Noctua – NH-D14 SE2011 Review

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Home > PC parts and Hardware, Reviews > Noctua – NH-D14 SE2011 Review

Noctua – NH-D14 SE2011 Review

July 7, 2012 Dawfreak Leave a comment Go to comments

Whazzup Dawfreaks… Today is a Big day for Dawfreak.se, I am very happy to announce my first CPU cooler review. Before I go on, I would like to thank Noctua for letting me do this review.

 

Introduction Building a Studio PC that is cool and quiet does take allot of planning, The stock CPU cooler that comes with your CPU can not always handle the pressure and does in most cases make allot of noise. Today we are going to have a look at the Noctua NH-D14 SE2011, since Dawfreak is all about studio PC´s I will not go into overclocking tests, I will look at how the Noctua – NH-D14 SE2011 perform in a studio environment.

About Noctua

Designed in Austria, Noctua’s premium cooling components are internationally renowned for their superb quietness, exceptional performance and thoroughgoing quality. Having received more than 1000 awards and recommendations from leading hardware websites and magazines, Noctua’s fans and heatsinks are chosen by more than a hundred thousand satisfied customers around the globe.

This text was taken from http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=unternehmen&lng=en

The Noctua NH-D14 SE2011

Key features

• Award-winning NH-D14 cooler
• 6 heatpipe dual radiator design
• Dual NF-P14/NF-P12 PWM fan setup
• Custom designed PWM IC with SCD
• Excellent component cooling
• SecuFirm2™ mounting system for LGA2011
• NT-H1 thermal compound

Specifications

This image is a copy of the info from The Noctua Homepage.

 

Package and Content     Noctua always delivers their products in very nice boxes, that shows specifications and key features about the product this is how the NH-D14 SE2011 box looks like.

Included with the NH-D14 SE2011 is the mounting brackets, one Y splitter cable, two Low noise adapters (RC7 and RC8), and 1 cable extension.

Also included with the NH-D14 SE2011 is the Noctua`s great performing Thermal compound NT-H1.

The NH-D14 SE2011

This image was borrowed from Noctua

The NH-D14 SE2011 Is a huge dual radiator tower CPU cooler that comes with a NF-P12/NF-P14 dual PWM fan configuration, it looks massive with both fans installed.

  Just to give you an idea of how big the NH-D14 SE2011 is I placed it beside the NH-U12P SE.

 

  Here is the Base of the NH-D14 SE2011

 

The build quality of the NH-D14 SE2011 is as always with Noctua products extremely well, I had a good 10 minutes inspecting this massive cooler and I I found no flaws or weakness in the NH-D14 SE2011 design.

Installation

The NH-D14 SE2011 does not stock come with LGA 1366 support, But when I spoke to Noctua about a NH-D14 review they understood the need of quiet performence and said they would send me a NH-D14 SE2011 with a NM-I3 SecuFirm2™ Mounting-Kit. This will allow me to install the NH-D14 SE2011 on my GA-X58a UD3R rev 2.0 and gain the benefits from the PWM fans.

  The NM-I3 Includes everything you need for to install everything to install the NH-D14 SE2011 on socket 1156/1155/1366 motherboards.

  First I mounted the Back plate and brackets through the LGA1366 motherboard holes.

Installing the  NH-D14 SE2011 with Noctua`s SecuFirm2 Is very straight forward and takes about 20-30 min to do, The only thing I had a problem with was attaching the NF-P14 to the Radiator due to tight space inside the case.

Now I have the Kingston HyperX DDR 1600 that is low profile DDR and I had no issues installing the NH-D14 SE2011 with Ram sticks in all six DDR slots.

Many people asked me how I would apply the Thermal compound, after the CPU have been cleaned of I use a small blob of the NT-H1 in the center of the CPU.

  This is how the NH-D14 SE2011 looks inside the Fractal design Define R3.

 

Testing When testing a CPU cooler that is a part of a quiet studio PC there are a couple of things that we have to take into consideration. Case Airflow is not set for optimal cooling, it is balanced for as little noise as possible but keeping the system below recommended temps, many studio PC´s uses passively cooled Graphic cards and they tend to have a small heat impact on the overall system temps. Another thing is Ambient room temp, when these tests where done it was one of them not so hot summer days we seams to have this year in Sweden so my Ambient temp was 24c

To test the NH-D14 SE2011 I first let my system be in idle for one hour to make sure my system had come to a normal base temp. I then used Prime95 64bit blend mode to stress the CPU for 1 hour, these tests where done with quiet Studio in mind so I removed the NF-P12 and only had the NF-P14 PWM installed Using the RC7 L.N.A.

 

My Daw / test system Motherboard:Gigabyte x58a-ud3r rev.2 Cpu: Intel i7 930 @ stock 2.8ghz Cpu cooler: NH-D14 SE2011 Ram: 24GB Kingston HyperX DDR 3 1600mhz Graphic card: SAPPHIRE HD 7750 ULTIMATE Hdd´s: System disk Plextor PX-128M3 Files Disk  2TB western digital caviar black.

Results   The results are very impressive as the NH-D14 SE2011 keeps my CPU bellow 65c, this is done with only the NF-P14 PWM and it only reaching a max speed of 837 RPM during this test. 

I wanted to give you something to compare with,so here is the temps inside the Define XL using the Noctua nh-u12p se with a push pull configuration.

The temps with the Noctua nh-u12p se is only 2-3c cooler with push pull configuration, note also that the fans on the Noctua nh-u12p se had reached 1178 RPM.

Noise So how quiet is the NH-D14 SE2011? when using only the NF-P14 PWM In my Define R3 case I can not hear the fan at all. I am very impressed with how quiet this cooler runs and this while keeping my CPU well below max temps under stress tests. we have to remember that the stress made by prime95 or other torture tests is a pressure the CPU will hardly ever gets to in 90% of our studios.

Conclusion

Noctua has once again delivered a great CPU cooler, No matter if you want a cool and quiet studio PC or if you want to OC your CPU to increase your gaming performance the NH-D14 SE2011 will keep your CPU running cool. Installing the NH-D14 SE2011 is a simple task so if this is your first time don’t worry as Noctua has made sure that their products can be installed by nearly anyone as long as they follow the installation guide and don’t stress. All in all I must say I am very impressed with the NH-D14 SE2011 and can recommend it to anyone in need of a great cooler.

Pros

• Great cooling performance even with only one fan
• Quiet
• Easy to install

Cons

• None

 

The Verdict

 

I would once again like to thank Noctua for letting me do this Review.

 

Thank you for reading

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Comments (2) Trackbacks (1) Leave a comment Trackback

1. K. M innerveykosmos prod. July 7, 2012 at 8:12 pm Reply

   hey good review man, like always! im thinking about to cool my new pc(only a 8gb ram i5,but i got lil clockspeed more 3,1 🙂 ,but especially with the summer in front of the door i wanna try to keep the temperature down, but im not havin bad experiences with the sound that mine’s making cause its not that loud, but still wanna cool it down, what should i do cause i know that this package isnt cheap, im thinkin to just install an extra fan, but thats goin to give me more noise.. any help,suggestions,.. appreciated

   • Dawfreak July 7, 2012 at 8:18 pm Reply

     Since you are happy with the over all performance i say get a second fan to start with, you can in most cases run two fans at a lower RPM and still gain cooling and with the right fan config you will not get very much more noise then what you have.

     If you in a month or so still feel you need better cooling. Then buy a new cooler.

1. October 13, 2013 at 11:09 pm Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 DRAM 1866MHz C9 Review | DAWfreak.se

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