Finished Looks

The only thing I dislike about aluminum is the fact that it is a fingerprint magnet. Other than that, the Noctua NH-U14S is a good-looking cooler; that is, if you can cope with the fan colors.


The beige and dark brown color scheme looks fairly good with red and black. However, users that like to have their hardware match in terms of color will be better off looking at ASUS Sabertooth motherboards.


When it comes to memory clearance on LGA2011, Noctua delivers. They advertised their cooler as offering 100% compatibility on LGA2011 and I can confirm that. Plenty of space has been left for even the tallest of memory modules.


Thanks to Noctua providing a second NF-A15 PWM fan, I will also test dual-fan performance. With two fans, clearance on my X79 motherboard still allowed for the use of memory with tall heatspreaders.


The only other thing to keep in mind with the NH-U14S is your top motherboard expansion slot. The cooler may get in the way of certain GPUs if it is your primary x 16 slot; larger graphics cards with backplates may not install into that PCIEx16 slot due to size limitations. As you can seen in the image, the amount of space between the two is minuscule. On Intel systems, the CPU cooler can be installed in a different orientation to avoid that problem. However, compatibility with tall memory is then tossed out the window. Motherboards with a top PCIe x1 expansion slot will not run into this issues, but it is something people should keep in mind if looking at Noctua's NH-U14S as a potential purchase.