Noctua NH-D15 G2

[umeng2002]

"Coolers 1/3 the price offer 98% of the performance"

That says it all, unfortunately.

 

[sLowEnd]

Noctua have never been about value. This is the best air cooler you can buy and the graphs confirm it. You can't use more than 1 cooler on a CPU, so the amount of coolers you can get for this is somewhat irrelevant. This cooler was never going to be about value, it was about Noctua engineering the very best air cooler, and they achieved that.

You're paying for the engineering that has gone into making this the best air cooler you can buy(R&D isn't cheap). You're also paying for top notch customer support, and if the past is anything to go by, future socket support at no-cost. That being said, this costs a bit too much with how close to the competition it is. I think a more reasonable price would be $100-130, and I think it'll get down to that ~$130 within the year.

In the early days at least, Noctua wasn't a huge amount more expensive than competing products.

The NH-U12P for example, was priced in line with coolers like the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme and the Prolimatech Megahalems

 

[Lesha]

@crazyeyesreaper The offset mount results for an AMD cpu would be great, that should bring the temperature down a couple of degrees.

 

[ymdhis]

Don't care much for this, it's simply too big and expensive. But then it is a flagship product where you pay 3x the price for 2% more performance. Most of the cost is in the great fans and Noctua's support anyhow.

I'm more interested in getting the standalone fan, it's not in stock locally right now and I'm not ordering it from fucking Amazon. The old A14 G1 fans were pretty bad (the A12s outperformed them), but according to the tests at hardware busters, the A14 G2 is the best in every metric except maybe having too high power usage.
Also, when will they release the A12 G2? I'm hoping for that one to be a killer too.

If I had to get an all new cooling setup, I'd go for the ID-Cooling SE-207 XT SLIM and see if it's possible to mate it with the round frame A12x25r... it's only 135mm tall that way, great for SFF builds, and from the reviews I've seen it trades blows with the U12A which is insane. Noctua has no 135mm max height offering that uses 120mm fans...

 

[sLowEnd]

If I had to get an all new cooling setup, I'd go for the ID-Cooling SE-207 XT SLIM and see if it's possible to mate it with the round frame A12x25r... it's only 135mm tall that way, great for SFF builds, and from the reviews I've seen it trades blows with the U12A which is insane. Noctua has no 135mm max height offering that uses 120mm fans...

The cooler is pretty small, but you could feasibly use standard 120mm fans on an NH-L12S. If you don't mind 140mm fans, the NH-C14S is 115mm tall if you mount the fan on the underside.

 

[Chaitanya]

What exactly do you like in Deepcool, so that you didn't mention Arctic, for instance?

Comparing Apples to Apples(Deepcool tower cooler) and not Apples to Oranges(AIOs)

 

[ymdhis]

The cooler is pretty small, but you could feasibly use standard 120mm fans on an NH-L12S. If you don't mind 140mm fans, the NH-C14S is 115mm tall if you mount the fan on the underside.

I'm aware of those options, thanks, but they are all for lower profiles, they are all top-down coolers, and they all have significantly weaker performance. At 135mm max, Noctua only has "tower coolers" that use 90mm fans. Their smallest profile tower cooler with 120mm fans is the D12L and that's already 145mm, won't fit in cases where the maximum size is 135mm.
The SE-207 XT SLIM uses a 120mm fan, has a TDP of ~220W and according to the Tweaktown review, it's within single percentages of the U12A and even the D15 G1. And that's with the stock fan, let alone a A12x25 or even the upcoming A12x25 G2 that they showed off on Computex. This may be a niche category but Noctua has nothing to offer there, other than fan upgrades.

Actually, I'd love to see this Slim cooler reviewed by Techpowerup. The only available review so far is from Tweaktown.