Cooling [SFF Network] Noctua NH-D15S, A Bit Sideways

[confusis]

Sometimes, you just need to go big or go home. Maybe you like to overclock or you're like me and run a high wattage AMD FX chip. For these scenarios, large air coolers or water cooling kits are the only effective options.

For those interested in air cooling, Noctua has multiple large coolers for just this use case. Today we're featuring the NH-D15S. This twin tower heatsink is rated by the manufacturer as being able to cope with a 220-watt TDP which is enough to handle the "just plain crazy" AMD FX-9590.

Read more here.

 

[Kooki]

Nice review!
Good thing you benchmarked the many settings allowed by the cooler, but you forgot to include the mythical passive mode!

 

[confusis]

Last time i cooled a CPU passively I killed a test bench board :/

 

[Kooki]

Oh, I thought it had something to do with the heatsink being too bulky or something and it cracked the board.
I didn't even realize the temps in the overall components is what could have killed it!

 

[Phuncz]

As a general note, not targeted at Confusis: many people tend to forget passive cooling isn't just the CPU, the VRMs also need adequate cooling and often times these ride shotgun with the airflow the CPU cooler generates. With most cases, a case fan will help but if these puppies need to live on convection alone... I'd guess the men get seperated from the boys in the VRM world.