 The NHD 14 has reigned for over four years as one of, if not THE, king of the castle for Dual Tower heatsinks, but Noctua hasn't been sitting on their thumbs, and finally we have a successor. The NHD 15 is here. For the ultimate no compromises compact gaming PC, look no further than the Obsidian Series 250D from Corsair. Click now to learn more. Now, to fans of previous Noctua products, the family resemblance between the D14 and the D15 will be fairly obvious. They both feature six heat pipes soldered onto a flat, shiny base. They both feature two large towers with stacked aluminum fins, and they are both intended to run in a dual fan configuration with high quality fans included in the box. In this case, static pressure optimized NFA 15 140mm PWM fans with integrated anti-vibration mounts, and they are both capable of mounting a third aftermarket fan for even better performance. When we look closer though, we start to notice some differences. First up is that the fin stacks have been widened. This allows the six heat pipes to have more spacing between them for better efficiency. Next, we see that the bottoms of the fin stacks have actually been cut away for better memory compatibility. This gives you a ton of options. You can populate both sides with fans and low profile RAM. You can populate the center with a fan and put high profile RAM on both sides of a dual tower heatsink, something I've never seen before, or you can throw two fans in and have high profile RAM on one side. One last option is that you can actually raise the outside fan if you need a little bit more space for RAM. Just make sure your side panel is far enough away from your motherboard for this to work, because it's going to stick up above the top of the heatsink. Inside the box, aside from the high quality included fans with their six-year warranty, you'll find low noise adapters for the fans that reduce them from 1500 to 1200 RPM, a Y cable so that both fans can be PWM controlled off of a single motherboard header, a tube of NTH1 thermal compound, and Noctua's legendary... Oh, that's not as exciting as I thought. Legendary SecuFirm 2 mounting hardware, which they're renowned not only for creating, but also for upgrading for free for existing customers when new sockets come out. With only a couple of exceptions, Noctua's mounting hardware is so much better than everyone else's, that for once, I really do wish that everyone would just copy their design. So the entire industry could have better mounting hardware. Okay, so I guess all that's really left at this point is how does it actually perform? I will leave that to Luke to cover. He will be putting the NH-15 up against the very best all-in-one liquid coolers on the market for a battle royale of top-end air cooling versus top-end liquid cooling, and I think that you guys will be impressed by the results. Spoiler alert, I'm still a Noctua fanboy. Alright guys, so for the test environment, we have a 4820K running at 1.3 volts at a speed of 4.0 GHz. We also have a GTX 580 in there, overclocked a little bit, running combustor just to heat up the place. On the CPU, we run Prime95 to heat up everything there, so that this is a very stressful environment and we're testing the cooler while under load in a really harsh, kind of above-the-top situation. We also have a C70 as our standard test benching case. We run all of our coolers in this case, and that's what this one was done in as well. In terms of mounting the cooler, with Noctua's SecchiFirm 2 mounting hardware, it's pretty freaking easy. Judging by the size of the cooler, you expect it's going to be really difficult, but once you mount the anchor points in and with the custom screwdriver that they give you, it's honestly a breeze. I had no complications installing this cooler at all. In terms of noise levels, it did great, but then everything we test here does great because we standardize on Noctua fans. All the other coolers we test get a nice little advantage because we add value by adding aftermarket fans to their cooling setups. These aren't aftermarket fans for Noctua because they're Noctua fans. The exact ones that we're testing with are the ones that come in the box because they're the exact same model. Before I jump into performance, I would highly suggest opening a new tab, not closing this one, checking out TechQuickie and watching Linus's video on liquid cooling radiators. It's a really good watch and it'll help inform you about a few things about liquid cooling, but if you do know about it, continue on watching and we'll talk about performance. So the NH-D15 performs really well. I was kind of surprised that it beat an H110, although that being said, Noctua has been sitting on this for a really long time, so I was kind of expecting excellence from them. It doesn't beat it by a lot though, so it's an interesting kind of trade-off. If you need that being able to put it somewhere else in the case because you're worried about sizing because this cooler is fairly tall, maybe you need an AIO, but if you're not worried about that, maybe you're a little bit scared of liquid being in your case, maybe this is the way you go. Let me know what you guys think in the comments down below and I'll see you guys next time. Speaking of silent performance, audible.com. Actually, I have no idea if Luke said anything about silence or performance because I'm shooting this before he does his part, but I'm not too worried about it anyway. My segues rarely make much sense anyhow. So you've likely heard of audible.com if you've been on the internet, but it's very possible that you haven't heard of their monthly audiobook service that you can join to get a new audiobook to listen to every month. I jumped the gun a little bit and even though my son is only two, as of today, happy birthday, yay, I grabbed A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline Lengel for a re-listen before I do the whole series with my son when he's a little bit older. It's great for kids and adults and I highly recommend it, but if you want something else, then you can of course pick out whatever you want from their selection of over 150,000 titles and the first one is 100% free when you sign up. So try it out and make sure you use the URL audible.com slash Linus so they know who sent you. 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