Orochi had some good things going for it, but the stock fan was not very good. You’ll want to replace that.
Both.
If you look at a NH-D15 from the ‘front’ (where the air enters the first fin stack), and have the motherboard ‘below’ the cooler, then the ‘sides’ are the left and right — where the ends of the fins poke out. On a NH-D15 these are already sealed, but on many other twin-stack coolers they are not. If they are not, then yes, you should seal them.
Unfortunately, the included 140mm fans are (almost comically) over-sized for the face of the stack they connect to, as well as being oddly-shaped. In addition, the face of the stack is rectangular. I was (personally) not able to seal the gap between the stock 140mm fan and the fin stack. I was, however, able to seal a 120mm Noctua fan to the fin stack.
Mostly correct. Direct physical connection of fan to stack results in the transfer of motor and rotor vibrations to the stack and that induces resonances which combines with actual noise from turbulence and makes it sound louder. Noctua’s fans have silicone bumpers on the corners which dampen the amount of vibration that transfers to the stack, but don’t eliminate it completely. An air-gap (physical disconnect) eliminates all transfer, but then you need to work out a different way to mount the fan.
In my Antec P180 case I (ultimately) ended up with one 120mm fan at the back of the rear stack, in a pull configuration. This was held in place (a couple of mm from the stack) with improvised brackets that connected to both the top and back of the case. A surgical adhesive tape (very flexible, heat resistant, and did not stiffen appreciably over time) was used to seal the gap between the fan and the rear stack, as well as the gap between the two stacks. Extremely hacky and ugly, yes, but it made for a very efficient and quiet cooler. The single 120mm fan pulled air through both stacks without a problem and kept my i7 2600K satisfactorily cool.
I’ve read good things about that cooler but never had one. I currently passively-cool my 65W Ryzen 5600G using a Noctua NH-P1 on a Streacom BC1 Open Benchtable. The P1 handles it like a champ.
There have been better performers than the D15 in some scenarios for a while now. IIRC, GN has reviewed several units that are smaller and offer better performance if only slightly, and noctua’s own U12A tends to outperform the D15 at lower TDPs in a much smaller size, which is probably why it’s more expensive.
I think the real story, though, is that the D15 was engineered to be very big and very good at the same time, when not many such options existed on the market, and when not many CPUs were coming out to push it’s limits, giving it a very long shelf life.
Even Hyper212+ has held up very well, especially for the cost it was at the time.(~$20) If you can get it mounted to a modern CPU, it should hold up well for anything but the very high end, not bad at all for something over 10 years old and a budget option at the time.
I have constant white noise going on in my room from an air filter and humidifier, so for me the big things I want to avoid is heat and gpu whine rather than airflow from fans, which is why I just moved my computer out to the garage. I use a long fiber optic displayport cable, and an additional cable for a usb extender so I only have a monitor and keyboard/mouse in my room.
Such a setup is about as quiet as one can get, minus you know… the whole keyboard and mice noises, and whatever sounds the monitor and power bricks make. Which the white noise covers over.
That was exactly my thought when I read the thread title. Competitors caught up if not over took D15 in the last five years or so.
If Noctua is willing to lower its prices, competitors can under cut it any time. Consumers should pay less for D15 or similar class coolers. These things (fans, fins, heatpipes) are cheap to manufacture. The profit margins are so fat that a lot of people want a piece of the cake.
The foam seals the gap nicely, but the steel screws directly couple the fan chassis to the fin stack. Because the Black Ridge is so shallow there are fewer resonant frequencies to deal with, so that might not be so bad. Coolers with deeper stacks will have more frequencies. Rigidly connecting fan to stack is generally not a good idea. (Convenient, yes, but creates a new category of noise issues.)
The Noctua case fans I had came with these stretchy silicone anti-vibration mounts that looked a little bit like arrows, but which you pushed through the fan and case wall mounting holes. They are a non-rigid alternative to screws. https://noctua.at/en/na-sav2 It would have been nice if there was something like that for mounting fans to fin stacks (instead of those metal clips or other hacky approaches).
Good move. High performance gaming rigs can’t be silent, and indeed tend to be noisy. Moving them somewhere else is a lot easier than trying to make them quiet — assuming you have a convenient space. I built a small, insulated stud-frame ‘office’ inside our shed that I use for various shed-related things, but also for the noisier games I like to play (e.g. tanking). It’s ~50m away from the house, which the missus appreciates. Monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse were inside the office. The rig was on the other side of the wall. Can’t hear it at all from inside the office. Nice.
I would think that a NH-D14 would be fine.
I have a Noctua NH-U14S-4677 single-rad cooler on an Intel Xeon W7-2495X 24-Core.
And a Noctua NH-D15 dual-rad on an AMD R9-5950X.
I went with the NH-D15 on my AMD simply because it is the Chromax Black model.
This isn’t entirely true. There’s R&D in making a good product, or cloning someone else’s good product. Copper isn’t cheap, and heatpipes are less so. Good quality control and reliable assembly are also costly. Shipping and packaging can be quite expensive, since it’s relatively heavy.
While I do think D15 can be cheaper, along with any noctua product, the profit margins are probably a lot less than you think, and I doubt the sales volume is amazing either.
Noctua does a fair bit of R&D too, so I think the profits are probably reinvested well enough.
Coolermaster, on the other hand… Literally has been raising prices on the same outdated cooler for a decade, without innovating on it at all. They’re a higher volume, and larger business too, with questionable QC for their size.
Smaller players like Scythe or Deepcool seem to be trend followers working off low-margin sales. Actually, Scythe has had some great innovations, too. Good science over there. I still have a batch of S-Flex going strong.
Some competitors track their list prices closely with respect to NH-D15. It’s kinda hard to estimate their real cost. Luckily we have Thermalright. Its Peer Assassin 120 cools the test CPU better than D15. Fans also a bit quieter than D15 at full blast.
The street price of D15 on Amazon is $110 apiece. That of Thermalright Peer Assassin 120 is $37 apiece, about one third of D15. All people on the food chain of PA 120 will bite a piece of the profit. I’m sure it’s not a losing business for the manufacturer either.
What’s the cost of PA 120? I don’t know. Say $15 apiece to manufacture including material & labour. Now that’s what I think how cheap these things do.
Don’t forget after three years of use. Both D15 and PA120 will oxidise. Shiny pipes and fins become dull. You’ll have equally a hard time cleaning it up and make it shine.
