Construction and design
Construction
If we had to define the type of cooler the NH-U14S is, then we would
say it is a single tower cooler. Tower coolers come with the advantage that the
air used to cool the CPU will be moved directly to a case fan, which then put
the warm air outside of the case. Unfortunately there is no direct airflow
towards the motherboard, which means, that the power design as well as the
memory almost only receives passive cooling. The Noctua NH-U14S has been built
using aluminium and copper. You can find a nickel plated copper base plate which
leads the dissipation power to six - also nickel plated - heatpipes. All
heatpipes have a diameter of six millimeters. Altogether there are 51 fins
soldered to the heatpipes for perfect heat transfer. A closer look at the edges
of the cooler reveals, that fins have been angled by 90°, which causes them to
form a channel where the air has to flow through. Shifting focus from the outer
edges about two centimeters towards the center, we see, that at this point the
fins have a tooth shape. Thanks to this design there is going to be vortex
inbetween the fins and since the fan produces the highest airflow at this
location it is very effective to have such a shape at this spot.
Design
We couldn't find any manufacturing
mistakes on our sample, and it
seems that it has been very well made which means that manufacturing is on an excellent
level. The heatpipes do have different bending radius. When looking at how they
have been arrange from a birds view, we see that they for a hexagon. Two out of
four heatpipes, which pass the center of the base plate, go to the outside,
where there is the highest airflow and two of these heatpipes are located closer
to the center of the cooler. The other two heatpipes which pass through the base
plate on the outside, a located between the other four heatpipes (when looking
at the cooler from a brids view).
Discuss this article in the
forums