Construction and design

Construction

The Noctua NH-D14 consists of aluminium and nickel coated copper. The base plate is made of solid copper which has been coated with nickel. Furthermore the baseplate has an almost invisible structure and it therefore isn't polished. To transport the heat as efficiently as possible from the CPU to the finds you find six heatpipes. At both ends of the heatpipes there are 42 fins soldered to them. With the NH-D14 Noctua makes use of a sandwich construction which means that one of the two fans is located between the two cooling towers.

Design

The NH-D14 is very well made and there are absolutely no hints for a sloppy manufacturing process. Quite special about this cooler is its massive size and the sandwich construction. With a total of 1250 gramms including the fans the Austrians definitely have one of the heaviest coolers on the market. On the NH-D14 you'll also find fins which are connected to eachother. This technique became quite common and it doesn't only increase the coolers stability it is also responsible for a better heat transportation and further it optimizes the airflow. 

Noctuas own 120 mm fan operates at 1'300 rpm when it is driven with 12 Volts. At these speed it is subjectively silent. If you use one of the U.L.N.A. adpators Noctua packs into the delivery you will get 1'000 rpm (+/- 10%) which produce soundlevel which is subjectively very silent. The same you see with the second fan except its a 140 mm fan that operates at 1'200 rpm default and it is subjectively silent. Using the delivered resistor you get 900 rpm (+/- 10%) and again a very silent noise.