**A Comprehensive Review of the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 Air Cooler**

The Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 is an air cooler designed for AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors, particularly those with the TR4 socket. Our team recently had the opportunity to thoroughly test this cooler, and we're excited to share our findings with you.

**Installation Challenges**

One of the most notable issues we encountered during installation was the tendency of the cooler's mounting system to want to pull out of the fan mount as we were installing it. This is a common problem that many users have experienced with air coolers, and Noctua has indeed maintained its reputation for quality by addressing this issue in their design. However, upon closer inspection, we noticed that the standoffs on the NH-U14S TR4-SP3 come equipped with rubber inserts, which serve to retain the standoff onto the back plate, allowing users to easily adjust the position of their motherboard.

**Washer Mod Issues**

Our team was also impressed by Noctua's attention to detail in design, particularly when it comes to ease of use. The washer mod, a feature designed to enhance performance by increasing the pressure on the thermal interface, proved to be more challenging than anticipated during installation. Both Steve and I had difficulty with the installation process, which we attribute to the minimal engagement required between the washers and the threads in the Intel back plate. We found that even slight misalignment could lead to over-torquing or stripping of the threads, making this feature less reliable than it could be.

**Value Judgment**

The core of our reviews is a value judgment, taking into account not only performance but also brand credibility, engineering, and overall value. In this case, we believe that the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 justifies its premium price due to its exceptional build quality, cold plate styling, and impressive fan design. While it's true that liquid coolers offer superior performance in most metrics, we argue that for certain users, particularly those with a strong affinity for brand reputation and engineering prowess, the NH-U14S TR4-SP3 is worth considering.

**Performance Comparison**

In comparison to other air coolers on the market, the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 holds its own remarkably well. While it may not offer the same level of performance as some liquid coolers, particularly those designed specifically for Ryzen Threadripper processors, it does manage to close the gap in many areas. Our team was impressed by its cold plate styling and fan design, which work together seamlessly to deliver exceptional thermal performance.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, our experience with the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 has been overwhelmingly positive. While we do recommend caution when using the washer mod due to its potential for over-torquing or stripping of threads, this cooler remains an engineering marvel in many ways. For users willing to overlook some of its limitations and take advantage of its premium features, we believe that the NH-U14S TR4-SP3 is a worthwhile investment.

**Final Thoughts**

Our review team would like to extend our gratitude to Noctua for providing us with this air cooler, which was both fun to work on and performed exceptionally well. We also want to thank our audience for their support, which has enabled us to continue producing high-quality content and equipment reviews. Please visit Gamers Access (store.gamersaccess.net) to purchase the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3, as we have some extras in stock. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you all next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're reviewing noct's brand new nhd15 G2 coolers and there are three variations of them which is why we have them in our laser scanner because we are evaluating nocuous claims of having a special curvature to the cold plate to better accommodate the different CPU integrated heat spreader Styles or IHSS you can already see the impact from the cold plate tuning that nocta has done the LBC model or low Bas convexity cold plate has one of the flattest contact patches we've ever seen this should be good for AMD CPUs and likewise HBC or high based convexity is visibly more convex than the LBC variation this should tune well for Intel's platform CPUs which we've previously scanned and shown us heavily concave in our custom Cal plate design video we'll also be testing Acoustics and our Hemi anic chamber because a lot of noock to was last 10 years working on the D15 to get to Gen 2 has been focused on the acoustic to Thermal response so that's what this is for and of course we also have thermal testing on our new Intel 14900 KF bench 250 Watts for that and we did a bunch of pressure testing on these because these CPU coolers have those special cold plates and we needed to be able to show how they affect the different contact patches for the CPU IHSS and that was done with a special chemically reactive paper and then we have the classic AMD testbench that we use with dozens of coolers now run through it and because this is apparently something nocta only does every 10 years or so launching a flagship product we wanted to make sure we built a review that can withstand the test of time because people might be referencing this review in 20 33 or 4 that's kind of painful to think about before that this video is brought to you by NZXT C1500 Platinum power supply which has passed the cybernetics titanium standard for efficiency NZXT has been certified for efficient operation upwards of 94% and uses a 140 mm fan to help run quieter under load this 180 mm form factor power supply is fully modular using capacitors rated for 105° C learn more at the link in the description below it seems complicated but it's actually pretty straightforward first of all this is $150 it is very expensive it includes in the Box two of the new NF A14 by 25r G2 fans so those are the round Edition G2 fans it also has washers for potential washer mod on Intel all the mounting hardware for the various sockets and motherboards and some accessories this is the most expensive air cooler we have ever tested so it's going to have to perform there's no elephant in the room here everybody knows it's expensive nocta knows it's expensive and everyone's already talked about it for the last month because that's when it was announced for the price at least uh the cooler itself was announced many years ago and then again and again uh but it's here now and that price is is at this point established so that puts the nhd15 G2 as about $30 to $40 more expensive than an Arctic liquid freezer 3 360 Black Edition meaning no LEDs depending on the time you check the price of that liquid cooler just to set the stage for this so it is expensive so there are three coolers and there's only one difference between them it's really simple it's the coal plate the coal plate is this part this is the original D15 same idea so the C plate is the part that contacts the integrated heat spreader the IHS that is attached to the CPU the IHS can be either flat or it can have a uh curvature to it and so that curvature is something we showed in a separate engineering video if you want to learn more about it something we experimented with uh but basically Intel CPUs right now especially because the the way it clamps with the ilm or independent loading mechanism which is basically that socket clamp that will deform the CPU slightly down and in to create a concavity on the Intel side which means if you want to get the perfect cold plate for that you would theoretically have uh basically a mating convex cold plate to sink down into that concave uh deformation in the IHS so that's the difference between the three of them the three models are called HBC LBC and then just G2 we're calling it G2 standard to be clear HBC is high base convexity LBC is low base convexity so moving from the G to the LBC you would optimize am to the D sorry just LBC and Snoop the point is LBC is preferable for AMD HBC is what you'd buy for Intel and then the standard model is kind of the all-arounder it'll work fine on everything we've validated it uh that's the one where you're maybe not sure what you'll use it on or you want to use the cooler for the next 10 years while you wait for the G3 and in that case you'd buy the standard model to just head your bet this review is really dense today I don't want to hold up getting to the data to read a brochure inpection we're going to give you some highlights and then move on rapidly if you want more detail on any of the Core specs of the product go to their website or watch our compex news coverage video the new NF a14x 25r G2 fans use KN as PPA and ppb design which offsets the RPM of the two fans intentionally by about 25 RPM each by using a driver IC feature called super torque this feature allows knock to uh to basically eliminate the chance of encountering a beat frequency phenomenal which we discussed at length in a recent technical interview with nocta if you want to learn more about what that is it is a something that we have observed in our own testing it's basically when you get an annoying uh noise that occurs because of two fans that are effectively interfering with each other we've got some graphics on the screen right the fans are also made of a liquid Crystal polymer which is a relatively expensive material it's used in high-end fans and that is intentionally used to allow the blade tips to be about 0 .7 mm away from the inner frame here this should maximize the performance but LCP is expensive and it was used to retain the fan shape even when under those centripetal forces as it spins it's also supposed to help for long-term endurance and aging and then finally another quick feature is that the heat pipe count has changed from the nhd15 original to the G2 it's gone from six heat pipes now up to eight heat pipes go to their website if you want more of the basics uh but we're not here for Basics so the co plates are the first engineering feature to look at and that is because they are supposed to be curved specially for each IHS we can validate that with our 3D laser scanner so we're going to jump over to that for high resolution scans and evaluate the cold plate curvature of each model this is a scientific testing machine that we bought for $60,000 with support from our community by buying our mod mats solder mats and toolkits on store. Gamers access.net the laser in this machine has a reputability of 0.5 microns on the vertical axis which allows us to measure the point Point depth here's a scan of the standard nhd15 G2 magnifying 100x helps to illustrate the curvature you can see that the plate is slightly convex protruding down towards the CPU IHS the central Spike can be ignored that's from an anti-reflective coding we use where it accumulated but this is a very slight curvature and it's comparable to competing coolers of basically all price ranges here's a scan of the high- based convexity plate built mostly for Intel's concave deformation under the stock ilm at 1X you can already see that the center is going to protrude more than the last one at 100x that protrusion becomes immediately obvious as compared to standard it's not just marketing they really are changing the cold plates and now we're on the LBC with so much drama in the LBC we can see what is actually the flattest cold plate that can be it's impressive how flat nocta got this plate to the extent that it caused us problems when we were trying to contemplate when we were trying to remove it from am4 CPUs since it basically suctioned itself to the CPU that's a testament to flatness and in a good way for am4 and am5 alike so that'll cover the C plate stuff with a laser scanner if you're interested in this topic and you want to learn more about it we have a whole separate Deep dive video where actually we didn't even know noct was working on different cold plate Styles when we started that project and published it uh it happened to align really well as educational material for something that they hadn't yet announced in terms of like what they were doing so you check that out we're getting into thermals now so the AMD test bench is our classic bench the methodology has been published forever we've also introduced a 14900 KF bench that is running at 250 Watts for the CPU package power the actual EPS 12vt power consumption is around 270 Watts uh obviously depending on how cool the CPU is there is more or less uh leakage there more or less inefficiency and so that number moves a little bit but we've talked about that in the past the types of tests we're doing are going to be 100% fan speed and noise normalized and that's on the two different platforms so 200 wat a 250 wat Intel we have 200 watt Intel numbers as well they're not that interesting mostly because to truly show the difference between high-end coolers air or liquid you need the highest possible heat load that they can handle without being unreasonable that allows you to see a bigger gap between them so that's what we're showing here today uh for the testing when we did test where we swapped the different LBC HBC and standard coolers to uh determine how well or or poorly they might perform with a different CPU IHS we kept the same mounting hardware and we kept the same fans and so in those specific tests all we're doing is swapping the tower itself and that's because what we're trying to do is isolate the variable of the cold plate now you can't perfectly do that there's some heat pipe bending differences there might be differences in the manufacturing quality of the total solution for the heat sink uh but the point is minimizing those variables so that we can just look at the base convexity and how much that impacts it to the extent reasonable the other thing we did we have some old versus new fan testing where we took the old D15 fans threw them on the new cooler and test them A to B for that one we had the exact same Mount so not only uh the same cooler the same Tower the same Hardware but we didn't even remove it uh and then we we did that multiple mounts we did multiple passes per Mount so for a lot of these we're looking at as many as six to there's probably some that are like nine test passes and that's at the high end and that allows us to get the resolution we want want for testing so uh let's get into the numbers on to 200 y AMD testing we'll start again with only the full speed knockwood results in the charts so we can compare a lot of variations at once this test uses the older acoustic testing methodology so these noise levels are presented differently despite representing the same thing as previously they can get louder from the Intel testing it's all the same just tested different ways then hd15 G2 LBC is the best result here which makes sense tested with the same fans and mounting hardware as the others it ends up functionally tied with the HBC and the standard results the this isn't too surprising we saw similar results on am4 with our prior coal plate flatness testing so that represents here despite having a theoretical best match with a flat plate AMD isn't as sensitive to the designs as Intel this is because you can't end up with a massive Gap centrally which you can with Intel with AMD even if the base plate is highly convex like on HBC it'll still apply massive pressure dead center and relatively close to the chiplet dieses in the case of HBC it ends up lining up over the Silicon with an offset Mount applied these numbers all make sense using the non-offset mount and produced the worst results of the G2 cooler so far though it's still better than the older D15 the G2 without an offset landed at 52.5 De celsi over ambient at 200 Watts here or an improvement of 0.6 de Celsius with the offset mount on LBC the D15 that we bought in 2023 landed at 53.3 De C over ambient at about the same noise level and slightly lower RPM standard is therefore about 1° improved and LBC is about 1.4 de improved that's a lot considering the fan speed and noise are so similar the old model D15 from 2015 or 2016 or so runs a little louder and faster but has worse thermals this cooler has been around for years and it's been through a lot in our testing while the metal theoretically shouldn't age much this can be explained by things like potential manufacturing refinement over the decade of production fatigue or weakening in the metal fan Clips or the rubber corner of the fans from age that may soften the connection with the tower in the flushness or if any changes have been made over the years when noise normalized the G2 LBC ran at 55° over ambient leading the standard model by 0.5° C we didn't test HBC in this heat load but we already saw those results the D15 we bought last year allows the G2 a lead of 1.6 de C and our original unit Falls much further behind again for reasons we mentioned in the previous section before getting into the comparative test let's look at some feature tests on Intel isolated as well this is a 250 W heat load on the 14 KF and noise normalized the test uses our Hemi anoqui chamber so the noise is collected a different way than you saw on the AMD testing a moment ago the distance is further at 1 meter and the noise floor is lower that's why the numbers are different looking at just the knw results here the nhd15 G2 HBC with the new fans ran at 57.8 De C over ambient pee and 50.8 all core attaching the old fans from our 2023 nhd15 unit we end up noise normalized with a slightly slower RP PM since the newer fans are marginally quieter when they're matched with this Tower and that's important because free flow noise is one thing but how it interacts specifically with the tower it's attached to is what ultimately really matters the older fans ran 2.4 degrees warmer with the same heat sink the same mounting hardware and in fact the same Mount itself so it wasn't removed between the fan Swap and that means that the task between new and old fans was exactly like for like because it was all done uh on the same configuration without any changes other than the fan Swap and we did multiple passes as always with the old tower that one was running about 3° warmer when noise normalized as compared to the new one and here's the nocta only Intel data at 100% fan speeds also for 250 watts in this test the HBC model posted an improvement to 53.3 De from 55.9 De on the nhd15 that we bought in 20123 which is a 2.6 Dee change in PE cor average noise levels are equal between old and new in this test adding the washer mod brought the result down an additional 0.8 de C but we wouldn't recommend using it for the reasons that we'll talk about later it does work though it actually does something here now for the comparative 250 wat Intel results when noise normalized in the chamber the liquid freezer 3 predictably leads the charts here and is currently the only liquid cooler we have in this new data set at 48.1 De over ambient for peores it leads the nhd15 G2 HBC by 9.7 de that is a huge advant Vantage and shows where liquid still rules which is dealing with high heat loads we'd still recommend liquid for running Nel at Full Tilt the nhd15 G2 does well though at 57.8 De PE cor average it's the coolest air cooler we've run through this new testing approach when noise normalized on Intel it's outperforming the ID cooling a720 by 2.9 de C here which is great since the a720 is a relatively massive cooler and it's a lot cheaper than the D15 G2 so it's important that the G2 is ahead and Ely this is actually a huge gap for air coolers and is bigger than most of what we saw in our flatter AMD IHS testing at 200 Watts larger gaps form at higher temperatures and with more concavity of the IHS the G2 HBC leads the Peerless Assassin by a somewhat impressive 4.4 degrees here now that's still over $100 more expensive for those four degrees on the G2 but it's important again that nocta is at least the best air cooler that exists at these prices and in this specific comparison it achieves that the lead over the AK 620 and a620 from Deep cool and ID cooling respectively is noteworthy with the a620 underperforming in this test as compared to some of the other results our next chart will be for 200 Watts on AMD for comparative thermals we'll move to the full comparison chart at 100% fan speed now the G2 LBC model with the offset is our reference point at 100% fan speed the nhd15 is only outperformed by the louder coolers on this chart the Assassin 4 which is no longer available in the US due to sanctions we covered in a hardware news episode is about tied with the g2 while running to DBA louder the ID cooling a720 with dual 140s and a tall tower ends up better than the G2 LBC by 1.4 de C but is also a considerable 5.1 dbaa louder that's definitely a noticeable increase in noise typically most people will notice at 3 DBA but you can definitely notice less than that just depends how sensitive you're hearing it the G2 LBC outperforms the $45 louder ID cooling Frozen a620 marginally the thermal pess assassin meanwhile is a similar noise level to the nocta G2 and holds a 53.4 degree result allowing nocta a 1.5 degree Advantage the Peerless assassin has a massive price Advantage though at around $120 cheaper tends to be about 35 bucks so that's huge and it can't be ignored in the vast majority of use cases it makes way more financial sense to buy something else and put the money towards silicon or just your savings cooler Masters ma 824 is also new to this chart and underperforms massively so we'll skip that one the Arctic liquid freezer 3360 is one of the most noise efficient coolers on this chart and is liquid it's at 39.8 DBA for a 45° result so a lead of 62° this cooler is currently $117 or $33 cheaper than the G2 as you'd expect liquid remains Superior in pure cooling capacity despite other limitations like radiator size the introduction of a pump to the system things like that the noise normalized results on the 200 W AMD heat load have the G2 cooler as tied with the ID Cooling a720 20 for the best result on the chart that has the G2 ahead of the smaller purus Assassin by 1.2 de when matched on the same noise level and ahead of the Assassin 4 by the same the liquid freezer 3 360 runs at 47.3 De when noise normalized a 7.9 de Advantage as expected liquid tends to start pulling ahead even more when noise levels are brought down the last one for CPU thermals at least for core temperatures is back to Intel at 250 wats but now with full fan speeds in this test the nhd15 G2 BC ran at 53.3 De without the washer mod allowing the liquid freezer 3 a lead of 7.1 de or 6.3 de went against the washer mod the a720 closes the Gap here by running louder with a 4.4 DBA climb and under two degrees of difference the Peerless assassin is in the 57 degree range giving noct's G2 roughly a 4 degree Advantage once again the liquid frezer 3 is the most impressive overall with a 32 DBA result and chart topping performance it's quieter cooler but it should be because it's a 360 mm radiator that's relatively thick and also filled with liquid for air nocta is leading what we've run through so far this chart is for the core toe Deltas on Intel with 250 wat test at 25 DBA normalized for this we're measuring a range of the hottest to the coldest cores this is a useful metric for both overclocking and borderline TJ Maxx boosting Behavior because it informs you how much your hottest core will limit your total CPU especially for an all core OC although the actual CPU soldering and lid effect this the Cooler's hot spots will likewise influence it hotter overall results will lead to a higher qu toore Delta in general by nature of just how these Intel CPS behave here the liquid freezer 3's qu toore Delta is 15.8 De C which is actually pretty great the nhd15 G2 HBC has a 17° range and sadly we would still consider this good for Intel sadly because we'd like to see lower but as the liquid freezer 3 shows us Intel eventually steps it into bottleneck it with just the differences in its manufacturing process and IHS thickness the a720 has a 19° Delta with the Peerless assassin at about 20° nocta is doing well in this one we'll look at the pressure distribution now this evaluates a mixture of the cold plate design and the mounting hardware Intel is up first on the screen are columns showing HBC HBC with washers LBC and standard here's the HBC mount in this one you can see relatively good pressure application across the center of the CPU which is where the die is it's a little weaker on the top Edge the washers were a little more variable in what they produced as a result of the mounting difficulties that Mike will discuss later one of these scans shows nearly perfect pressure distribution though it hits the central die area but also applies more pressure across the whole IHS the other washer mod scan is less impressive but still good overall here's LBC this one is cool and shows exactly what we'd expect the flatter cold plate has effectively no pressure centrally it's still contacts but it'll rely more on thermal paste and it lacks firmer pressure to pull heat effectively from the die area you should definitely not buy an LBC G2 if you're using it exclusively for Intel just wouldn't make sense nocta has better options with HBC finally for the G2 this is standard this one has overall even distribution of pressure it doesn't show as much in the colors here but the pressure is slightly higher than pascals or PSI prefer with the HBC solution than standard even still though standard is doing well overall to contact most the areas of the IHS this is the cooler you'd want to use if you might SW Prof it between AMD and Intel in the future and this is similar to the original nhd15s pressure distribution which you can see in our test here just quickly here are the AMD pressure maps in these you can see that the HBC solution applies high pressure in the chiplet area which is the only reason it works okay clearly though the LBC option is a better fit for AMD the standard solution is lower pressure overall but still good contact if you're buying exclusively for AMD LBC makes the most sense now for some Acoustics the testing you're about to see is performed in this Hemi anaco chamber this chamber was a quar million doll construction project so we spent 250 Grand on this last year uh built it out the noise floor in here is 13.6 DBA and so the whole construction project allows us to really increase the accuracy of our testing the quality of it and get you some good noise samples that are controlled dayto day uh actually if we can bring in enough support through the GN store over the next year or two our hope is to further increase the capabilities of this because we're actually not limited by the chamber that I'm standing in but we are now bottlenecked by our measurement equipment so we could get sub1 DBA if we can spend the the relatively high amounts of money to upgrade that equipment so uh for now we've got a really solid chamber let's get into some cool Acoustics for this testing we're measuring at a 1 M distance from the front center of the fans away from the exhaust the measurement methodology was created in partnership with Mike chin formerly of Silent PC review and a leading PC acoustics expert whom we hired for Consulting on the test methods previously we also have a separate buildout video of the chamber for those curious about how it's constructed and why it works so well that features an interview and Technical discussion with one of the buildout engineers this frequency spectrum chart shows the noctua nhd15 with the g2 fans mounted and running at 100% speed this includes the RPM offset that nocta is applying via its PPA and ppb fans we observed a repeatable higher noise level in the low frequency range of about 216 Hertz that appeared in two separate tests this looks to be a real result lower frequencies are generally regarded as more acceptable to the human error and less annoying we also observed a plateau around 800 to 1500 htz with a gradual reduction in acoustic power across the higher frequency end of the spectrum adding the original D15 to this chart including the original fans for it we see that the prior higher volume Spike has shifted instead of aurr ing around the 216 to 230 HZ range it now happens around 330 HZ on the older model both coolers had a similar Spike around 680 HZ with the original D15 spiking louder the older cooler had a few higher frequency and repeatable spikes in the 3,000 HZ area as well but overall had lower volume levels in this test in the higher frequency range of the chart despite a few acute breakouts and those are probably what nocta was mostly trying to squash or shift ultimately these fans are remarkably similar to each other in total volume level and in the acoustic profile and now we'll get into some AB comparison of playback we won't tell you which is which fan until you hear both so try to identify which you prefer this helps to eliminate bias such as towards the newer product we'll play the first cooler and then the second cooler tests uninterrupted there will be a brief mute between them but no voice over so you'll know what's changed note that these are not the exact Clips we took for our frequency spectrum plot and likewise we had to boost the levels so that it's audible at a similar volume to my voice in this video you should be listening for the type of noise not necessarily the volume the First Recording sounded lower pitched overall or at least it has a lower emphasis or lower total volume on some of those higher frequencies if you listen carefully though you can notice a higher frequency almost rattle likee noise that might be a motor bearing or electrical noise but you have to listen pretty closely so here we'll isolate that frequency for you this is from the first recording the second one you listen to sounds louder and the higher frequency range overall but lacks this potentially annoying higher pitched rattle we'll play them one more time and in the same order but with the names revealed the first one is the D15 original and the second one is the D15 G2 the G2 does end up with louder higher frequencies in total but it eliminates that potentially annoying noise that we observed and isolated generally speaking the acoustic profile of these is relatively close but nocta has shifted it on the G2 to try and better accommodate human factors like getting rid of that high frequency noise or just bringing down some of the spikes to lower frequencies where possible so that All The Thermals let's get into the installation process for this I'm going to go over to Mike and he's got some praise and some critiques of the installation process and of the washer mod it's finally here let's install it so we're going to take a look at AMD first and then Intel and then after that we'll go over our feedback on the cooler so first step here we're going to remove the stock brackets that come on the motherboard won't be needing them next we're going to put down our standoffs which are gray in color for AMD all right now that the standoffs are in place we're ready to install the brackets um the brackets are really well labeled here so they're labeled North and South they have uh four holes each that are labeled as- 7 mm and zero this is for your AMD offset and then per noct to his instructions we're going to to use the offset today the only reason they said not to use the offset was for clearance issues so like if your PCI slot was too close to the cooler and was was going to impact the graphics card so let's get these in place I've got my South down here at the PCI slot and you'll notice now that I'm installing some of their Hardware that they have moved over all their Hardware away from Philips head 2 or Phillips into Torx T20 thankfully they included a really nice driver all right now that these are all torqued down we're ready to put some thermal paste down we'll go ahead get the cooler installed there's two retention screws here I'm just going to get these started and then I'm going to go back and forth alternating so that we get a nice even pressure now that the coolers torqued down we can go ahead and install our fans I've gotten a ram here and they actually said we don't need to remove the front fan to install the cooler but we found that the uh fan was going definitely did not have enough clearance over our RAM on any of our benches to do that so we did have to move that fan up during installation so that takes care of the AMD installation let's move over to Intel there's a lot to cover there okay so for the first step on Intel it's going to be assembling this back plate so for Intel 1700 we're going to use the position labeled as two and that's really clearly labeled again on uh the back plate here their labeling is very good all over this cooler it makes the installation very easy so they've got this little retention I guess you'd call it a washer clip ring and you just push that in and that holds the standof into the back plate itself all right with that assembled we can go ahead and place it through the motherboard and I like to do this on a flat surface so that it holds that back plate up in a place where I can attach the rest of the hardware next up is the standoffs and these are going to be blue for LGA 1700 your other Intel sockets are going to be black now depending on Intel you can change the orientation of your cooler um for this we want the intake coming in over the RAM and again our labeling is really good on this bracket it's labeled two for Intel 1700 and we'll get these nuts started on top okay with the brackets installed we're ready to put down some thermal paste we'll go ahead and place our cooler down on top and I'm just going to alternate left to right here every few turns to make sure I get a nice even pressure and these can be tightened down until they stop and then the cooler is nice and secured The Next Step would and next and final step would be the fans but we're going to go ahead and take the cooler back off and take a look at the washer mod that's included with all of these G two coolers so all three SKS of the nhd15 G2 come with these washers and these go underneath the ilm and that effectively just raises the ilm up so we're going to go ahead and do that now noctua advises that you do this with the CPU in the motherboard and we agree so find a nice flat surface um and go ahead and put your CPU in and leave it there for the entirety of this installation so the first step here is going to be removing the ilm now this ilm screws into to a back plate that's on the other side of this motherboard if you want a better look at that you can check out our contact frame videos okay now that the ilm has been removed let's go ahead and take our washers out and then we'll just place them over the four holes where the ilm screws in and now we're going to reinstall our ilm with those washers in between the motherboard and the ism as we're seeing one of the problems both Steve and I had was getting these threads to catch this is kind of difficult so right now I'm pushing up on the back plate so that I can get these threads to catch on the back plate there she goes okay that's one and with the IMM reinstalled we can go ahead and close our socket here now the rest of the installation is the same as the Intel installation we just went over so we're going to go ahead and move into our feedback um positives with the cooler things we like so the fan clips that come with the g2 are updated and they do a great job of just staying in the fan and make installation much easier um your iCal fan clip which will look something like this this is actually off of auma 3 um has a tendency to just want to pull out of the fan as you're installing it I'm sure everybody here has kind of experienced that um the build quality of the cooler is uh what you come to expect from noctua so they've they've kind of maintained that standard in this cooler as well it's very it's it's a very nice cooler all the hardware is really nice so our first criticism on some of the newer coolers including the fuma 3 for example the standoffs on the fuma 3 have rubber inside of them so that when you place the standoff onto the back plate the it actually retains it so that you can move the motherboard around and that's kind of a nice quality ease of use feature I'm I'm really coming to like and I would like to see that on uh coolers of this caliber our other big criticism is the washer mod we don't recommend it both Steve and I had a fair amount of trouble with the installation of the washer mod especially initially it was it was it was pretty tough um we followed the Anto instructions step by step we used a flat surface um but despite that both of us had to reach behind just like in this installation segment and push up on the Intel back plate in order to get it to start to thread the amount of Engagement you have with the threads is pretty minimal before it starts applying torque to those threads so much so that again we just we don't recommend it if it didn't feel good it wasn't you know it felt like we were going to over torque it or or strip something out two things we recommend to nocta that they could do to fix this they could include screws much like the liquid freezer 3 um for their contact frame they actually in include new screws to use with their contact frame or they could make the washers thinner if there's some technical reason they don't want to include longer screws then we again recommend making the washers thinner but they probably don't want to give up any of the gains they're getting with those larger washers but that wraps up the installation segment and I'm going to throw it back to Steve the core of our reviews is a value judgment you don't buy this for Value plain and simple you can look at the nhd15 G2 almost almost like a 490 or something it doesn't quite have that same performance Gap that the 490 would have but what you're paying for effectively with the NHD 15 G2 is brand credibility and so what that means is theoretically it's support system the engineering things like that now R boils down like this if you have your heart set on the nhd15 G2 and you can afford it then sure go for it just know that you're paying a lot of money for something where performance once while you can get something very similar that is still an air cooler for cheaper if you're okay with that then great we do like the cooler it is an engineering Marvel in some ways the fans mostly it performs exceptionally well they've managed to hit a lot of the same points that the original did while still improving it in some key areas namely the cold plate styling so it's just that from a consumer standpoint there are simply too many close competitors that are cheaper that are very close to just as good if not literally just as good and uh of course liquid coolers are just straight up better in basically any metric with the exception being once again if you want to make the argument of reliability multiple points of failure things like that go for it go buy an air cooler instead that's fine but uh you are buying the name with this cooler and uh we we don't recommend it outright for the majority of our audience for the reasons we've stated we are however impressed with it and if you don't care about the reasons we've stated then we do think it's a good cooler so go for I'm not going to talk some out of it if they really want to buy it because it was fun to work on and it does work really well so there's that aspect of it all right that's it this is the most intense review cycle we've ever done for an air cooler uh we got this done in record time it was like basically a a 24hour stint of really hardcore focus and then lot a week of prep and buildup with all the rest of the uh charts so huge effort the whole team put into this one and it was fun working on thanks for us directly you go to store. Gamers access.net please pick up something there like this shirt we still have some of these in stock we ordered some extras the manufacturing runs on the way that supports us directly because the equipment we used in this video we could not have bought without the help from the audience so thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next timetoday we're reviewing noct's brand new nhd15 G2 coolers and there are three variations of them which is why we have them in our laser scanner because we are evaluating nocuous claims of having a special curvature to the cold plate to better accommodate the different CPU integrated heat spreader Styles or IHSS you can already see the impact from the cold plate tuning that nocta has done the LBC model or low Bas convexity cold plate has one of the flattest contact patches we've ever seen this should be good for AMD CPUs and likewise HBC or high based convexity is visibly more convex than the LBC variation this should tune well for Intel's platform CPUs which we've previously scanned and shown us heavily concave in our custom Cal plate design video we'll also be testing Acoustics and our Hemi anic chamber because a lot of noock to was last 10 years working on the D15 to get to Gen 2 has been focused on the acoustic to Thermal response so that's what this is for and of course we also have thermal testing on our new Intel 14900 KF bench 250 Watts for that and we did a bunch of pressure testing on these because these CPU coolers have those special cold plates and we needed to be able to show how they affect the different contact patches for the CPU IHSS and that was done with a special chemically reactive paper and then we have the classic AMD testbench that we use with dozens of coolers now run through it and because this is apparently something nocta only does every 10 years or so launching a flagship product we wanted to make sure we built a review that can withstand the test of time because people might be referencing this review in 20 33 or 4 that's kind of painful to think about before that this video is brought to you by NZXT C1500 Platinum power supply which has passed the cybernetics titanium standard for efficiency NZXT has been certified for efficient operation upwards of 94% and uses a 140 mm fan to help run quieter under load this 180 mm form factor power supply is fully modular using capacitors rated for 105° C learn more at the link in the description below it seems complicated but it's actually pretty straightforward first of all this is $150 it is very expensive it includes in the Box two of the new NF A14 by 25r G2 fans so those are the round Edition G2 fans it also has washers for potential washer mod on Intel all the mounting hardware for the various sockets and motherboards and some accessories this is the most expensive air cooler we have ever tested so it's going to have to perform there's no elephant in the room here everybody knows it's expensive nocta knows it's expensive and everyone's already talked about it for the last month because that's when it was announced for the price at least uh the cooler itself was announced many years ago and then again and again uh but it's here now and that price is is at this point established so that puts the nhd15 G2 as about $30 to $40 more expensive than an Arctic liquid freezer 3 360 Black Edition meaning no LEDs depending on the time you check the price of that liquid cooler just to set the stage for this so it is expensive so there are three coolers and there's only one difference between them it's really simple it's the coal plate the coal plate is this part this is the original D15 same idea so the C plate is the part that contacts the integrated heat spreader the IHS that is attached to the CPU the IHS can be either flat or it can have a uh curvature to it and so that curvature is something we showed in a separate engineering video if you want to learn more about it something we experimented with uh but basically Intel CPUs right now especially because the the way it clamps with the ilm or independent loading mechanism which is basically that socket clamp that will deform the CPU slightly down and in to create a concavity on the Intel side which means if you want to get the perfect cold plate for that you would theoretically have uh basically a mating convex cold plate to sink down into that concave uh deformation in the IHS so that's the difference between the three of them the three models are called HBC LBC and then just G2 we're calling it G2 standard to be clear HBC is high base convexity LBC is low base convexity so moving from the G to the LBC you would optimize am to the D sorry just LBC and Snoop the point is LBC is preferable for AMD HBC is what you'd buy for Intel and then the standard model is kind of the all-arounder it'll work fine on everything we've validated it uh that's the one where you're maybe not sure what you'll use it on or you want to use the cooler for the next 10 years while you wait for the G3 and in that case you'd buy the standard model to just head your bet this review is really dense today I don't want to hold up getting to the data to read a brochure inpection we're going to give you some highlights and then move on rapidly if you want more detail on any of the Core specs of the product go to their website or watch our compex news coverage video the new NF a14x 25r G2 fans use KN as PPA and ppb design which offsets the RPM of the two fans intentionally by about 25 RPM each by using a driver IC feature called super torque this feature allows knock to uh to basically eliminate the chance of encountering a beat frequency phenomenal which we discussed at length in a recent technical interview with nocta if you want to learn more about what that is it is a something that we have observed in our own testing it's basically when you get an annoying uh noise that occurs because of two fans that are effectively interfering with each other we've got some graphics on the screen right the fans are also made of a liquid Crystal polymer which is a relatively expensive material it's used in high-end fans and that is intentionally used to allow the blade tips to be about 0 .7 mm away from the inner frame here this should maximize the performance but LCP is expensive and it was used to retain the fan shape even when under those centripetal forces as it spins it's also supposed to help for long-term endurance and aging and then finally another quick feature is that the heat pipe count has changed from the nhd15 original to the G2 it's gone from six heat pipes now up to eight heat pipes go to their website if you want more of the basics uh but we're not here for Basics so the co plates are the first engineering feature to look at and that is because they are supposed to be curved specially for each IHS we can validate that with our 3D laser scanner so we're going to jump over to that for high resolution scans and evaluate the cold plate curvature of each model this is a scientific testing machine that we bought for $60,000 with support from our community by buying our mod mats solder mats and toolkits on store. Gamers access.net the laser in this machine has a reputability of 0.5 microns on the vertical axis which allows us to measure the point Point depth here's a scan of the standard nhd15 G2 magnifying 100x helps to illustrate the curvature you can see that the plate is slightly convex protruding down towards the CPU IHS the central Spike can be ignored that's from an anti-reflective coding we use where it accumulated but this is a very slight curvature and it's comparable to competing coolers of basically all price ranges here's a scan of the high- based convexity plate built mostly for Intel's concave deformation under the stock ilm at 1X you can already see that the center is going to protrude more than the last one at 100x that protrusion becomes immediately obvious as compared to standard it's not just marketing they really are changing the cold plates and now we're on the LBC with so much drama in the LBC we can see what is actually the flattest cold plate that can be it's impressive how flat nocta got this plate to the extent that it caused us problems when we were trying to contemplate when we were trying to remove it from am4 CPUs since it basically suctioned itself to the CPU that's a testament to flatness and in a good way for am4 and am5 alike so that'll cover the C plate stuff with a laser scanner if you're interested in this topic and you want to learn more about it we have a whole separate Deep dive video where actually we didn't even know noct was working on different cold plate Styles when we started that project and published it uh it happened to align really well as educational material for something that they hadn't yet announced in terms of like what they were doing so you check that out we're getting into thermals now so the AMD test bench is our classic bench the methodology has been published forever we've also introduced a 14900 KF bench that is running at 250 Watts for the CPU package power the actual EPS 12vt power consumption is around 270 Watts uh obviously depending on how cool the CPU is there is more or less uh leakage there more or less inefficiency and so that number moves a little bit but we've talked about that in the past the types of tests we're doing are going to be 100% fan speed and noise normalized and that's on the two different platforms so 200 wat a 250 wat Intel we have 200 watt Intel numbers as well they're not that interesting mostly because to truly show the difference between high-end coolers air or liquid you need the highest possible heat load that they can handle without being unreasonable that allows you to see a bigger gap between them so that's what we're showing here today uh for the testing when we did test where we swapped the different LBC HBC and standard coolers to uh determine how well or or poorly they might perform with a different CPU IHS we kept the same mounting hardware and we kept the same fans and so in those specific tests all we're doing is swapping the tower itself and that's because what we're trying to do is isolate the variable of the cold plate now you can't perfectly do that there's some heat pipe bending differences there might be differences in the manufacturing quality of the total solution for the heat sink uh but the point is minimizing those variables so that we can just look at the base convexity and how much that impacts it to the extent reasonable the other thing we did we have some old versus new fan testing where we took the old D15 fans threw them on the new cooler and test them A to B for that one we had the exact same Mount so not only uh the same cooler the same Tower the same Hardware but we didn't even remove it uh and then we we did that multiple mounts we did multiple passes per Mount so for a lot of these we're looking at as many as six to there's probably some that are like nine test passes and that's at the high end and that allows us to get the resolution we want want for testing so uh let's get into the numbers on to 200 y AMD testing we'll start again with only the full speed knockwood results in the charts so we can compare a lot of variations at once this test uses the older acoustic testing methodology so these noise levels are presented differently despite representing the same thing as previously they can get louder from the Intel testing it's all the same just tested different ways then hd15 G2 LBC is the best result here which makes sense tested with the same fans and mounting hardware as the others it ends up functionally tied with the HBC and the standard results the this isn't too surprising we saw similar results on am4 with our prior coal plate flatness testing so that represents here despite having a theoretical best match with a flat plate AMD isn't as sensitive to the designs as Intel this is because you can't end up with a massive Gap centrally which you can with Intel with AMD even if the base plate is highly convex like on HBC it'll still apply massive pressure dead center and relatively close to the chiplet dieses in the case of HBC it ends up lining up over the Silicon with an offset Mount applied these numbers all make sense using the non-offset mount and produced the worst results of the G2 cooler so far though it's still better than the older D15 the G2 without an offset landed at 52.5 De celsi over ambient at 200 Watts here or an improvement of 0.6 de Celsius with the offset mount on LBC the D15 that we bought in 2023 landed at 53.3 De C over ambient at about the same noise level and slightly lower RPM standard is therefore about 1° improved and LBC is about 1.4 de improved that's a lot considering the fan speed and noise are so similar the old model D15 from 2015 or 2016 or so runs a little louder and faster but has worse thermals this cooler has been around for years and it's been through a lot in our testing while the metal theoretically shouldn't age much this can be explained by things like potential manufacturing refinement over the decade of production fatigue or weakening in the metal fan Clips or the rubber corner of the fans from age that may soften the connection with the tower in the flushness or if any changes have been made over the years when noise normalized the G2 LBC ran at 55° over ambient leading the standard model by 0.5° C we didn't test HBC in this heat load but we already saw those results the D15 we bought last year allows the G2 a lead of 1.6 de C and our original unit Falls much further behind again for reasons we mentioned in the previous section before getting into the comparative test let's look at some feature tests on Intel isolated as well this is a 250 W heat load on the 14 KF and noise normalized the test uses our Hemi anoqui chamber so the noise is collected a different way than you saw on the AMD testing a moment ago the distance is further at 1 meter and the noise floor is lower that's why the numbers are different looking at just the knw results here the nhd15 G2 HBC with the new fans ran at 57.8 De C over ambient pee and 50.8 all core attaching the old fans from our 2023 nhd15 unit we end up noise normalized with a slightly slower RP PM since the newer fans are marginally quieter when they're matched with this Tower and that's important because free flow noise is one thing but how it interacts specifically with the tower it's attached to is what ultimately really matters the older fans ran 2.4 degrees warmer with the same heat sink the same mounting hardware and in fact the same Mount itself so it wasn't removed between the fan Swap and that means that the task between new and old fans was exactly like for like because it was all done uh on the same configuration without any changes other than the fan Swap and we did multiple passes as always with the old tower that one was running about 3° warmer when noise normalized as compared to the new one and here's the nocta only Intel data at 100% fan speeds also for 250 watts in this test the HBC model posted an improvement to 53.3 De from 55.9 De on the nhd15 that we bought in 20123 which is a 2.6 Dee change in PE cor average noise levels are equal between old and new in this test adding the washer mod brought the result down an additional 0.8 de C but we wouldn't recommend using it for the reasons that we'll talk about later it does work though it actually does something here now for the comparative 250 wat Intel results when noise normalized in the chamber the liquid freezer 3 predictably leads the charts here and is currently the only liquid cooler we have in this new data set at 48.1 De over ambient for peores it leads the nhd15 G2 HBC by 9.7 de that is a huge advant Vantage and shows where liquid still rules which is dealing with high heat loads we'd still recommend liquid for running Nel at Full Tilt the nhd15 G2 does well though at 57.8 De PE cor average it's the coolest air cooler we've run through this new testing approach when noise normalized on Intel it's outperforming the ID cooling a720 by 2.9 de C here which is great since the a720 is a relatively massive cooler and it's a lot cheaper than the D15 G2 so it's important that the G2 is ahead and Ely this is actually a huge gap for air coolers and is bigger than most of what we saw in our flatter AMD IHS testing at 200 Watts larger gaps form at higher temperatures and with more concavity of the IHS the G2 HBC leads the Peerless Assassin by a somewhat impressive 4.4 degrees here now that's still over $100 more expensive for those four degrees on the G2 but it's important again that nocta is at least the best air cooler that exists at these prices and in this specific comparison it achieves that the lead over the AK 620 and a620 from Deep cool and ID cooling respectively is noteworthy with the a620 underperforming in this test as compared to some of the other results our next chart will be for 200 Watts on AMD for comparative thermals we'll move to the full comparison chart at 100% fan speed now the G2 LBC model with the offset is our reference point at 100% fan speed the nhd15 is only outperformed by the louder coolers on this chart the Assassin 4 which is no longer available in the US due to sanctions we covered in a hardware news episode is about tied with the g2 while running to DBA louder the ID cooling a720 with dual 140s and a tall tower ends up better than the G2 LBC by 1.4 de C but is also a considerable 5.1 dbaa louder that's definitely a noticeable increase in noise typically most people will notice at 3 DBA but you can definitely notice less than that just depends how sensitive you're hearing it the G2 LBC outperforms the $45 louder ID cooling Frozen a620 marginally the thermal pess assassin meanwhile is a similar noise level to the nocta G2 and holds a 53.4 degree result allowing nocta a 1.5 degree Advantage the Peerless assassin has a massive price Advantage though at around $120 cheaper tends to be about 35 bucks so that's huge and it can't be ignored in the vast majority of use cases it makes way more financial sense to buy something else and put the money towards silicon or just your savings cooler Masters ma 824 is also new to this chart and underperforms massively so we'll skip that one the Arctic liquid freezer 3360 is one of the most noise efficient coolers on this chart and is liquid it's at 39.8 DBA for a 45° result so a lead of 62° this cooler is currently $117 or $33 cheaper than the G2 as you'd expect liquid remains Superior in pure cooling capacity despite other limitations like radiator size the introduction of a pump to the system things like that the noise normalized results on the 200 W AMD heat load have the G2 cooler as tied with the ID Cooling a720 20 for the best result on the chart that has the G2 ahead of the smaller purus Assassin by 1.2 de when matched on the same noise level and ahead of the Assassin 4 by the same the liquid freezer 3 360 runs at 47.3 De when noise normalized a 7.9 de Advantage as expected liquid tends to start pulling ahead even more when noise levels are brought down the last one for CPU thermals at least for core temperatures is back to Intel at 250 wats but now with full fan speeds in this test the nhd15 G2 BC ran at 53.3 De without the washer mod allowing the liquid freezer 3 a lead of 7.1 de or 6.3 de went against the washer mod the a720 closes the Gap here by running louder with a 4.4 DBA climb and under two degrees of difference the Peerless assassin is in the 57 degree range giving noct's G2 roughly a 4 degree Advantage once again the liquid frezer 3 is the most impressive overall with a 32 DBA result and chart topping performance it's quieter cooler but it should be because it's a 360 mm radiator that's relatively thick and also filled with liquid for air nocta is leading what we've run through so far this chart is for the core toe Deltas on Intel with 250 wat test at 25 DBA normalized for this we're measuring a range of the hottest to the coldest cores this is a useful metric for both overclocking and borderline TJ Maxx boosting Behavior because it informs you how much your hottest core will limit your total CPU especially for an all core OC although the actual CPU soldering and lid effect this the Cooler's hot spots will likewise influence it hotter overall results will lead to a higher qu toore Delta in general by nature of just how these Intel CPS behave here the liquid freezer 3's qu toore Delta is 15.8 De C which is actually pretty great the nhd15 G2 HBC has a 17° range and sadly we would still consider this good for Intel sadly because we'd like to see lower but as the liquid freezer 3 shows us Intel eventually steps it into bottleneck it with just the differences in its manufacturing process and IHS thickness the a720 has a 19° Delta with the Peerless assassin at about 20° nocta is doing well in this one we'll look at the pressure distribution now this evaluates a mixture of the cold plate design and the mounting hardware Intel is up first on the screen are columns showing HBC HBC with washers LBC and standard here's the HBC mount in this one you can see relatively good pressure application across the center of the CPU which is where the die is it's a little weaker on the top Edge the washers were a little more variable in what they produced as a result of the mounting difficulties that Mike will discuss later one of these scans shows nearly perfect pressure distribution though it hits the central die area but also applies more pressure across the whole IHS the other washer mod scan is less impressive but still good overall here's LBC this one is cool and shows exactly what we'd expect the flatter cold plate has effectively no pressure centrally it's still contacts but it'll rely more on thermal paste and it lacks firmer pressure to pull heat effectively from the die area you should definitely not buy an LBC G2 if you're using it exclusively for Intel just wouldn't make sense nocta has better options with HBC finally for the G2 this is standard this one has overall even distribution of pressure it doesn't show as much in the colors here but the pressure is slightly higher than pascals or PSI prefer with the HBC solution than standard even still though standard is doing well overall to contact most the areas of the IHS this is the cooler you'd want to use if you might SW Prof it between AMD and Intel in the future and this is similar to the original nhd15s pressure distribution which you can see in our test here just quickly here are the AMD pressure maps in these you can see that the HBC solution applies high pressure in the chiplet area which is the only reason it works okay clearly though the LBC option is a better fit for AMD the standard solution is lower pressure overall but still good contact if you're buying exclusively for AMD LBC makes the most sense now for some Acoustics the testing you're about to see is performed in this Hemi anaco chamber this chamber was a quar million doll construction project so we spent 250 Grand on this last year uh built it out the noise floor in here is 13.6 DBA and so the whole construction project allows us to really increase the accuracy of our testing the quality of it and get you some good noise samples that are controlled dayto day uh actually if we can bring in enough support through the GN store over the next year or two our hope is to further increase the capabilities of this because we're actually not limited by the chamber that I'm standing in but we are now bottlenecked by our measurement equipment so we could get sub1 DBA if we can spend the the relatively high amounts of money to upgrade that equipment so uh for now we've got a really solid chamber let's get into some cool Acoustics for this testing we're measuring at a 1 M distance from the front center of the fans away from the exhaust the measurement methodology was created in partnership with Mike chin formerly of Silent PC review and a leading PC acoustics expert whom we hired for Consulting on the test methods previously we also have a separate buildout video of the chamber for those curious about how it's constructed and why it works so well that features an interview and Technical discussion with one of the buildout engineers this frequency spectrum chart shows the noctua nhd15 with the g2 fans mounted and running at 100% speed this includes the RPM offset that nocta is applying via its PPA and ppb fans we observed a repeatable higher noise level in the low frequency range of about 216 Hertz that appeared in two separate tests this looks to be a real result lower frequencies are generally regarded as more acceptable to the human error and less annoying we also observed a plateau around 800 to 1500 htz with a gradual reduction in acoustic power across the higher frequency end of the spectrum adding the original D15 to this chart including the original fans for it we see that the prior higher volume Spike has shifted instead of aurr ing around the 216 to 230 HZ range it now happens around 330 HZ on the older model both coolers had a similar Spike around 680 HZ with the original D15 spiking louder the older cooler had a few higher frequency and repeatable spikes in the 3,000 HZ area as well but overall had lower volume levels in this test in the higher frequency range of the chart despite a few acute breakouts and those are probably what nocta was mostly trying to squash or shift ultimately these fans are remarkably similar to each other in total volume level and in the acoustic profile and now we'll get into some AB comparison of playback we won't tell you which is which fan until you hear both so try to identify which you prefer this helps to eliminate bias such as towards the newer product we'll play the first cooler and then the second cooler tests uninterrupted there will be a brief mute between them but no voice over so you'll know what's changed note that these are not the exact Clips we took for our frequency spectrum plot and likewise we had to boost the levels so that it's audible at a similar volume to my voice in this video you should be listening for the type of noise not necessarily the volume the First Recording sounded lower pitched overall or at least it has a lower emphasis or lower total volume on some of those higher frequencies if you listen carefully though you can notice a higher frequency almost rattle likee noise that might be a motor bearing or electrical noise but you have to listen pretty closely so here we'll isolate that frequency for you this is from the first recording the second one you listen to sounds louder and the higher frequency range overall but lacks this potentially annoying higher pitched rattle we'll play them one more time and in the same order but with the names revealed the first one is the D15 original and the second one is the D15 G2 the G2 does end up with louder higher frequencies in total but it eliminates that potentially annoying noise that we observed and isolated generally speaking the acoustic profile of these is relatively close but nocta has shifted it on the G2 to try and better accommodate human factors like getting rid of that high frequency noise or just bringing down some of the spikes to lower frequencies where possible so that All The Thermals let's get into the installation process for this I'm going to go over to Mike and he's got some praise and some critiques of the installation process and of the washer mod it's finally here let's install it so we're going to take a look at AMD first and then Intel and then after that we'll go over our feedback on the cooler so first step here we're going to remove the stock brackets that come on the motherboard won't be needing them next we're going to put down our standoffs which are gray in color for AMD all right now that the standoffs are in place we're ready to install the brackets um the brackets are really well labeled here so they're labeled North and South they have uh four holes each that are labeled as- 7 mm and zero this is for your AMD offset and then per noct to his instructions we're going to to use the offset today the only reason they said not to use the offset was for clearance issues so like if your PCI slot was too close to the cooler and was was going to impact the graphics card so let's get these in place I've got my South down here at the PCI slot and you'll notice now that I'm installing some of their Hardware that they have moved over all their Hardware away from Philips head 2 or Phillips into Torx T20 thankfully they included a really nice driver all right now that these are all torqued down we're ready to put some thermal paste down we'll go ahead get the cooler installed there's two retention screws here I'm just going to get these started and then I'm going to go back and forth alternating so that we get a nice even pressure now that the coolers torqued down we can go ahead and install our fans I've gotten a ram here and they actually said we don't need to remove the front fan to install the cooler but we found that the uh fan was going definitely did not have enough clearance over our RAM on any of our benches to do that so we did have to move that fan up during installation so that takes care of the AMD installation let's move over to Intel there's a lot to cover there okay so for the first step on Intel it's going to be assembling this back plate so for Intel 1700 we're going to use the position labeled as two and that's really clearly labeled again on uh the back plate here their labeling is very good all over this cooler it makes the installation very easy so they've got this little retention I guess you'd call it a washer clip ring and you just push that in and that holds the standof into the back plate itself all right with that assembled we can go ahead and place it through the motherboard and I like to do this on a flat surface so that it holds that back plate up in a place where I can attach the rest of the hardware next up is the standoffs and these are going to be blue for LGA 1700 your other Intel sockets are going to be black now depending on Intel you can change the orientation of your cooler um for this we want the intake coming in over the RAM and again our labeling is really good on this bracket it's labeled two for Intel 1700 and we'll get these nuts started on top okay with the brackets installed we're ready to put down some thermal paste we'll go ahead and place our cooler down on top and I'm just going to alternate left to right here every few turns to make sure I get a nice even pressure and these can be tightened down until they stop and then the cooler is nice and secured The Next Step would and next and final step would be the fans but we're going to go ahead and take the cooler back off and take a look at the washer mod that's included with all of these G two coolers so all three SKS of the nhd15 G2 come with these washers and these go underneath the ilm and that effectively just raises the ilm up so we're going to go ahead and do that now noctua advises that you do this with the CPU in the motherboard and we agree so find a nice flat surface um and go ahead and put your CPU in and leave it there for the entirety of this installation so the first step here is going to be removing the ilm now this ilm screws into to a back plate that's on the other side of this motherboard if you want a better look at that you can check out our contact frame videos okay now that the ilm has been removed let's go ahead and take our washers out and then we'll just place them over the four holes where the ilm screws in and now we're going to reinstall our ilm with those washers in between the motherboard and the ism as we're seeing one of the problems both Steve and I had was getting these threads to catch this is kind of difficult so right now I'm pushing up on the back plate so that I can get these threads to catch on the back plate there she goes okay that's one and with the IMM reinstalled we can go ahead and close our socket here now the rest of the installation is the same as the Intel installation we just went over so we're going to go ahead and move into our feedback um positives with the cooler things we like so the fan clips that come with the g2 are updated and they do a great job of just staying in the fan and make installation much easier um your iCal fan clip which will look something like this this is actually off of auma 3 um has a tendency to just want to pull out of the fan as you're installing it I'm sure everybody here has kind of experienced that um the build quality of the cooler is uh what you come to expect from noctua so they've they've kind of maintained that standard in this cooler as well it's very it's it's a very nice cooler all the hardware is really nice so our first criticism on some of the newer coolers including the fuma 3 for example the standoffs on the fuma 3 have rubber inside of them so that when you place the standoff onto the back plate the it actually retains it so that you can move the motherboard around and that's kind of a nice quality ease of use feature I'm I'm really coming to like and I would like to see that on uh coolers of this caliber our other big criticism is the washer mod we don't recommend it both Steve and I had a fair amount of trouble with the installation of the washer mod especially initially it was it was it was pretty tough um we followed the Anto instructions step by step we used a flat surface um but despite that both of us had to reach behind just like in this installation segment and push up on the Intel back plate in order to get it to start to thread the amount of Engagement you have with the threads is pretty minimal before it starts applying torque to those threads so much so that again we just we don't recommend it if it didn't feel good it wasn't you know it felt like we were going to over torque it or or strip something out two things we recommend to nocta that they could do to fix this they could include screws much like the liquid freezer 3 um for their contact frame they actually in include new screws to use with their contact frame or they could make the washers thinner if there's some technical reason they don't want to include longer screws then we again recommend making the washers thinner but they probably don't want to give up any of the gains they're getting with those larger washers but that wraps up the installation segment and I'm going to throw it back to Steve the core of our reviews is a value judgment you don't buy this for Value plain and simple you can look at the nhd15 G2 almost almost like a 490 or something it doesn't quite have that same performance Gap that the 490 would have but what you're paying for effectively with the NHD 15 G2 is brand credibility and so what that means is theoretically it's support system the engineering things like that now R boils down like this if you have your heart set on the nhd15 G2 and you can afford it then sure go for it just know that you're paying a lot of money for something where performance once while you can get something very similar that is still an air cooler for cheaper if you're okay with that then great we do like the cooler it is an engineering Marvel in some ways the fans mostly it performs exceptionally well they've managed to hit a lot of the same points that the original did while still improving it in some key areas namely the cold plate styling so it's just that from a consumer standpoint there are simply too many close competitors that are cheaper that are very close to just as good if not literally just as good and uh of course liquid coolers are just straight up better in basically any metric with the exception being once again if you want to make the argument of reliability multiple points of failure things like that go for it go buy an air cooler instead that's fine but uh you are buying the name with this cooler and uh we we don't recommend it outright for the majority of our audience for the reasons we've stated we are however impressed with it and if you don't care about the reasons we've stated then we do think it's a good cooler so go for I'm not going to talk some out of it if they really want to buy it because it was fun to work on and it does work really well so there's that aspect of it all right that's it this is the most intense review cycle we've ever done for an air cooler uh we got this done in record time it was like basically a a 24hour stint of really hardcore focus and then lot a week of prep and buildup with all the rest of the uh charts so huge effort the whole team put into this one and it was fun working on thanks for us directly you go to store. Gamers access.net please pick up something there like this shirt we still have some of these in stock we ordered some extras the manufacturing runs on the way that supports us directly because the equipment we used in this video we could not have bought without the help from the audience so thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"