While water cooling has been especially popular over the last few years, there are still a lot of people who would prefer to not deal with the additional risks and installation complication. On top of that, when you are looking for really high end cooling it actually costs a lot more than you think to go water cooling. This is where companies like Noctua come in. You see cheap water cooling doesn’t always compete with air cooling, especially when it comes to noise. So Noctua continues to innovate in the air cooling market. Their top dog is called the NH-D15. Well they sent one out a while back and being the slackers that we are it ended up pushed back. Today I will finally have the chance to check out their biggest and best to see just how it compares to the completion both on the air and water cooling sides.
Product Name: Noctua NH-D15
Review Sample Provided by: Noctua
Written by: Wes
Pictures by: William and Wes
NH-D15 Specifications |
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Socket compatibility |
Intel LGA2011-0 & LGA2011-3 (Square ILM), LGA1156, LGA1155, LGA1150 & AMD AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+, FM1, FM2, FM2+ (backplate required) |
Height (without fan) |
160 mm |
Width (without fan) |
150 mm |
Depth (without fan) |
135 mm |
Height (with fan) |
165 mm |
Width (with fan) |
150 mm |
Depth (with fan) |
161 mm |
Weight (without fan) |
1000 g |
Weight (with fan) |
1320 g |
Material |
Copper (base and heat-pipes), aluminum (cooling fins), soldered joints & nickel plating |
Max. TDP |
LGA2011 - 140W & OC |
Fan compatibility |
140x150x25 (with 120mm mounting holes), 140x140x25 (with 120mm mounting holes), 120x120x25 |
Scope of Delivery |
2x NF-A15 PWM premium fan 2x Low-Noise Adaptor (L.N.A.) Y-cable NT-H1 high-grade thermal compound SecuFirm2™ Mounting Kit Noctua Metal Case-Badge |
Warranty |
6 Years |
Fan specifications |
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Model |
2x Noctua NF-A15 PWM |
Bearing |
SSO2 |
Max. Rotational Speed (+/- 10%) |
1500 RPM |
Max. Rotational Speed with L.N.A. (+/- 10%) |
1200 RPM |
Min. Rotational Speed (PWM, +/-20%) |
300 RPM |
Max. Airflow |
140,2 m³/h |
Max. Airflow with L.N.A. |
115,5 m³/h |
Max. Acoustical Noise |
24,6 dB(A) |
Max. Acoustical Noise with L.N.A. |
19,2 dB(A) |
Input Power |
1,56 W |
Voltage Range |
12 V |
MTBF |
> 150.000 h |
Packaging
The packaging for the NH-D15 has the same look that Noctua has had with their packaging for a few years now. What sets the NH-D15’s packaging apart from everything else is just how large it is. To put things in perspective I took a photo of the box along with our SteelSeries Wireless Sensei. That did leave room for a lot on the packaging though. The front has the product name and a list of main features of the heatsink. On the back that take a similar list but add small line drawing photos and short explanations. Then around on the side is a full specifications listing.
Inside the box we have even more boxes. Noctua has broken up all of he accessories by Intel and AMD and then a third general box with parts that are shared. Additionally there is a box with the second 140mm fan and a box with the heatsink itself in it. The AMD and Intel boxes have brackets specific to each manufactures chipsets along with that they both include the installation instructions. The general box has most of the goodies. You get a screwdriver, a full stick of thermal paste, fan cables with resisters inline to slow the fans down as well as a fan splitter cable. You also get screws, rubber fan mounts, two fan clips, and a metal case badge. Everything I cover a Noctua heatsink I am impressed with the quality of their case badge. What I don’t mention enough is that they include a full stick of thermal paste. Most manufactures just pre apply it or include a small amount but Noctua includes the same amount as what you get when you buy one of their thermal pastes. Not counting shipping, getting this on its own is like 7-9 bucks, a nice addition to your heatsink purchase.
Photos and Features
The design of the NH-D15 is based on the NH-D14 Noctua’s previous flagship heatsink. Like the D14 the D15 has a twin tower design that can run a two or three fan push pull setup. For the D15 they increased the size slightly to support larger 140mm fans. The additional surface area and airflow should help increase the already great cooling power.
Unlike a lot of the other manufactures, when it comes to the fins on the heatsink, Notcua has always ran a little thicker gauge metal than most. I don’t know if it helps with the cooling at all, most likely it blocks more airflow and means fewer fins aka less surface area. But even so I love the thicker gauge metal because it gives the heatsink a more solid feel. When handling a Noctua heatsink I never have to worry about bending anything nor do I have to worry about my hands getting cut up. The fin design on the D15 is folded on the ends, this helps push the air through the heatsink to the next fan with less air leaking out of the sides.
The D15 has an impressive 6 heatpipes. Each of the heatpipes runs the full height of both towers and just above the contact area. This design isn’t a direct contact design, but they are damn close and should do a good job of pulling the heat away from the CPU and up into both towers. I am curious if using the same heatpipes across both towers will push head up evenly to both towers, but we will let the testing tell us that later. One issue that I was a little concerned about, at the top of both towers the outside two heatpipes seem to short and don’t contact the last few cooling fins.
With heatsinks the contact surface can sometimes be hit and miss. Some manufactures focus on having a mirror finish while others save money and go with a rougher finish. For Noctua I never feel like they have held back or saved money anywhere on their heatsinks and the D15 is no different. The D15’s surface area has a slight machined finish to it but as you can see below you can still see the detail on a quarter when you hold it up against it. Frankly the finish on the D15 is going to be better than any CPU you attach it too!
Our Test Rig and Methodology
Cooling Test Bench |
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Processor |
Intel Core i5-2500 |
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Motherboard |
Asus Sabertooth P67 |
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Storage |
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB |
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RAM |
Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600MHz 8GB |
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Video Card |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 |
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Case |
Cooler Master xB |
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OS |
Windows 7 Home Premium x64 |
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Thermal Paste |
Noctua NT-H1 |
Cooling Tests Ran |
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Peak Test |
Prime95 for a total of 30 minutes at 100% fan speed |
Real World Test |
3DMark 11 Combined Test for a total of 30 minutes at 100% fan speed |
Noise Testing |
Noise level measurements taken with a digital sound level meter every 10 minutes throughout the test to be averaged into an overall comparison score |
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.
Overall and Final Verdict
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.
The NH-D15 isn’t perfect. Its large size does mean that it isn’t going to work in every case. This is especially true in small form factor builds, but even in our test bench it stuck out over the top of the main frame. Lucky for us the top panel for the Cooler Master HAF XB has a big budge in it, so the D15 fit. But before you pick one up make sure it’s going to work for you. Assuming it still fits I really don’t think you can get a better heatsink if air cooling is your preference. Not to mention you are getting Noctua quality!