A Closer Look
If you’ve been a fan of Noctua products for a long time, then you’ll certainly find a lot of this is familiar. OK, there have been a lot of changes over the years, which is why we have what is basically just the D15-2 here. However, it still has the same overall aesthetic tone and vibe as the Noctua D15 cooler, which I really appreciate.
OK, admittedly, not everyone is going to love the chrome and brown, but it’s Noctua’s calling card, it’s a colour theme that you immediately recognise as Noctua. Plus, if you don’t like it, there will be their Chromax series for that more modern aesthetic. But I stand by my word, I love the retro PC gaming throwback palette of brown, brown, brown and chrome they’ve used here.
There are quite a few tweaks here, the biggest one visually is to the new fan. Noctua spent literally years refining this fan, with a slimmer frame, larger fan blades with smaller gaps between the two, and well… a lot of extremely complex material advancements and fan blade adjustments that simply make it do two things better, make it blow more air, and do it quieter than before.
I think the new fan design looks cooler too, and while Noctua products look good to my eyes, I don’t think they’ve ever really set about product engineering from an angle of aesthetics. It’s all about performance first. However, while those new fan blades are designed to perform better first and foremost, I think the more aggressive angular design of them looks pretty slick.
The cooler itself is still a dual tower design, much like we saw on the D15. However, the fin stacks are tighter and more refined, allowing better heat dissipation and improving the way the air flows over them to draw that heat away.
It’s also interesting that you can configure this in multiple ways. You can have a single fan in the middle, giving you better clearance on the sides for taller RAM. Or you can have two fans, one blowing through each tower, or if you really wanted, you could drop a third fan on here and have it look complete nuts, although I suspect that will come with diminishing returns on cooling performance, and most definitely would add a lot to the overall cost too.
The contact plate is massive, and well, it needs to be, as it has eight thick heat pipes feeding through it on each side, which are then fed into this beautifully polished plate to ensure optimal heat transfer. It’s big enough that it’ll handle all the latest products from Intel and AMD, and there’s an optional mounting adjustment kit for AM5 to ensure the cooler sits on the hot spot of those CPUs for improved performance.
So, it’s the D15 we know and love, but literally everything is beefed up and refined to be better. No slight on Noctua but the D15 was around for over a decade, and while it dominated for much of that, in the last couple of years, the likes of DeepCool, Cooler Master and a few others have finally caught up in terms of performance, so let’s find out of this new version can retake the crown!
