Cooling

Noctua’s NH-U14S – Not As Large as the NH-D15

While we are a community formed around the idea of small, space-efficient designs, once again, a bigger cooler may be the best option for your build, be it for performance or to ensure low noise levels. While the NH-U14S is smaller than the recently reviewed NH-D15S, it should still offer great performance, enabling satisfaction of the above requirements.

The Noctua NH-U14S can be used in single fan and, with the addition of a separately purchased NF-A15 fan, dual fan modes. To see how the cooler performs, continue reading.

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The Noctua NH-U14S

HEATSINK SPECIFICATION
Dimension (with fan) L52 mm x W150 mm x H165 mm
Weight (with fan) 935 g
Weight (without fan) 770 g
Heat pipes Copper heat pipe (x6)
Fin Material Aluminium x 51
Mounting plate Copper nickel plated
RAM Height Limit 65mm
TDP 220W AMD, varies with Intel. More information here.
 Replaceable Fan Yes
FAN SPECIFICATION
Dimension L140 mm x W150 mm x H25 mm
Connector 4 Pin PWM
Rated Speed 300 ~1500 RPM
Noise Level 19.2 ~ 24.6 dBA
Max Air Flow 68 CFM
Voltage 12V
Power Consumption 1.56W

This product supports Intel LGA2011-0 & LGA2011-3 (Square ILM), LGA1150, LGA1151, LGA1155, LGA1156, and AMD AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+, FM1, FM2, FM2+ (backplate required).

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Unboxing

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The usual Noctua packaging style is evident here, it’s something we’ve commented on a few times before, and it bodes well for a quality product.

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Included is a full complement of SecuFirm2 mounting hardware as well as an extra pair of fan mounting clips. We’ll see more about how these come into play below.

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The NH-U14S

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The NH-U14S consists of 51 aluminium fins, 6 nickel plated heatpipes in a ‘U’ configuration, and a Noctua NF-A15 fan. Build quality is excellent, and the fins are thick and sturdy – which makes for a product that will last through many builds.

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Included with the mounting kit is a set of replacement vibration dampeners (and of course, a pair of wire fan clips), to be used for adding a second NF-A15 fan, like this:

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It’s great to see Noctua including accessories like this, meaning that you don’t have to go out and buy extra accessory packs or hack something together to run the cooler in a higher-performance configuration.

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Compatibility

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With performance sometimes comes compromises, and here’s a major one. Like a few other larger coolers that we have tested prior, this cooler has one major flaw – it blocks the use of the PCIe slot on the M-ITX board. While this board does have the socket very close to the slot, this is a common layout style used by many low to high end M-ITX boards, and some M-ATX boards, where the x16 slot is at the top of the 4 available.

Interestingly, the mounting system for this cooler matches the one seen on the Noctua NH-U12S, for which I go into more detail here.

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On the test board, only regular or low profile DIMMs need apply. No fancy heatspreaders here, but really, unless you are overclocking memory, who needs those? (Cue ranting from some in the community!)

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Testing

To test this cooler, we used the SmallFormFactor.net thermal test bench and methodology, as detailed here.

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Results

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The cooler performs better than its cousin, the NH-U12S. Out of the coolers tested on the small SFFn test bench, it performs the in the top of the field. In the noise world, the cooler was exceptionally quiet with no negative aural characteristics. In the dual fan configuration,  it performs better compared to the other coolers, and making for a 0 c at idle and 3-4 c at load improvement, for no major change in noise characteristics.

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Conclusion

It has come to be expected, but yet another product from Noctua offers great performance with exceptional build quality. The performance especially was exceptional. Unfortunately for us in the SFF community, this does come with caveats that for some would make this product unusable – namely the component conflicts. Using this cooler on one of quite a few M-ITX or M-ATX boards leads to the (topmost for M-ATX) expansion slot being blocked.

Pros

  • Great performance
  • Upgrade-ability

Cons

  • Size
  • Compatibility on our test system

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This cooler is currently available for around US$70 on Amazon.com

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Thoughts? Discuss them in the forum.

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Review sample provided by Noctua.

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