Noctua NH-C14 CPU Cooler Review

Noctua NH-C14 Intel Core i5 2500k Gigabyte Z68X-UD5 4Gb Kingston HyperX Gensis 2133MHz AMD Radeon HD 6850 1Gb 2 x Kingston V+ 100 96Gb Thermaltake ToughPower 1200W Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

When testing a cooler like this, you are faced with a lot of tough decisions. This includes whether you will be using two fans, or just one on the top, or one on the bottom. Also the decision as to if you will be using a normal fan connector, or one of the low noise adapters, or even the ultra low noise. Once this has been decided, you have to think about comparisons, stock speed and much more, and with us aiming to give you the most detailed review we can, we want to cater for the majority of our viewers. Due to the above, we will be comparing the NH-C14 to itself. Due to the many combinations of using this cooler in different variations, we thought it would make for an interesting test to see which would be the most suitable configuration for our test bench. Think about it; you have a y splitter, two low noise adapters, two ultra low noise adapters and three variations of installing the fans. There’s over 20 combinations just from a first glance, and though we love our viewers very much, i’m not going to spend the next 18 months testing a CPU cooler. Therefore we thought we’d stick to the most brutal testing of sheer performance and getting the lowest temperatures possible. We are using an Intel i5 2500k for our tests, and we are testing at its stock speed. Though we could have overclocked to see the potential that lay within it, we decided against it due to the many factors involved. This includes clock speed, voltage, and much more which wouldn’t lead to a fair comparison as EVERY chip performs differently. Whereas by testing at stock speed, we know you’ll be able to do the same which will lead to a fairer comparison. We will be testing the NH-C14 in three configurations:

• Single mount top fan
• Single mount bottom fan
• Both fans connected through y-splitter adapter

We will be running our tests and frequently monitoring CoreTemp to show the temperatures of each core individually. We will leave the system to set for around 15 minutes and then take a note of the idle temperatures. Once this has been recorded, we will continue to load the CPU by running Prime95 on the large test to generate the most heat to the CPU. Once Prime95 has been running for around 15 minutes we will continue to monitor CoreTemp and record the temperatures once again. We will then change the fan configuration and leave the system to set for 30 minutes, so that the processor can return to its idle state and any underlying heat from the load test will have been dismissed out of the equation.