Noctua offers a six year warranty on their products and has an excellent customer service. If your fans every stop working or if you need a new mounting kit, they will send you a new one free of charge.

The accessories and mounting hardware are in separate boxes while the heatsink and fan are in another. The only negative that some people might have with Noctua's products in general is the color scheme which might not be a problem for some of you but for modders it could be a deal breaker. The comparator heatsink was the Noctua NH-D15. Each Heatsink was mounted with a 6 mm blob of NT-H1 TIM. Each time a heatsink was mounted, the TIM was allowed a day to fully spread before the temperature tests were run.Noctua's NF-A14 iPPC-3000RPM fan move 159 CFM airflow which is more than any fan that we have in our lab. Of course, any 140mm fan with a square frame will mount to the NH-C14S, but we are sent the NF-A14 PWM fan to cool this fin array. This fan spins on an SSO2 bearing, with a maximum speed of 1500 RPM, but is also able to drop down to just 300 RPM on the low-end of the scale. The NF-A14 can also deliver 140.2 cubic meters of air per hour. Converting that, we find it is close to half the stated value when comparing to CFM, so near 70 give or take. It is nice to see that these fans will spin for up to 150,000 hours, but it is better to see that the entire cooler comes with a six-year warranty. Noctua ships the NH-C14S with SecuFirm 2 mounting kit that makes the installation process a breeze. a Phillips screw driver that you can use during the installation, AMD and Intel SecuFirm2 mounting hardware, Noctua metal case badge and a manual. Test Setup & Methodology Test Setup

This heatsink kept up with the big boys. If you want a blow-down heatsink to cool your CPU and your RAM, the NH-C14S does a remarkable job. Additionally, there is room for most RAM, even with the fan in a pull position. Noctua is well known for its superb heatsinks and fans. You might say we are blown away by their products. This time around, they have modified their well-proven NH-C14. This is a blown-down heatsink. Why use a blow-down heatsink? You may have noted that some these heatsinks blow air directly on your RAM and or VRMs, cooling it. That’s one reason. But probably the most common reason is to use a narrower case. Honestly, if you use this cooler, I would recommend using a 5800X or lesser CPU. This will be more than efficient for that kind of thermal output. However, since I will only be watching movies for 90% of activity with this cooler and build, I am very impressed by its performance. We will measure the noise levels for both in idle and load using a dBA meter and point it at the computer at a distance of ~50 CM.All of the testing is done with an ambient temperature of ~19C. All of the coolers are run with their fan speeds at default. The Airflow of the fan is measured in CFM (Cubic Feet per Minute) and the higher the CFM value, the more air the fan is moving but also the higher the dB. You don’t have to buy an additional fan to get the most out of the NH-C14S. However, buying a second NF-A14 PWM and running them both with Low Noise Adapters can reduce the noise they make to almost nothing while keeping up the cooling. NH-C14S Pros The NH-C14S performs great with just one fan and it is whisper quiet just what you would expect from a Noctua product. Inside you will find Noctua's NT-H1 thermal compound, one Low-Noise-Adapters (L.N.A) which can be used to reduce the fan speed,

In the chart below we have sorted each CPU cooler from highest to lowest by the maximum amount of airflow they move in CFM. The NF-A14 premium fan supplied with the NH-C14S supports PWM for convenient automatic speed control through the motherboard. In addition, the maximum fan speed can be reduced from 1500 to 1200 RPM using the supplied Low-Noise Adaptor for even quieter operation. SecuFirm2 mounting system PWM support and Low-Noise Adaptor –The NF-A14 premium fan supplied with the NH-C14S supports PWM for convenient automatic speed control through the motherboard. In addition, the maximum fan speed can be reduced from 1500 to 1200rpm using the supplied Low-Noise Adaptor for even quieter operation.Overall, the price of the NH-C14S might be a little bit steep for some people but it's worth every penny considering that this is a very well engineered cooler. This chart is pretty self-explanatory but it should give you an idea of the different fan sizes that come with each cooler. When I did on my own testing of this fan, I found the specs to be accurate. BTW – the LNA for this fan is the NA-RC7. The NH-C14S has a single 140 mm NF-A14 PWM fan installed. The major twist with the design of the NH-C14S is the position of the fan, which is underneath the fin array and is pushing the air upwards through it. Still, standard RAM modules will fit underneath the NH-C14S. The user has the option to place the fan (or another fan) at the top of the fin array, increasing the clearance of the RAM modules by 25 mm but adding the same height to the overall height of the cooler. With the fan at the top of the array, RAM modules up to 70 mm tall can fit, allowing greater hardware compatibility if the case can support a cooler that is 142 mm tall. according to my measurements, the NH-C14S is about 2 dBA quieter compared to the NH-C14 in idle mode.

CPU-Z will be used to verify the CPU speed and the voltage being used in Windows 7. Also, the coolers are tested with the The cooler will be ideal for high performance gaming, as well as regular performance where you just want to keep the noise levels down. It comes with a LNA (low noise adapter) cable, should you want to quieten the fan even further. On the left side you will find a short paragraph with details of the cooler and some of its features in multiple languages.

Test Setup & Methodology

One item I did not cover in this review is the orientation of the installed heatsink. As I discussed in a review on the NH-L12, whether you orient the heatpipes horizontally or vertically makes a difference. So, it would behoove you to test the cooling power of your heatsink mounted with the heatpipes horizontally or mounted with the heatpipes vertically to see which is better. What's special about this cooler, is that it mounts sideways. This means that most PC cases can fit it. In fact, your graphics card is likely to be higher than the cooler, even in the "fan on top" configuration. Secondly, you have the choice of two configurations with the fan. Fan underneath is applicable for mini/micro ATX builds. Fan on top is suited towards regular PC cases.