Closest NH-D15 quality competitor?

Melodist · Sep 18, 2023

Sup,

I'm about to put a Z790 build together and am an active user of the Noctua NH-U12A (it's still on my 9900KS), which will not suffice running a 13700K I suppose?

I know that the NH-15 is still the reference king when it comes to dissipating heat but are there any smaller, almost equally competitive products? Which is what I liked about the 12A.

Thermalright's Peerless Assassin seems to perform amazingly according to GN but when I see the built quality and price, I would get scared that it could have a change to snap off my nice new CPU and motherboard.

Also something worth noting, is that I would like to have something that has a very reliable tightening mechanism that I can screw all the way down until it stops me, reliably.

Hardware-Canucks has quite an extensively tested list of recent Air Coolers which many options, I just don't know whether I can trust their test methodology.

What bothers me about the Thermalright coolers is the quality of the components, for example the plastic backplate: I don't want to attach a cooler to my motherboard that is expensive as the CPU using a plastic backplate...

Oddly enough, at the time when I put my 9900KS build together, the 12A actually outperformed the 15a I had on before but I don't know what it is about the regular 15 without s.

Ichirou · Sep 18, 2023

The Noctua is a relic of the past. It's not nearly good enough for modern Intel cooling needs. Everyone who says otherwise is just lying or running things on the low.
Now's the time to move onto AIOs or you'll forever be throttled. Even if you use a 13700K, you might get mixed results at best unless your ambient temps are in the 10's.

ozlay · Sep 18, 2023

Thermalright FC140

Always Counterclockwise · Sep 18, 2023

Melodist said:
I know that the NH-15 is still the reference king when it comes to dissipating heat but are there any smaller, almost equally competitive products?

The NH-D15 is routinely outperformed by other 120 and 140 air. See QuasarZone's dual tower testing for reasonable results on Intel—I think the Assassin IV's the most recent they've done. Broadly speaking, Noctua doesn't currently make anything that's particularly performance competitive and frequently prices 2–4x higher their competitors, though the NF-A12x25's often more like 1.5x. Noctua's marketing and branding is, however, quite good at exploiting people's tendency to assume something which costs more is better.

NH-U12A being a degree or so cooler than the NH-D15 is a fairly common noise-normalized result. Maybe the builder community will get away from unsupported assumptions about bigger being better and generally neglecting part to part, build to build, and test to test variation but, if so, it's not happening very fast. ΔTs differing by a degree or two is normal and the largest spread I've seen between reported test results of plausible validity is 9 °C―given decent methods, it mostly just depends where the samples being considered land in their probability distributions.

So far as I know Hardware Canucks' data has validity comparable to much of what's available. For example, if Gamers Nexus submitted their methodology for scientific peer review it'd probably get reject, reject and resubmit, or major changes for excessive outlier rejection, so a consequence of applying normal standards of data integrity is likely doing lots of your own cooling testing. Typically it's more useful to accept the best available review data's uncertain but generally likely to be well intentioned.

Melodist said:
I would get scared that it could have a change to snap off my nice new CPU and motherboard.

If you're going to worry about Thermalright failures, recent known issues are low quality fan bearings and loose cover plates. Most of their coolers use metal Intel backplates anyways.

Given desire for a new, performant air cooled build I don't see motivation to select Intel's lower power efficiency and LGA1700 warping over AM4 or AM5, but that's a separate discussion.

doyll · Sep 18, 2023

I disagree with Ichirou.
NH-D15 is still a very good cooler. Problem is we now have many others performing as well or better cooling in smaller sized packages.

Thermalright has some of the very best coolers out and their prices are much much lower than Noctua.
Thermalright prices are 1/3 to 1/2 the price D15 and cool as within a couple degrees and dB.
There are several Thermalright cooler threads in this forum.

Thermalright can be purchased on Amazon in most countries now.

What Always Counterclockwise said.

airisom2 · Sep 18, 2023

It's all in the fans, generally speaking. When you put the same fans on dual tower 140mm or even single tower ones (in p/p), they all perform within spitting distance of each other. While they are still able to scale with faster fans, the hunks of metal have pretty much hit a plateau.

Companies are now focusing on aesthetics and ease of use because of that. Make it flashy or monolithic-looking, put some lights on it, make sure to put blue and red airflow in the marketing pictures, make the fans look neat while meeting performance targets and push it out to the market.

Cooler Master is sitting on the vapor chamber heatpipe patent, TEC was tried decades ago and was pretty much a fail, weird designs like stacked heatpipes and angling a tower over the RAM were more of a gimmick than effective. What we have now is pretty much what has stuck, and unless there is a substancial material change, incremental improvements are all we can hope for.

That said, the best way to go about buying air coolers nowadays is to just grab a cheap one, and the FC140 sits high on my recommendation list. Cheap, performs well, no frills, and Thermalright quality has always been great in my experiences.

Mekboy · Sep 18, 2023

Some notice for anyone curious about Thermalright high-end products (FS-140 and FC-140)

If you want to get 13900K, go with FS-140, 13600K/13700K, choose FC-140 because heat-pipe placement is important here and FC-140 is 4dB louder then FS but if running at 60% fan speed for noise, then go for FC-140, both of them can handle the 13700K easily.
You purchased TR product, you got support to the teeth, AIO, backplate using the same mounting kit, no need to worry anything about compatibility.
Most of the failure come from the 120mm fan and from PA series but with FS-140 and FC-140 which is come with a slightly better fan then you don't need to worry.
Visit this guy on youtube for more testing, "thermalright 肯尼酷kenny" , Chinse market is now TR play yard now, Noctua getting rejected here since it's over price and can't not compete with TR in Air Cooler.
13700k = better bin 12900K so here is a video that testing FC-140 with stock 12900K from a shop that mostly build rendering rag in my country

doyll · Sep 18, 2023

airisom2 said:
It's all in the fans, generally speaking. When you put the same fans on dual tower 140mm or even single tower ones (in p/p), they all perform within spitting distance of each other. While they are still able to scale with faster fans, the hunks of metal have pretty much hit a plateau.

Companies are now focusing on aesthetics and ease of use because of that. Make it flashy or monolithic-looking, put some lights on it, make sure to put blue and red airflow in the marketing pictures, make the fans look neat while meeting performance targets and push it out to the market.

Cooler Master is sitting on the vapor chamber heatpipe patent, TEC was tried decades ago and was pretty much a fail, weird designs like stacked heatpipes and angling a tower over the RAM were more of a gimmick than effective. What we have now is pretty much what has stuck, and unless there is a substancial material change, incremental improvements are all we can hope for.

That said, the best way to go about buying air coolers nowadays is to just grab a cheap one, and the FC140 sits high on my recommendation list. Cheap, performs well, no frills, and Thermalright quality has always been great in my experiences.

Maybe I'm miss-understanding what you are saying. Different size coolers perform very differently with different fans or using same fans. A 4x 6mm heatpipe single tower canl not remove near as much heat as a 8x 6mm heatpipe twin tower cooler cooler.

Vapor chamber cooling doesn't work well because it's quite vapor chambers are much harder to build than heatpipes are. Much easier to maintain round tubes than rectangular tubes.

Heatpipe coolers kinda plateaued for awhile until a few years go when we started seeing increased cooling ability with smaller fin pack areas.

Actually that's not completely true. Thermalright Ultra 120 (6x 6mm heatpipes in 120mm finpack) came out in 2006, and latest versions of same cooler is still one of the best in it's size.

Our definitions of "cheap" seem to be very different.
My definition of "cheap" is low quality products at low prices or high prices.
Good quality products at low prices are not "cheap". They are only low priced. ')
Thermalright coolers are "low priced" quality coolers.

Melodist · Sep 18, 2023

The problem is that Thermalright's plastic backplate for me is a no-go unless there is a custom swap their coolers...

doyll · Sep 18, 2023

Melodist said:
The problem is that Thermalright's plastic backplate for me is a no-go unless there is a custom swap their coolers...

I haven't used any with plastic backplate so have no first hand information about them. I've assembled other things with plastic / composite mounting hardware and had no problems, and * haven't seen or read any problems reported on forums, youtube, etc. Have you heard / seen any problems?

airisom2 · Sep 18, 2023

doyll said:
Maybe I'm miss-understanding what you are saying. Different size coolers perform very differently with different fans or using same fans. A 4x 6mm heatpipe single tower canl not remove near as much heat as a 8x 6mm heatpipe twin tower cooler cooler.

Vapor chamber cooling doesn't work well because it's quite vapor chambers are much harder to build than heatpipes are. Much easier to maintain round tubes than rectangular tubes.

Heatpipe coolers kinda plateaued for awhile until a few years go when we started seeing increased cooling ability with smaller fin pack areas.

Actually that's not completely true. Thermalright Ultra 120 (6x 6mm heatpipes in 120mm finpack) came out in 2006, and latest versions of same cooler is still one of the best in it's size.

Our definitions of "cheap" seem to be very different.
My definition of "cheap" is low quality products at low prices or high prices.
Good quality products at low prices are not "cheap". They are only low priced. ')
Thermalright coolers are "low priced" quality coolers.

Ah yeah, I don't do a good job of explaining myself sometimes, and you make fair points.

For the different cooler sizes, I tend to lump the high end 140mm dual tower coolers (assassin, d15, ph-tc14pe, fc140, etc.) and some 140mm single towers (ts140p, u14s, as500, etc.) together. In this scenario, the majority of the temperature differences will come from the fans/fan configuration, with a minority coming from the heatsink itself. Even with their supplied fans, the differences between these coolers really aren't that big. In my perspective, anyhing around a 5C difference is a wash. The heatpipe configuration in these coolers offer enough heat dissipation, though 6x6mm is kind of cutting it close with these newer intel processors. 5x8mm+ or 7x6mm+ is more preferred if you're running the 8 pcore Intel processors.

As far as vapor chambers go, they do a good job of smoothing out hotspots, and that could be a nice interface between the IHS and the heatpipes. But there aren't any cpu coolers with vapor chambers on the market right now, and there's probably a reason for that, so my theory probably doesn't hold up in the real world. Maybe it's hard to get good flatness and durability while keeping the prices down.

You're right that there are some older heatsinks that have withstood the test of time and have their own cult following, and it's thanks to those coolers that we have so many good performers out there now as they use the formula of moar fins and moar heatpipes to pull the heat off. But I think it's safe to say that cooler design improvements have been more incremental in the past 5 years than the 5 years before it. I'm not sure we'll ever see a megahalem or true copper 120 again unless something drastic changes in the heatsink department.

Cheap for me is low priced. If it's low quality cheap, then it's usually not even worth buying.

doyll · Sep 18, 2023

airisom2 said:
Ah yeah, I don't do a good job of explaining myself sometimes, and you make fair points.

For the different cooler sizes, I tend to lump the high end 140mm dual tower coolers (assassin, d15, ph-tc14pe, fc140, Silver Arrow IB-E, etc.) and some 140mm single towers (ts140p, u14s, as500, etc.) together. In this scenario, the majority of the temperature differences will come from the fans/fan configuration, with a minority coming from the heatsink itself. Even with their supplied fans, the differences between these coolers really aren't that big. In my perspective, anyhing around a 5C difference is a wash. The heatpipe configuration in these coolers offer enough heat dissipation, though 6x6mm is kind of cutting it close with these newer intel processors. 5x8mm+ or 7x6mm+ is more preferred if you're running the 8 core Intel processors.

As far as vapor chambers go, they do a good job of smoothing out hotspots, and that could be a nice interface between the IHS and the heatpipes. But there aren't any cpu coolers with vapor chambers on the market right now, and there's probably a reason for that, so my theory probably doesn't hold up in the real world. Maybe it's hard to get good flatness and durability while keeping the prices down.

You're right that there are some older heatsinks that have withstood the test of time and have their own cult following, and it's thanks to those coolers that we have so many good performers out there now as they use the formula of moar fins and moar heatpipes to pull the heat off. But I think it's safe to say that cooler design improvements have been more incremental in the past 5 years than the 5 years before it. I'm not sure we'll ever see a megahalem or true copper 120 again unless something drastic changes in the heatsink department.

Cheap for me is low priced. If it's low quality cheap, then it's usually not even worth buying.

I think number heatpipes and fin count gives minimal improvement. I think the biggest improvement has been their smaller size / footprint combined with better heatpipe wicking and new fans providing better and quieter airflow.

I tested ID-Cooling vapor chamber cooler in it's day. FI-Reex Deluxe and Hunter VC-3D were cutting edge. It performed very well when vapor chamber was working properly. Problem was warpage of vapor chamber's rectangular shape was problematic, warping out of shape slightly. This problem cause cooler base to not be flat and properly mate to IHS. This warping also caused problems with vacuum pressure in chamber so liquid proper vaporized and condensed to create heatpipe heat transfer from CPU IHS to fins.

I think air cooling kinda peaked years ago when Hunter VC-3D, PH-TC14PE, NH-D15 and others were competing with each other. Then not much happened until last few years when Thermalright started bringing out new coolers.

Melodist · Sep 18, 2023

How's the spring mechanisms of these new coolers compared to Noctua's. Is it as reliable where you don't have to worry and just screw down till the spring compacted?

digitalfrost · Sep 18, 2023

For me, the quality of Noctua also comes from the longevity of the product. I bought mine in 2017 and used it with AM4. Now AM4 was new back then and anybody who had one could get an AM4 upgrade kit for it. I then went Intel LGA1700 sometime in 2021 and I could buy a mounting kit for 8€. And when I move to AM5 with Ryzen 8000, guess what mounting kit is available for cheap.

Not only is the performance good but you simply don't need to buy new CPU coolers anymore.

Owterspace · Sep 19, 2023

Melodist said:
The problem is that Thermalright's plastic backplate for me is a no-go unless there is a custom swap their coolers...

What plastic backplate do you speak of?

I have a bunch of their coolers, none have a plastic backplate.

Some of these arguments are pretty weak, and out of touch.

Melodist · Sep 19, 2023

Owterspace said:
What plastic backplate do you speak of?

I have a bunch of their coolers, none have a plastic backplate.

Some of these arguments are pretty weak, and out of touch.

Yeah sorry that was the SE, it was just a bias from a video I saw, I think I should give it a try. I guess I am very biased towards the price and reviews so I guess I'll just have to give it a try. It's just insane when you think about how we spend 500 on a motherboard and equally as much on the CPU, cooling it with a cooler worth 40 bucks 😵‍💫

But you know what I've discovered: I think there is an issue of the NH-D15 on newer Intel sockets because a YouTuber ran into bad thermal results with his NH-15 on the 13900K which didn't change despite swapping the cooler. However, when using the newer 12A, it outperformed the NH-15 heavily.

I had the exact same experience with my 9900KS in 2019 when replacing the 12A with the NH-15 (Version S in my case but it should be quite similar) and it was around 4 degrees worse than the 12A and I checked that under ADHD 4 times with re-installarion of the socket installer and new thermal paste:

Melodist · Sep 19, 2023

Owterspace said:
What plastic backplate do you speak of?

I have a bunch of their coolers, none have a plastic backplate.

Some of these arguments are pretty weak, and out of touch.

How reliable is the spring retention system? Can I screw it down till the spring keeps the screw from going down further like the Noctua?

Owterspace · Sep 19, 2023

Melodist said:
It's just insane when you think about how we spend 500 on a motherboard and equally as much on the CPU, cooling it with a cooler worth 40 bucks 😵‍💫

Motherboard prices are crazy for sure. But you gotta pay to play I guess. For me, this has been my hobby since 2002, so I am very familiar with the Thermalright brand..

Melodist said:
How reliable is the spring retention system? Can I screw it down till the spring keeps the screw from going down further like the Noctua?

It is excellent. Yes. Picture a Noctua mount, but with Thermalright logos on them. At least on AM4

I haven't used the Intel mount yet, but I have a board waiting for a 14700K.

I have like 8 or 9 Thermalright coolers lol.. some of them are fairly old.

TFL Replica · Sep 19, 2023

Owterspace said:
What plastic backplate do you speak of?

I have a bunch of their coolers, none have a plastic backplate.

Some of these arguments are pretty weak, and out of touch.

The SE variants of the PS and PA use plastic backplates for Intel only AFAIK. Moot point for AMD users, and picky Intel users can get the non-SE version which has a metal backplate.

Melodist · Sep 19, 2023

Owterspace said:
Motherboard prices are crazy for sure. But you gotta pay to play I guess. For me, this has been my hobby since 2002, so I am very familiar with the Thermalright brand..

It is excellent. Yes. Picture a Noctua mount, but with Thermalright logos on them. At least on AM4

I haven't used the Intel mount yet, but I have a board waiting for a 14700K.

I have like 8 or 9 Thermalright coolers lol.. some of them are fairly old.

Now I remember I might've owned one as well around the same time or a little bit later, maybe 2004, it was a circular cooler with fins like a flower sitting on the middle of the CPU, I think I still have this, was it Thermalright? 😵‍💫

Closest NH-D15 quality competitor?

Melodist

Ichirou

ozlay

Always Counterclockwise

doyll

airisom2

Mekboy

doyll

Melodist

doyll

airisom2

doyll

Melodist

digitalfrost

Owterspace

Melodist

Melodist

Owterspace

TFL Replica

Melodist

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