"Noctua is definitely renowned for making good coolers. The U12 and U9 are both examples of that. Noctua is also infamous for their ghastly cream and maroon fans. But the NH-D14 doesn't care that it's fans are ugly or that it's extremely big. It does what it knows best, to cool that CPU."
Contortion - AtomicMPC.
Interestingly, Contortion's main concern seemed to be the physical size of the NH-D14 CPU cooler. Noctua do understand that not everyone wants or has room for such a monster, so they designed the NH-C14 to address these concerns. Peeps are over the moon about the NH-D14's performance, however it's little brother, the NH-C14 is far more widely compatible with chassis and - here's the low down - it performs almost on par with the Austrian Sandwich. Here's a quick reminder from Overclockers Australia where they have compared the NH-C14, the NH-D14 and some other contenders:
"Noctua's NH-C14 proves to be a versatile solution for those who upgrade their case regularly and don't want to be stuck with a ginormous cooler limiting their upgrade paths, or just prefer to choose a cooling solution that is able to take a lot of CPU heat while maintaining low noise levels in a HTPC desktop or tower case configuration. While its single fin array is half of what the big brother NH-D14 sports, it was able to keep up with it during our tests surprisingly well, considering the lower surface area."
DiGiTaL MoNkEY - OCAU.
You can read the Noctua NH-D14 review on AtomicMPC here and the Noctua NH-C14 review from OCAU here.
