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.