With the fan installed the fan and heatsink clear the memory banks closest to the back panel I/O and in fact may provide some additional airflow around the modules. For taller memory, there would be some clearance issues, there is only a couple of millimeters left before the fan edge. For the other side, no such issues.
We have set this up in low profile mode, which is one of three including, dual fan and high clearance mode, which will help with tall memory modules.
With the MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V installed everything is nicely squared off, and there is clearance, just. This is typical of most of the coolers we test, so no real issues there, and we are getting a lot of surface area cooler performance without the height of the flagship coolers.
If you can visualize this on an mITX motherboard without a graphics card, you could have the unused space in the chassis taken up with this square block of heatsink, and have no fan starvation due to the fan position, nice.
Test Set Up
We tested the Noctua NH-C14S CPU Cooler for sound and cooling performance using an i7 LGA2011-v3 set up. We tested two configurations, stock and over clock both with turbo.
- Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
- Processor: Intel i7-5820K
- Motherboard: Asus Rampage V Extreme Motherboard
- Graphics: MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V
- Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666Mhz
- Drives: 2 x 128GB SSDs OS RAID 0 (SanDisk SSD SATA III 128GB)
- PSU: Corsair HX1000i
- Chassis: MicroCool Banchetto 101 Chassis
Software used for load tests and temperature capture;
- HWiNFO64
- AIDA64 Engineer
We ran the AIDA64 Extreme stability test in 30 minute batches and recorded the results. We used the Core Max result as there was typically a variance across the cores of a couple of degrees. We only selected the cache, FPU and CPU tests, so no other component would generate impacting heat during the tests.
BIOS Setting
We used the default PWM setting and left it alone!
Sound Level Testing
We used a standard generic digital sound level meter at 15 inches. It is important to note we used the MicroCool Banchetto 101 Chassis for testing which is an open chassis. This means you are hearing the CPU coolers fan unobstructed.
Noctua NH-C14S CPU Cooler Review
Package - 9
Performance - 9.2
Price - 9.2
Consumer Experience - 9.5
9.2
The Noctua NH-C14S is another excellent cooler with a history. The improvements and up to date socket compatibility make it a class leading cooler in certain circumstances, mainly small chassis set ups or at least cooling areas with certain spacial dimensions with high performance.
