Noctua NH-D15S chromax.black, Premium Dual-Tower CPU Cooler with NF-A15 PWM 140mm Fan (Black)

Product Information

Finally, slide a cover over each fixture and the magnets do the rest. It’s that easy! You don’t have to detach the fan and can even do this while the heatsink is installed on the motherboard. Amazing! Upon removing the heatsink covers, you’ll notice a gray fixture on the underside of each cover. If you pull away in the corner, the fixture will come off as you break the connection of the magnets holding it in place. Upon removing the D15S heatsink from its box, I was amazed at its sheer bulk. This is a serious heatsink and it oozes quality. This is a heatsink you buy once and will re-use again every time you upgrade your system.

A large 140mm Noctua NA-A15 PWM fan is clamped onto one side of the heatsink. An additional 120mm or 140mm fan can be installed on the other side but make sure it will fit in conjunction with your motherboard and RAM. Noctua has released its NH-D15S to stand alongside its NH-D15. The NH-D15 is a huge heatsink, a full 15cm wide. The NH-D15S looks like the D15’s twin, also 15cm wide. Where do the two differ? The NH-D15S is moved over to make more room for the first PCIe slot, and it comes with one fan, not two – this keeps the price down. Otherwise they are the same heatsink. Think of the NH-D15S as the high-compatibility version of this heatsink. The single fan configuration gets you a highly capable dual tower cooler with very good RAM and PCIe compatibility. You can add a second fan according to your preference, be it a another NF-A15 if you use standard height RAM or a 120 mm if you need more space. The idea was to give customers more flexibility in configuring the cooler to their needs, be it for maximum compatibility or maximum performance. So let’s look at this heatsink. Now attach the mounting bars and install with the four NM-ITS1 thumbscrews, making sure the connection is tight and firm (not too strong). The Noctua D15S is a most capable heatsink and it shows exactly why AIOs have not replaced traditional CPU cooling solutions. Plus, there is literally no maintenance with the D15S. Yes, AIOs don’t require maintenance but the liquid mixture inside them does eventually breakdown and they have been known to fail and even ruin systems with water going everywhere. These situations are rare but nevertheless do occur. Conclusion Inside you’ll find the instructions, two white heatsink covers and two steel clips. Before I get into the installation, I must give kudos to Noctua for the excellent design of these covers. Not only do they look stunning but they way they are installed is ingenious!Finally, a second box under the fan tray has the additional anti-vibration pads necessary for installation in every color. There are also four mounting screws if the fan is to be installed in a case. A low-noise adapter is also included. We utilized an Intel Core i7-10700K for this test and used the factory CPU settings of 3.8GHz at 100% load to put the cooler to the test. The second and third tests were performed with an OC stage of 4.7GHz and 5.0GHz, respectively. We wanted to see how well the Noctua NH-D15S performed in standard and high-end OC modes. The box for the Noctua NA-HC4 chromax.white maintains the same aesthetic as other Noctua product boxes and displays the compatible heatsink model numbers on the front.

Having forged their reputation on amazing performance, exceptional quality, and ultra-low noise levels, Noctua stands out as a premier manufacturer of PC-cooling products. Their can't-miss color scheme of tan and brown may not be to everyone's taste, but it does make them stand out. In fact, just about anyone who has ever built a PC can spot a Noctua product. That awareness paired with the knowledge that they offer some of the best warranty and after-sales support of any PC-cooling company has certainly garnered them a great deal of favor among enthusiasts. Well, that and their long-lived support. As usual, slower fans do not cool as well as faster fans, but they work more quietly. But here, running with two NF-A15 fans at 1200 rpm will be very quiet; and if you are willing to remount your heatsink until you get that “golden mount,” you can get very good cooling indeed. Conclusions In essence, I tried to do all the things you might find logical to try. I used two different mounts to compare the cooling. I mounted the NH-D15S a third time with the fans blowing up – I had recently tested the NH-C14S heatsink and found a 5 degree difference in cooling, depending on how I mounted it. So I tried this vertical mount to see if it made a difference in how well the D15S cooled. The results are presented in different charts to keep the different mounts separate. The customization Noctua now provides with their chromax line further strengthens their already strong lineup of industry leading fans and heatsinks. Noctua NA-HC4 chromax.white ReviewNoctua heatsinks have long been revered for their top-tier cooling abilities and quiet operation but their understated design and their brown fans specifically, are occasionally the subject of ridicule among PC builders who value aesthetics above all else. In their long line of CPU coolers, Noctua introduced the NH-D15D coolers, especially made for those that require Noctua's best model cooler yet yearn a little more silence. The Noctua NH-D15S CPU cooler will to deliver both the cooling performance you may expect, yet remains all silent under normal processor conditions. The end result is a cooler that can cope with any CPU released to date cooled including even the most high-end Haswell and Skylake SKUs. The next picture shows you how you can fit a 140 mm fan (an NF-A15 in this case) as a push fan and still not interfere with your RAM – as long as you use low profile RAM. Each test run was 60 minutes in duration. The last 50 minutes of each run was measured, and the temperature logs were analyzed in Open Office spreadsheets. An Intel chip reports its temps in one degree increments, so for best accuracy these reports should be averaged in aggregate. Here the core temps were measured once a second, resulting in 3000-line spreadsheets. The digital thermometer measuring air temp reported its measurements in increments of 0.1 °C. The ambient temperature was measured every five seconds, resulting in 600-line spreadsheets. The mean ambient temp was subtracted from the mean core temps, resulting in a net temp for each run. The net temps were then averaged.