Noctua NH-DH14 & Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K – in Pursuit of 5.0GHz

The Conclusion

When it comes to quietly cooling your overclocked hot Intel or AMD CPU efficiently and quietly, Noctua is the company to turn to. If you have a Core i7 or i5, or a hot-running FX processor that you really want to push to its maximum overclock by safely using air-cooling without offending your ears, the NH-DH14 should be one of your first considerations.  It is one of the very best designed premium CPU air coolers that money can buy that comes in a complete universal kit that boasts one of the easiest and most secure installations ever.

Pros:

• Noctua’s NH-DH14 CPU cooler is an excellent high-end cooler that provides superb and *quiet* cooling – well above any bidget cooler’s ability to cool an overclocked CPU
• A brilliant design simplifies installation for such a large cooler; without a doubt, the easiest large CPU cooler installation to date!
• Everything is included for installation including premium thermal compound and a screwdriver.
• Instructions are clear and well-written
• The NH-DH14 is very quiet at stock fan speeds and may be made even quieter using U.L.N.A.included adapters to drop the fans’ rotational speed down from 1300 rpm to 900 rpm

Cons:

• It’s really large.  Make sure it will fit inside your case.
• Not a con; however, we would like to see more color choices.

The Verdict

Noctua’s universal NH-DH14 CPU cooler is an excellent and supremely quiet cooler for a reasonable price considering its 6-heatpipe per dual-fin build, ease of installation, and all-inclusive package. It is well-deserving of our “Editor’s Choice” award and the NH-DH14 will be used to cool ABT’s flagship system.  It is highly recommended especially to those who appreciate quiet cooling, intelligent design and ease of installation.

Our next article will be published this week continuing the theme of with cases and cooling, and it will cover our Thermaltake Overseer RX-I full tower that we used for this evaluation and it will also be set up for watercooling.

Also up shortly will be “Part Two” of Ivy Bridge 3770K Gaming results vs Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz where we shall compare IPC across more than gaming at 4.2GHz (and beyond) between Bloomfield and Ivy Bridge.  This upcoming evaluation will showcase our complete platform upgrade (including SSD vs HDD, and 4GB vs 8GB RAM!) featuring the new ECS Z77H2-A2X motherboard in an ongoing ABT series.  Join us on our ABT forum as we preview upcoming articles and you can help us to direct the evaluation of new products by speaking your mind.

Happy Gaming!

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

Please join us in our Forums

Become a Fan on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

For the latest updates from ABT, please join our RSS News Feed

Join our Distributed Computing teams

• Folding@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 164304
• SETI@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 138705
• World Community Grid – Team AlienBabelTech