Noctua NH-C14S, Premium CPU Cooler with NF-A14 PWM 140mm Fan (Brown)

Product Information

The accessories and mounting hardware are in separate boxes while the heatsink and fan are in another. The bottom line is that Core 2 is the name of Intel’s latest line of CPUs, based on a new micro-architecture, designed for speed and efficiency.

The NH-C14S comes with one 140mm NF-A14 PWM fan but Noctua has sent us an extra NF-A14 PWM fan to test with both one and two fan configuration. At the same time, the new offset layout allows it to clear the top PCIe slot on most micro-ATX and ATX motherboards. The cooler has provisions to mount a fan on top and below the fins, providing a few choices in how you set it up.

The central, lower, heatpipe has extra bracing soldered to it, to ensure the cooler does not sag over time, and can handle the rigors of transport to a LAN party, or just general gravitational forces. The case I'm using has about 70mm clearance IIRC, so I was looking at the Noctua NH-L9a, but I'll have to see if the other dimensions of the Reeven will work in that space. To install the fan onto the heat sink you’ll need the two included metal clips, which allow secure attachment both on the top of the heat sink and underneath. Featuring sophisticated aerodynamic optimisations such as Flow Acceleration Channels, the NF-A14 is renowned to be among the best quiet 140mm fans on the market. As we have seen with all of Noctua's packaging, Noctua has always packaged their products in a very specific way.

We will rank each CPU cooler that we have in our lab from highest to lowest by the amount of fin count they have, number of heatpipes and their fin thickness.The cooler only works well when put in a system where the case exhaust runs parallel to the fans on the C14S. The contents were laid out in a straightforward manner, and the instructions were easy to understand. You will notice that Noctua uses internal cardboard boxes to protect the heatsink, fan and all the included accessories. so the results may not be 100% precise but it should give you a clear indication of the noise levels for the cooler.

In cases that use PCIe riser cables, the cooler can be mounted with the heatpipes facing the PCIe slot with use of Noctua’s NM-AM4 mounting kit. The fins used on the NH-C14S are quite substantial, reminiscent of a tower cooler’s fin array, bent over horizontal. Testing is carried out on BC1 Mini v2 (open testbench), using the following hardware, in 20°C ambient room temperature. My Asus Rampage needed the fan sensor setting to ignore as when the pc booted it wasn't spinning at even the lowest 200rpm setting the bios monitor offered.On the left side you will find a short paragraph with details of the cooler and some of its features in multiple languages.