Still a monster performer, a great overall cooler from a great company that really stands behind their products.

The Noctua NH-D14 has been a flagship cooler for a long, long time. When it comes to air coolers, you can pay more but I honestly don't think you're going to get better value for your money. First of all, Noctua's mounting system and hardware are simply the best when it comes to air coolers. The simplicity of the mounting system is excellent and is super well thought out. Performance of the cooler aside, the mounting system alone has won many awards for it's innovation. It's just a generally accepted truth that Noctua's mounting system is the best when it comes to air coolers. Secondly, and this is a bit more up for debate, but I feel like Noctua makes the best system fans in the game. Say what you will about the colors and the lack of (imo) juvenile and tacky RGB lighting, the fans are fantastically quiet and perform really well. They do have a line of grey and black fans now if you prefer, as well as an all black version of the cooler and included fans. I believe it's call the Chromax. Lastly and most importantly, the performance of the heatsink itself. It's definitely big with tons of big fat heatpipes. It flat out performs and despite the D14 being ancient in terms of pc hardware it still performs great. It hangs with any air cooler that might be far newer and keeps up with most aio coolers that typically cost much more. If you're able to snag one of these in good used condition like I did it presents a value that's really fantastic. I'm able to run my scorching hot 7700k at 5.0ghz (not de-lidded) at 1.34v and I never get above 75-78c while gaming and it typically stays much cooler than that. Running stress tests it does get a little hotter than that but synthetic stress tests put a load on your CPU that you just won't see in all but a very few real world applications. After I de-lid this thing I'll be seeing temps that are equal to or better than full custom loop cooling on a non de-lidded CPU. I'm super happy with this cooler and I think you will be too, especially if you can find one for $50 shipped like I did. They did finally come out with the NH-D15 model a while back and from what I can tell it's a very similar design. It's offered in all black like I mentioned earlier as well as what looks like an improved slightly heatpipe design as well as a little more clearance room for RAM with taller heatsinks. FWIW I'm running 32gb of Corsair Vengeance with the tall red LED heatsinks and I was still able to install the cooler. I don't have a ton of room but it does fit and this is definitely some of the taller RAM on the market. In short, this is a monster of an air cooler that absolutely keeps up with all the latest greatest 2019 coolers and in my opinion is a much better value than say a $150 aio cooler with a big 240mm rad. It won't cool quite as well as these high doller aio coolers but when you stack up the performance you get vs the money you spend I feel like it's a better buy, especially if you can find a good deal on a used one. A heatsink just doesn't wear out after all and of course will never leak.Read full review

Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned