I have been using a custom water-cooling setup for years and have always enjoyed it. I've never had a leak or component failure in my decade or so of water-cooling - mostly because I buy decent quality stuff and I am very thorough in my research.
Well, recently, I've been wanting higher cooling capacity than the 240mm radiator I have can offer... but I have no room for a better radiator or another radiator in my case - and my system needs to be reasonably portable. So my only option was to buy a case which could handle my system along with another radiator or two. Looking around, about all I could find was spending about $300 on the entire upgrade... for what would be a more difficult system to lug around. Much more money than I wanted to spend on this...
So, I figured I'd look around at what the best air cooling systems available and, naturally, came across the NH-D15 (and the S variant). After measuring everything, and as Noctua has already demonstrated their AM4 kit - and said it will be free - I knew this would be a rather safe way to guarantee early adopter compatibility... I grabbed the NH-D15S.
I didn't expect the cooler to work as well as my water-cooling setup, but I figured it'd work well enough to cover my actual needs - and I could hold on to my water-cooling kit for any time in the future when I really want to go all out and spend a fortune on a sweet rig that isn't going to be moving about. As it turns out, I was wrong. This thing works every bit as good as my custom loop did with it setup for reasonable acoustic performance.
Sure, I could crank my pump to 100% and my fans to 100% and the D15S would have no chance of keeping up, but this system is a foot from my head and I just can't stand the noise the pump makes over 50%. Using PWM, my fans were usually all at idle, as well as the pump, and they'd all ramp up with temperatures. I didn't want them ramping up while playing games, so I set the target temperatures to 60C for the fans and at 45C for the pump. The result was that my idle temperatures were about 35C on the CPU and the max temps were about 78C (i7 2600k @ 4.8GHz + ~0.015V), but could momentarily hit 80C.
The D15S, however, with just one fan, outperformed my water-cooling setup using the same PWM settings! Idle is at 32C and the max is 77C (using IBT @ Very High). What really got me was just how much more quiet this thing is than my rather quiet water-cooling setup. I added another fan to the D15S (a Cougar 120mm PWM fan) which keeps the highs down to 76C - so not much change.
Clearly, *IF* I go back to water-cooling, I will only consider doing so with much greater radiator surface area. which will require a new, expensive, case on top of the radiator and tubing costs... so I am having a hard time justifying such a move. I may well stick with air cooling... and what better praise can you give a heatsink than that?
Also, the install was simple, everything is very high quality, yadda yadda...
| Brand | Noctua |
|---|---|
| Series | NH-D15S |
| Item model number | NH-D15S |
| Item Weight | 2.5 pounds |
| Product Dimensions | 6.3 x 5.91 x 5.31 inches |
| Item Dimensions LxWxH | 6.3 x 5.91 x 5.31 inches |
| Voltage | 12 Volts |
| Manufacturer | Noctua |
| ASIN | B00XUVGLEU |
| Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | No |
| Date First Available | August 28, 2015 |
