Noctua NH-D14 CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look at the NH-D14

There is no getting around the fact that this is one huge cooler. Even without any fans installed, Noctua states the NH-D14 weighs in at a hefty 900 grams (which is basically two pounds) which is a hell of a lot of weight for a motherboard to support. Add in 100 grams per fan and you are looking at a fully loaded cooler tipping the scales at 1200 grams.

To make matters even more interesting, the D14 is not only heavy but it has the girth of a Sumo wrestler as well. Its official dimensions (once again without that huge 140mm fan or 120mm fan attached) are 160mm x 140mm x 130mm so with sizes like this, the biggest concern is whether this cooler is simply too big for your setup. Luckily, as you will see, Noctua somehow achieved broad compatibility across multiple platforms.


After removing the fans (to get a better look at the cooler itself), the very first thing we though was that the D14 looks a lot like Noctua took two U12s which have been morphed into one “new” solution. On the surface this can be a considered fairly accurate way to describe this cooler as it does have two separate towers which share a lot of features with previous Noctua designs.

The devil is in the details however, and it is here that the brilliance of the Noctua engineers starts to shine through. When you take a closer look at the design of it this is not some mutant love child of the U12 but is rather a separate and distinct Noctua cooler which happens to have a U12 in its ancestral heritage. Honestly, calling the D14 nothing more than a “dual U12” is a lot like calling Homo Sapiens nothing more than hairless apes.


At the heart of the D12’s cooling ability, resides six large U shaped heatpipes. Unlike the U12 (or most air base CPU cooling solutions for that matter) these heatpipes are not arranged in a North / South orientation but rather run in an East / West direction and take full advantage of having two separate, distinct, yet equal towers available for cooling them.

Continuing this trend of doing things different, these heatpipes are not clustered into each end of the cooling towers. Rather, each tower has all six heatpipes evenly spaced through out it in a straight row, but only one side of each of the heatpipe’s U shape resides in each tower. In a nut shell, this means each tower cools off only one side of the base and has been arranged in such away to take full advantage of the air moving over them so that no one heatpipe blocks or restricts the air flow of another. This tweak alone should help even a single central fan cool down the CPU as the static pressure should be lower than previous dual tower designs we have looked at.