How to mount three fans on a D14

The Noctua NH-D14 comes with two fans. It's a great cooler that way. But of course, any self-respecting denizen of OCN looks at the back end of that cooler and says, 'There's room for a third fan.' So, how do you mount it?

Well, you can write to support at Noctua, sending them a copy of their invoice. They will send you a set of pads, pegs and clips. But the Noctua clips applied to a third fan interfere with the clips on the middle fan.

[revision]



See how I have pushed up the back fan? It's still not enough to clear the middle fan clip. You can also see evidence of how hard it was to get the clips off the last time I tried this. I have "stretched" the fan clips since then. I still needed pliers to pull this clip off.


A close view:






This shows not only how high I had to push the pull fan up, but it also shows clearly how the Noctua clips function.

I have seen pics of prototype Noctua coolers where the fans fit on a fin stack back to back. The clips have much shorter handles. That will be both good and bad.


Now, how do you hook three fans up electrically? The NH-D14 comes with a Y-cable where one arm has two leads and the other three - the third lead carries the rpm signal. RPM signals from two fans would confuse your mb cpu fan header. So you need to buy a second Y-cable (free shipping) and cut one of the yellow wires. BTW - the Y-cable I linked to is very good. I have swapped fans hundreds of times on it, and I am still using the same Y-cable.

So, how should you really mount three fans on a D14? [/revision] Buy a set of 25mm Megahalems clips. Then mount your fan:



Purty, ain't it? Now turn it on:




But what if you don't want to wait for the pads from Noctua? Well use a fan gasket. I'm partial to the Vantecs:



As you can see, I used 38mm clips in this setup.

Those Megahalems clips are quite flexible. Here I mounted two San Ace H fans with a shroud:



My current rig has a Gentle Typhoon AP-14 in push and a Noctua NF-P14 in pull/push, both using Noctua clips (I cut the corners out of the GT). I have a second AP-14 as a pull fan, fastened with 25mm Megahalems clips.

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Edit: Afraid your memory won't fit under a D14? Below is a pic of the D14 and Ripjaws RAM. Note the distance between the bottom of the fin stack and the top of the RAM. That 120mm push fan can be repositioned upward (see Noctua image here).


Edited by ehume - 10/17/10 at 7:53pm

The links I provided include shipping - cheap clips with shipping at no extra cost.

I got another 0.5c by adding a second P12 in the third position. When you use more powerful fans you get better results - up to a point. With powerful enough fans you take out the middle fan and go with push-pull only. Of course, then you're using 38mm Megahalems clips front and back.



You can also do it with a shroud in the middle:


Edited by ehume - 8/23/10 at 6:08pm

When you get pads, clips and pegs from Noctua, adding the third fan at the back of the back tower means you have two fans clipped to that tower: your P14 in the middle, with its clips going toward the back, and your third fan, with its clips going forward. The wire handles of the clips interfere with each other. Next time I have the rig open I'll mount a P12 that way so you can see.

The Noctua pads are helpful enough that you should go ahead and write Noctua for the hardware for a third fan. But buy Megahalems clips to put them on. With free shipping from SVC, they're not terribly expensive.