blood sweat or tears.

So with everything up and running, how does it run? Well I ran the NH-D15 through our standard heatsink test suite. This includes running through a real world test and a worse case test and checking both the CPU and RAM temperatures. Why do I test the RAM as well? Well some heatsinks are designed to blow down air onto the RAM as well, so I like to keep an eye on how well all heatsinks cool there as well. Then after those tests I also do a noise performance test to see how much noise everything is making.

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. The one test that it didn’t top the chart in was RAM peak temperature testing where it was a close second (.3 of a degree) to a large cooler that blows down on the RAM. Its really surprising that the D15 did so well cooling the ram actually but I suspect the large 140mm fans that overhang on the top and bottom of the heatsink helped blow a little air over the RAM. Additionally with it doing such a good job pulling the heat away from the CPU, that might prevent heat from soaking into the RAM as well.

For noise testing I sadly had to start over on testing, so there aren’t as many results to compare. Frankly the results surprised me because as quiet as both the Noctua and the Nepton water cooling both were. When testing I couldn’t hear the Noctua at all but the water cooling did have a slight pump noise. I’m guessing that this is related to the tones that the noises were made, Noctua spends a lot of time tuning the unavoidable noise that fans make to a tone that is a little less noticeable. You can actually read about it HERE.