Noctua NH-C14S and NH-D15S Review

NH-C14S

If you've never owned a Noctua cooler, you owe it to yourself to have one at least once in your PC building career.  Why?  Well aside from being pure class, the feeing you get when you open up the box and find all the other components packed neatly into their own individual, size indexed boxes will, if you're not careful cause a fizzy feeling down below at best, and at the very worst inflict a fully fledged nerdgasm.  Inside the boxes you'll find everthing you need to fit the cooler to pretty much every relevant AMD and Intel CPU, along with more than a few  of goodies, including an LNA, additional fan clips and even a case badge.  Don't have a screw driver to fit the cooler?  Don't worry, there's even one of those in the box.  Quite simply, there is nothing on the market that comes even remotely close to Noctua for quality.   

So the NH-C14S then is a topflow cooler and successor to the NH-C14.  It has a deeper fin stack, but only one fan as opposed to two.  With the fan installed underneath the stack as seen below, the cooler stands only 15mm tall, making it ideal for HTPC and low profile builds where low noise is paramount.  Its offset configuration means it can also be used with SFF motherboards where fouling of the first PCI slot can often be an issue.

Placing the fan above the fin stack raises the height to 140mm but increases the space available under the heat sink to 70mm, meaning that RAM with large heat sinks can be used.  The cooler comes with the excellent NF-A14 140mm fan which prosthetic limb colouring aside does a great job of moving the heat away from the Aluminium fin stack.

The six Copper heat pipes are spread evenly within the Aluminium fin stack ensuring that heat is evenly dissipated.  Both the Copper pipes and the all Copper base are covered in a nice Nickel coating.  As usual with Noctua products, the finish and quality are exceptional.