Gadgetory

now this is a product that I've been excited about ever since I heard about it Noctua needs absolutely no introduction they make some of if not the best air coolers on the market all right so this is a brand new product from them that is a bit of an evolution on their NH c12 and it is called the NHC 14 so as you might well imagine that means we've gone from a 12 centimeter fan to a 14 centimeter fan it uses AC type flow design which means that this is a downdraft cooler and you know what I I know this one pretty well so I don't need to really talk too much about what's on the outside of the box and I know there's going to be lots of mounting accessories and fans and all kinds of stuff inside here that we're going to have to have a look at so I'll have plenty of time to yak about all the different things about this product so the first box inside we find a set of Intel mounting hardware and I've said this before but it's been a long time since not to has released something new so I'm going to say it again I love knocked with mounting hardware it is some of the best on the market and here I'm just going to show you guys something I mean even though their coolers are big and heavy they're mounting hardware is built like a tank I mean look at this thing it's got a thick thick rubber coating so no matter what kind of components are mounted on the back of your motherboard PC be they're not going to pierce through there and make contact with the metal and short anything out they've got a removable rubber piece here so that makes room for an integrated backplate if your CPU has one all right so for example LGA 1156 does have one so you'll have to pull that out and you put this on the rubber makes contact with the back your board very nice the overall build quality of all Noctua products is just outstanding alright long here we've got more like solid solid metal pieces once you attach this thing it's not coming off no matter what okay here we have a manual which shows you Intel and AMD mounting instructions it is a color some semi color manual alright very very detailed it's very easy to install these things I could pretty much do it with my eyes despite the fact that they are massive coolers here we have the ante mounting hardware real simple for that one and then we have the shared pieces so in here you're going to actually find a lot of different accessories that are all very useful in their own ways and I'm going to tell you all about them so first we have low noise fan adapters as well as ultra-low noise fan adapters so those are 7 and 5 volt fan adapters depending on how quiet you want your fan and how much cooling you want out of it next we have a splitter so that's so you can plug both fans because this is a dual fan cooler into the single CPU motherboard header then we have some anti vibration mounts for a fan we have some non anti-vibration mounts for a fan and we have some anti vibration little bracket II guys here actually sure what those ones do I haven't seen those before not to a case bad even not to his case badges are like better built than anyone else look at that it's like metal it's like a piece of metal awesome okay next we have packing okay Oh cameraman somehow ended up on the other side of me I'm not quite sure when that happened while we were filming this video alright now this is it I haven't seen this in person yet so I'm actually like pretty stoked right now so I can already see there's a six heat pipes built into this cooler sorry about that Esther filled up my memory card and I didn't realize it was full because I didn't know there was a bunch of footage on my camera so I deleted all her stuff hopefully she didn't eat it and I'm just trying to figure out how to get this box open love environmentally friendly packaging and you can see that noctua has not a single piece of foam in their entire package it's all perfectly recyclable corrugated cardboard love it alright so the first thing we see is the bottom view of the heat sink where we will find six heat pipes this is not a heat pipe direct touch heat sink although that's never stopped Noctua from being at or near the very top of the performance charts in the past because they do use a very high quality heat pipe as well as the pretty much the best menu during that I'd seen everything is always really really really tight to whatever their specification happens to be just looks really sharp okay so right on the bottom you can see we've got our six heat pipes we've got the whole base is a slot soldered together all right you can see there's a small fin on the bottom so I guess you'll get a tiny tiny bit of cooling out of that actually got trying to figure out what that is but hold on okay it looks like it can actually be removed somehow okay okay sorry guys sorry guys I got I got a little distracted there okay so the knocked well mounting mechanism that I that I love so much so it's a solid piece of metal that's actually screwed in here I've seen some of their coolers in the past where you actually have to attach this piece but what you'll have to do is you installed the mounting hardware around the outside of whatever your CPU type is and then you just screw these two onto the mounting hardware that goes on to the motherboard so how are you going to do that you might ask because clearly looking at it you're not going to be able to screw that in very easily but there is a solution not to I has thought of everything so I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys how this works and I actually really like their system for mounting fans too it's uh quite a bit easier than a lot of the other ones that I've seen you just do that okay so they've actually built in holes here and they give you an included screw driver that is long enough and slim enough to reach that's it that's their solution to the problem so you can reach all the way through even with that fan installed you can access the screw and then you can screw it in from the top just like that very very nice love knot to his design now they've got a huge cooler here for what is a downdraft CPU cooler they've got very thick fins and they've actually used what is traditionally knocked to a use as a wider spacing on a lot of their coolers but they've got a very narrow fin spacing and I think the reason they've done that is they've got two high-pressure fans so while these are not high rpm fans these are NFP 14s they are designed along the same lines as the original 120 millimeter version of this fan and that means that they've got optimized static pressure whereas they're not optimized for high air flow where there's no resistance to the air so what that means is that if you've got a very high density heat sink you've got two fans that's been at low rpm but are optimized for lots of pressure you're still going to be able to push air through those tight fins so I'm actually going to remove the other fan and I want to talk a little bit about the advantages of using a downdraft CPU cooler versus something like the D 14 which is as far as I know to this day the undisputed performance king of CPU coolers so the advantage of this is that we get most of the performance of a monster like the D 14 and a form factor that is a more likely to be compatible with your case because you don't have to deal with any clearance issues with the side panel because the D 14th huge I mean it's like like this tall right off the CPU socket you also get the advantage of cooling all the components around your CPU now what that means is that depending on how you position this you're going to be able to cool your vrm you're going to be able to cool your Northbridge you're going to be able to cool your RAM that sits under it and that makes for maybe not quite as good CPU temps like I said it doesn't perform as well as the D 14 but it makes for much better temperatures for all of the other things that are around it so you're looking at better overall system reliability if you can keep everything well within spec and running nice and cool not to also build in like I've seen some pretty cheesy approaches to anti-vibration I mean not to us all about silence so they build in these little rubber mounts that are going to to stop the fan vibrations from being passed along to the heatsink and then by extension the CPU motherboard and then case so that's a really nice touch that I've seen on a lot of Nachtwey heat sinks and I figured out what that what that screw is so that screw bolts in this bracket which seems to provide some kind of additional support for the oh oh I get it okay so I guess if it's on this way it may so that it has a little bit more support and doesn't put pressure on the heat pipes from from the weight here and shipping if it gets bounced around that's another thing NCIX ships a lot of PC systems and one of the ones that we've had the most success with when shipping or transporting systems is not to uh that's one of the reasons I like their mounting system so much so I want to look at the Box quickly see if there's anything I missed high clearance mode oh yeah high clearance mode versus low profile mode haha that's smart so you don't have to mount two fans on here you can do one or two so you can actually do one on the bottom and that turns this extreme performance heat sink into a very low profile solution so you can fit it even in some HT pcs as long as you've got enough clearance or you can put it in up on the top if that works better for you let's say you've got something under it like tall Ram modules down here that you need to make room for so now you can put the fan on the top and then if you've got lots of room all around then you can put on both fans so there we go we've covered that particular aspect of it and then we've also got dual fan configuration yep now we've talked about that and I think that's pretty much everything on here oh yeah they include their n th one thermal compound which is pretty good stuff I totally missed that as we were unboxing all the accessories so thank you for checking out the unboxing and first look at the Noctua NHC 14 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other cool computer videos