Noctua is a highly regarded company that produces some very hig-quality products, and it has quite a catalogue of items to its name. This is one of its single-fan tower CPU coolers, and it comes with Noctua's trademark beige-and-brown, Bakerlite-looking fan and fan casing mounted onto a polished aluminium heatsink.
It measures 165 x 150 x 78mm and weighs a surprisingly heavy 935g. The aluminium fins house the six 6mm copper heatpipes that pass through to the polished copper CPU contact plate. Using a recessed section on each end, you can clip a pair of 140mm fans to either side of the heatsink. However, the kit only comes with a single Noctua NF-A15 fan, which spins between 300 and 1500rpm depending on the PWM setting on the motherboard.
Fitting the cooler is easy. The backplate fits well, although again we miss the padded area from the Be Quiet installation, and there are mounting plates and fittings for a selection of Intel and AMD CPUs, along with a tiny amount of high-quality thermal paste.
Obviously since this is a slimmer cooler than some of the other group items, there’s little to no interference with the surrounding VRM heatsinks and memory sticks. We’re using HyperX RAM, which isn’t too big, but even with the larger memory heatsinks available, we still think you shouldn’t have any problems with the fan and heatsink colliding or touching other components.
The temperatures measured reflected the fact that this is a single-fan model, with less cooling surface area than the other models we’ve looked at. The idle temperature of our slightly overclocked i7-4790K at 4.4GHz was 39ºC. Compared to what we’ve seen so far in the group test, this is quite high. The load temperature taken after running Prime95 for 20 minutes was 78ºC, which is quite high.
The noise levels were a little louder, although not by a huge amount. We recorded 48dbA a metre away from the cooler while the fan was running at its maximum. It’s not a bad volume, although more than what we’ve so far experienced, but it’s by no means a deafening roar.
The selling points here are the great quality of the cooler and its component parts and the fact that there’s plenty of room for placement on the motherboard. If you’re not entirely certain you’ll be able to fit the bigger CPU coolers, then this may well do the job for you. The only thing worth considering is the increased temperature and the slightly elevated noise levels.
The Noctua NH-U14S Slim U-Series costs roughly £55, depending on where you shop, so it’s the cheapest cooler we’ve had so far in the group. It’s certainly good enough for most users, under stock processor speeds at least, and the colour scheme is certainly different, if not necessarily to your personal taste. Overall, an okay choice.
Intel LGA2011-0 & LGA2011-3 (Square ILM), LGA1156, LGA1155, LGA1150
AMD AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+, FM1, FM2