 Now this is a product that I've been excited about ever since I heard about it Noctua Needs absolutely no introduction they make some of if not the best air coolers on the market All right So this is a brand new product from them that is a bit of an evolution on their NHC 12 And it is called the NHC 14 so as you might well imagine that means we've gone from a 12 centimeter fan to a 14 centimeter fan it uses a c-type flow design which means that this is a down draft cooler And you know what I I know this one pretty well So I don't need to really talk too much about what's on the outside of the box And I know there's going to be lots of mounting Accessories and fans and all kinds of stuff inside here that we're gonna have to have a look at so I'll have plenty of time To yak about all the different things about this product so the first box inside We find a set of Intel mounting hardware, and I've said this before But it's been a long time since Noctua has released something new so I'm gonna say it again I love Noctua's mounting hardware. It is some of the best on the market and here I'm just gonna show you guys something I mean Even though their coolers are big and heavy their mounting hardware is built like a tank I mean look at this thing. It's got a thick thick rubber coating so no matter what kind of Components are mounted on the back of your motherboard PCB They're not gonna pierce through there and make contact with the metal and short anything out They've got a removable rubber piece here So that makes room for an integrated backplate if your CPU has one all right So for example LGA 1156 does have one so you'll have to pull that out And then you put this on the rubber makes contact with the back your board very nice the overall build quality of all Noctua products It's just outstanding all right All along here. We've got more like solid solid metal pieces once you attach this thing It's not coming off. No matter what okay here We have a manual which shows you Intel and AMD mounting instructions. It is a color some semi color manual all right very very detailed It's very easy to install these things I could pretty much do it with my eyes closed despite the fact that they are massive coolers here We have the AMD mounting hardware real simple for that one, and then we have the shared pieces So in here you're gonna actually find a lot of different Accessories that are all very useful in their own ways, and I'm gonna tell you all about them so first we have Low noise fan adapters as well as ultra low noise fan adapters so those are 7 and 5 volt fan adapters depending on how quiet you want your fan and How much cooling you want out of it next we have a splitter so that's so you can plug both fans because this is a Dual fan cooler into the single CPU motherboard header then we have some anti-vibration mounts for a fan we have some non anti-vibration mounts for a fan and We have some anti-vibration little brackety guys here. I'm not actually sure what those ones do I haven't seen those before Knocked to a case badge even knocked with case badges are like better built than anyone else look at that. It's like metal It's like a thick piece of metal awesome Okay, next we have packing Okay Cameraman somehow ended up on the other side of me I'm not quite sure when that happened while we were filming this video all right now This is it. I haven't seen this in person yet, so I'm I'm actually like pretty stoked right now So I can already see there's six heat pipes built into this cooler Sorry about that Esther filled up my memory card And I didn't realize it was full because I didn't know there was a bunch of footage on my camera So I deleted all her stuff Hopefully she didn't need it And I'm just trying to figure out how to get this box open love Environmentally friendly packaging and you can see that noctua has not a single piece of foam in their entire package. It's all perfectly recyclable Corrugated cardboard love it all right So the first thing we see is the bottom view of the heat sink where we will find six heat pipes This is not a heat pipe direct touch heat sink although That's never stopped noctua from being at or near the very top of the performance charts in the past because they do use a very high quality heat pipe as well as the Pretty much the best manufacturing that I've seen everything is always Really really really tight to whatever their specification happens to be just looks really sharp, okay? So right on the bottom you can see we've got our six heat pipes. We've got the whole base is A sawed soldered together all right you can see there's a small fin on the bottom So I guess you'll get a tiny tiny bit of cooling out of that I've actually got trying to figure out what that is but Hold on okay. It looks like it can actually be Removed somehow okay, okay, sorry guys. Sorry guys. I got I got a little distracted there Okay, so the noctua mounting mechanism that I that I love so much, so it's a solid piece of metal That's actually screwed in here I've seen some of their coolers in the past where you actually have to attach this piece, but What you'll have to do is you install the? mounting hardware around the outside of whatever your CPU type is and then you just screw these two Onto the mounting hardware that goes onto the motherboard, so how are you going to do that you might ask because clearly looking at it? You're not going to be able to Screw that in very easily, but there is a solution noctua has thought of everything So I'm going to go ahead and show you guys how this works And I actually really like their system for mounting fans, too It's quite a bit easier than a lot of the other ones that I've seen you just do that okay So they've actually built in holes here, and they give you an included screwdriver. That is long enough and slim enough To reach That's it. That's their solution to the problem so you can reach all the way through even with that fan installed You can access the screw and then you can screw it in from the top Just like that Very very nice love noctua's design now. They've got a huge cooler here for what is a downdraft CPU cooler They've got very thick fins, and they've actually used what is Traditionally noctua uses a wider spacing on a lot of their coolers But they've got a very narrow fin spacing and I think the reason they've done that is they've got two high pressure fans So while these are not high rpm fans these are nfp14s, and they are designed along the same lines as the original 120 millimeter version of this fan and that means that they've got optimized Static pressure whereas they're not optimized for high airflow where there's no resistance to the air So what that means is that if you've got a very high density heat sink You've got two fans that spin at low rpm, but are optimized for lots of pressure You're still going to be able to push air through those tight fins So I'm actually going to remove the other fan and I want to talk a little bit about the advantages of using a downdraft CPU cooler versus something like the d14 which is As far as I know to this day the undisputed performance king of CPU coolers So the advantage of this is that we get most of the performance of a monster like the d14 in a form factor That is a more likely to be compatible with your case because you don't have to deal with Any clearance issues with the side panel because the d14 is huge I mean, it's like like this tall right off the CPU socket You also get the advantage of cooling all the components around your CPU now What that means is that depending on how you position this you're going to be able to cool your VRM You're going to be able to cool your north bridge You're going to be able to cool your RAM that sits under it and that makes for maybe not quite as good CPU temps Like I said, it doesn't perform as well as the d14 But it makes for much better temperatures for all of the other things that are around it So you're looking at better overall system reliability if you can keep everything well within spec and running nice and cool Noctua also builds in like I've seen some pretty cheesy approaches to anti vibration I mean Noctua is all about silence So they build in these little rubber mounts that are going to To stop the fan vibrations from being passed along to the heatsink and then by extension the CPU motherboard and then case So that's a really nice touch that I've seen on a lot of Noctua heatsinks And oh I figured out what that what that screw is so that screw bolts in this bracket Which seems to provide some kind of additional support for the oh? Oh, I get it okay So I guess if it's on this way it makes it so that it has a little bit more support and doesn't put pressure on The heat pipes from from the weight here and shipping if it gets bounced around That's another thing NCIX ships a lot of PC systems And one of the ones that we've had the most success with when shipping or transporting systems is Noctua That's one of the reasons I like their mounting system so much So I want to look at the box quickly see if there's anything I missed high clearance mode Oh, yeah, high clearance mode versus low profile mode. Haha. That's smart So you don't have to mount two fans on here you can do one or two So you can actually do one on the bottom and that turns this extreme performance heatsink into a very low profile solution So you can fit it even in some HT PCs as long as you've got enough clearance Or you can put it in Up on the top if that works better for you Let's say you've got something under it like tall RAM modules down here that you need to make room for So now you can put the fan on the top and then if you've got lots of room all around then you can put on Both fans so there we go. We've covered that particular aspect of it, and then we've also got Dual fan configuration. Yep. Yeah, we've talked about that and I think that's pretty much everything on here Oh, yeah, they include their nth one thermal compound, which is pretty good stuff. I Totally missed that as we were unboxing all the accessories So thank you for checking out the unboxing and first look at the Noctua NH-C14 Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other cool computer videos