 The BitFenix Prodigy M is compact and ready for anything. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of it. Seriously, did you leave your plus vitamins on the table? The NH-U14S, which is part of their award-winning U series, which basically was what the Germans used to win the war. Wait, no, that's probably not funny. They're Austrian. Hold on. So the NH-U14S is a single tower heat pipe cooler. So not like the D series, so their D14 is the dual tower one. It retains the same performance as their previous U series coolers, but does it a little bit differently. So it has a slimmer profile that allows the NH-U14S to be installed on a motherboard, even an LGA 2011 motherboard, with fans with full height ramps and not have any interference. So let's go ahead and pull this bad boy out of here. As always, Noctua's packaging is excellent, if a little bit plain. So it's just plain cardboard packaging, fully recyclable, which I do actually like to see. Inside we see that they've included one of their NF-A15 fans, which is a 140 millimeter fan that actually uses 120 millimeter mounting points. So this gives it pretty good compatibility. However, this particular fan design, you can tell just by looking at it, was pretty much optimized for this cooler. You can tell because you see right here, the vibration reducing pads that are on the four corners of the fan are set up perfectly to sit on, here you go, this piece right here on the outside of the NH-U14S. Now when it comes to product quality, if you guys have been watching me for any period of time, you'll already know what I think about the NH-U14S, what I thought about it before I even opened it. It is the utmost pinnacle of product quality. Noctua makes excellent gear. They back it up with a six year warranty, which you might say, well on a heat sink that doesn't matter. But on a fan it does, they're saying their fan will not die for six years or they'll deal with it for you. They use some of the best, actually I would go as far as to just call their mounting mechanism the best in the industry. You can see right here, it comes in either this box right here for the Intel mounting system. So it's going to have wicked solid hold down pieces that are made of thick old steel. It's going to have all the little screws in a nice little package here. It's going to have a thick back plate. I mean, look at that thing, it's rugged. And it's going to have the option for you to upgrade it for free later in all likelihood because Noctua has done that for years now, offering existing customers new mounting hardware for future sockets. So there's the AMD stuff in here as well as all the accessories in this box right here. So this is where you'll find your, see even their case badges are better than other people's case badges. They include a gorgeous metal case badge as well as noise dampening strips. So if you don't want to use Noctua fans, they do include a couple of rubber strips. So you can use different fans, but you should probably use the Noctua fans. A couple more metal retention clips for mounting different fans to the heat sink as well as their NTH1, which is good. I mean, it's not the best thermal compound on the market, unlike everything else about the product, which does happen to be as good as it gets, but it's not bad at all. They've also got some additional corner mounts. That's kind of interesting for the fan, presumably. So that's kind of neat. And then they've got a screwdriver. So you don't actually even have to have any extra tools in order to install the NH-U14S. Speaking of installing it on the base right here, you will find that it is actually not that shiny of a base. So we'll do the obligatory finger shot there. You can see, you can't make up my finger that clearly. Because the shininess of the base does not actually necessarily tell you anything about the thermal performance of it. This has been true for years. Swift Tech was one of the ones that had trouble with this because they used to do a very flat look on the bottoms of their blocks, but it was flat even though it wasn't shiny. And they sometimes got flack for that versus other manufacturers highly polishing the bases, but they weren't actually flat, which is not conducive to it being a better cooler. This particular base doesn't happen to be completely flat. It's a little bit bowed, which has been shown with the high mounting pressures we use today to give slightly better performance than a completely flat base. And you can see right here at the bottom, they use six heat pipes. And it should be noted that even though they're quite small heat pipes, they're not, you know, super pipes like Asus. Actually, here, I happen to have it right here, is using a 10 millimeter heat pipe on their latest GTX 780 card. So you can see by contrast, the four millimeter pipes don't look that big. So quality of heat pipes is actually terribly important, whereas the size of them is important, but is not the only factor. The overall manufacturing of it is of course perfect. It has no blemishes on it whatsoever. The fins are all completely straight, exactly like you'd expect from Noctua's excellent packaging. And check it out. More on that. Hold down. I mean, look how thick that piece of steel is on the top of this cooler. So what is the advantage? Basically they've taken the U series. They've upgraded it to 140 millimeter, giving you better performance. Well, the same performance, but giving you better performance in a slimmer form factor than what you can get elsewhere, allowing you to use a nice high performance cooler, two fans and full size memory modules. Meaning that you can actually cool your memory directly with the fans on your CPU heatsink as well. Without further ado, I'm going to sign off and hand you guys over to Slick to talk about the performance of the NH-U14S on our standard test bench. So we're going to start with idles at 20 degrees Celsius. So if you want to see more details about our ambient temperatures and the rounding and everything that's going on, you can check out the Google doc that's linked in the description. But these are our temperatures at 20 degrees Celsius for idle. So I was kind of surprised at how well it actually performed. And now if you were, you can be looking at the Zalman results and be a little bit confused. But what's going on there is I have that fan turned down to 1100 RPM and that fan actually naturally runs a lot faster. Now we can't replace the fan on that cooler. So in the review of that cooler, we'll have a couple of different RPMs going on there. But I was really impressed with its performance on idle and we're going to move on to load. Now to load performance, which I'm a lot more interested in because honestly, I know the cooler is going to work on idle. It's load that I'm really kind of worried about and I'm interested to see how things will play out so that you can see the HDI and the Zalman Reservator 3 kind of fight with themselves down at the bottom. And then the interesting race is a little bit higher than that with this guy and the Corsair H100i. Again, we'll have more numbers as time goes on because I have to rerun a lot of things. But I was really impressed that it did quite well and it makes sense because of how big it is and because of the fact that it has a much larger higher performance fan. But I was still quite impressed. Like this video if you like it, dislike this video if you don't like it. And in the comments, what are you going to go with now? AIO's have been here for a while, but there's still some perceived terror over them. Now are you going to go with an AIO or an air cooler? That's up to you. And if you like this video, please subscribe.