Gadgetory

it's time to take a look at knock Shores flagship NHD 15 air cooler and see if it is really king of the hill ladies and gentlemen welcome back to takia city this is Brad coming back to you guys today with a review of a very big air cooler this is the NHD 15 from NOC schewe and wow this thing is huge so we're going to go run down through the specs first then I'm going to do a comparison against all the other coolers they have here and then we'll go on to a conclusion and my subjective opinion about this cooler so as soon as you get the Box in from start to finish this thing was just a luxurious experience if that's one word to put it the box and everything in it comes organized so well comes foam packaged I couldn't ask for a better unboxing experience now as soon as we pull the contents out you've got there too low noise adaptors you've also got two 140 millimeter fans from knock Shore themselves so these are in-house design fans and boy are they very quiet but we'll get onto that later they are sort of cream and brown themed they're also included is mounting kits for popular AMD and Intel sockets and another good thing I'll point out about Knox well is they include future compatibility so all you have to do if you get a new socket in the future and your cooler doesn't mount you just send them an email and they'll send you out the attachments and all the mounting kit required to get your cooler on the new socket now the goodness doesn't stop there they also include a massive tube of thermal paste and I've tried this it just compares pretty much identical to the MX 4 so good stuff that they've included with it and they even give you this thick metal badge which is interesting because a lot of people include cheap decals these guys are including a thick metal badge which I've got on the fractal define r4 there now let's get on to business with the cooler itself this bad boy is not only the biggest thing I've seen in terms of dimensions for an air cooler but it's also the heaviest as well weighing in at one point three kilos with both fans attached looking at the dimensions however we have 161 millimeters wide by 150 millimeters long by 164 mm the meters tall also important to note there is RAM clearance you've got up to 64 millimeters of clearance therefore your RAM and also this cooler can be mounted either vertically orientated or horizontally orientated however looking at the materials of the cooler itself we have a copper base plate which is nickel plated and gives off a mirror finish that's attached to six heat pipes which are also nickel plated and then that was all attached to a heap of aluminium fins so now it's time to move on to the part that you've all been waiting for and we will just get the benchmarks pulled right up here and the first benchmark I decided to do was the 5820k at four point three gigahertz at one point to five volt which I've tested all the other coolers around here and it's good to see that the nock sure does beat out every other air cooler here by a little comfortable margin there especially against the assassin which is its next best competitor so beat that by a whole two degrees whilst mainly remaining really quiet as well it is important to note however it did lose to the captain 240 water cooler by about 4 degrees though on a platform like the 5820k which gives off a lot of heat especially compared to your 4 cos that's no surprise as water does cool more efficiently than air now moving on to the 6600 K this is where things came really close like there wasn't anything in this I had to test this a few different times but we see here the NHD 15 only lost to the water cooler by 2 degrees however it still beat out every other air cooler it beat out the assassin by one degree so the NHD 15 is the king of the hill when it comes to air cooling so now that leaves us to the final conclusion where I'm going to talk about this cooler and everything that I like and some little things that I don't like about it so let's get on with the actual build quality this is the most impressive thing about the NOC schewe NHD 15 I mean it was just amazing from opening this thing to installing it I couldn't critique one negative about this you can see that Knox you have just paid attention to detail in everything just even things like boxing everything up so neatly and then they're getting the cooler out and just seeing that it's perfect and the fans mount easy the fans are really quiet you've got you've got good thermal paste included the manual is just so simple and then you even get a screwdriver included to make it just a breeze of an installation it's actually a tall one as well for screwing in the middle of the base plate which was not a problem to screw in so everything just made sense on this cooler and I was just absolutely blown away by the build quality however let's move on now to the negative or our negative because there's only one negative thing that I can really think of with this cooler and that is the sheer size now when I got the deep cool assassin in I thought that thing was massive and it is massive but this thing is even bigger than the assassin and it's just so big in fact that it doesn't even fit properly on my neck x99 motherboard in one orientation that's facing horizontally however it does mount in a non-conventional way the vertical way which in the end is fine it mounts on this z170 absolutely fine in both orientations but keep in mind it is just so big so keep that in mind and know the specs of this cooler if you wish to mount it on your rig just to be sure for instance if someone's mounting it with conventional air flow going through the case then they can't mount it horizontally they may come into a little bit of a problem with their flow or the air flow in their case so this leaves you with my final score of four point seven five stars out of five stars now I wanted to give this thing five stars but just that mounting problem caused me to drop off 0.25 of a star here because everything else with this cooler is just simply phenomenal build quality amazing fans quiet I mean I didn't even have to go into my bias and put it on a silent profile because at max speed these things were really quiet anyway so I was just completely blown away by every little detail that knock should have paid attention to with the D 15 so now guys that's about it for me today if you have any questions or comments about the nhd 15 then please drop a comment in the comment section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can if you haven't already hit that like button and subscribe to tech es city for more tech news reviews and even gaming peace out for now bye