Noctua NH-D15 question

[sakete]

I just installed this cooler on my CPU and had to move the first fan up a bit to make room for my memory. Is it important to have the second fan at the same height as the first fan for optimal push-pull action? Or does it not matter that much? Right now the first fan is up higher than the second fan.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I just installed this cooler on my CPU and had to move the first fan up a bit to make room for my memory. Is it important to have the second fan at the same height as the first fan for optimal push-pull action? Or does it not matter that much? Right now the first fan is up higher than the second fan.

It shouldn't be hyper-critical for anything. But -- really -- why do you have to access memory modules at a moment's notice? Or -- instead -- is this for the high-profile RAMs like the G.SKILL Tridents or Corsair Vengeance?

Let me proffer some options.

You don't need to hang two fans on those coolers:

1) You can leave the center-fan installed, or replace it with a beefier but quiet "Round" fan, like an Akasa 140 R.

2) Whether you have 120 or 140 rear exhaust, you can port something like the ThermalRight blue-silly-rubber accordion duct from rear of the D15 to the exhaust.

3) You can also replace the exhaust with something a tad breezier, like a Noctua iPPC.

I'd guess any pair of these options would work, but (2) costs you about $5:

http://www.performance-pcs.com/cpu-...r-01x-120mm-tower-cooler-fan-duct-for-k8.html

and it looks now like the $5 would include some part of shipping or all of the tax.

You can also build one, but for that price, I'd consider using the TR as a "part" in such a project, anyway.

What sort of intake fans are deployed in your case?

I'll have to look again, but I assume the D15 comes equipped with two fans, as with the D14. You can simply use the center fan as puller-pusher, and use the other fan at the rear tower as a puller. That would make it less of a priority to replace the case exhaust fan, if you used the TR duct -- which is also likely to be a squeeze. Scissors? It has a $3 pricetag! I bought four last month, just to have some handy!

 

[sakete]

It's regular low profile ram, the g skill Aries. I still had to move the fan up a bit though.

 

[XavierMace]

But -- really -- why do you have to access memory modules at a moment's notice? Or -- instead -- is this for the high-profile RAMs like the G.SKILL Tridents or Corsair Vengeance?

For the record, the pair of D15's in my old file server blocked a total of 4 slots, 2 per CPU and that's standard height DDR3 with no heatsinks.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

For the record, the pair of D15's in my old file server blocked a total of 4 slots, 2 per CPU and that's standard height DDR3 with no heatsinks.

I've only got the D14. If you reoriented the front pusher fan to the rear tower, wouldn't that alleviate the RAM conflict? [for the typical consumer motherboard, that is -- and maybe ignoring the orientation of slots on the X99 boards].

ADDED: But that's the reason I try steering folks toward the ACX cooler, unless there's anything else that performs as well.

There's always the chance I'll need to build another air-cooled system, but it isn't in my current desires. If I do, I wouldn't bother with either D14 or a D15.

The other thing. I had asked here and there in the forums if somebody -- SOMEbody -- can find another single-tower heatpipe cooler with a comparison test as good as the ACX. Haven't heard a word. "Fifty-two-dollah, GI!! Fifty . . .two . . . dollah!"

 

[MisterLilBig]

Sakete, I'm surprised you had to move the fan, but, it shouldn't matter much. If it bothers you, you could take the heatspreaders out from the RAM, right?




Hey, BonzaiDuck, can that "ThermalRight blue-silly-rubber accordion duct" be stretched? What is the length of it?

 

[Essence_of_War]

Is it important to have the second fan at the same height as the first fan for optimal push-pull action?

I wouldn't worry about it, you should be fine.

 

[ClockHound]

The D15 is a beast. Concur, it won't make much difference and may even help a bit with over all airflow.

Can't wait until Noctua releases their 200mm fans this year, followed by a D20 heatsink that uses them. The thought of a 5Kg. 230mm x 180mm x 210mm heatsink that crushes everything on the motherboard and takes a section of the case with it while cooling in near silence brings little tears of anticipation to my eyes.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Sakete, I'm surprised you had to move the fan, but, it shouldn't matter much. If it bothers you, you could take the heatspreaders out from the RAM, right?




Hey, BonzaiDuck, can that "ThermalRight blue-silly-rubber accordion duct" be stretched? What is the length of it?

http://www.performance-pcs.com/cpu-...r-01x-120mm-tower-cooler-fan-duct-for-k8.html

It's a soft rubbery plastic or silicon rubber or soft vinyl -- not sure. It can be compressed; it should always make an interference fit between the case-metal (held in place by a 120mm exhaust fan frame) and the fins of most any single or double heatpipe cooler in the usual orientation.

TR says it's made for the HR-01 cooler. I've found that it will work with most any heatpipe tower, even if it doesn't completely cover the width and height of the fin array. But it completely mates to my EVGA ACX heatpipe tower; it installs easily with a CM Hyper 212 EVO; it should be made to work with a D15, but it would be quite a squeeze: for the price, you could go at it carefully with a pair of scissors to mod it.

I had a tedious project to build a box duct for the same sort of fit with my D14 cooler, using black foam-art-board, the specialized glue for it, my Xacto knife -- a little "drafting design" on paper accurate to the millimeter. The box just fits between my 120mm AP-30 exhaust fan and the D14, fitting to and resting on the upper edges of the rear tower's fins. It can't "go anywhere;" it doesn't interfere with the fan blades; there's only one way to remove it -- pulling it out sideways and jiggling it here and there a bit.

The duct has an interior padding with a single layer of Spire acoustic foam-rubber padding; and its exterior is similarly wrapped in 4 layers of the stuff. If you look, I posted the narrative and pictures last year in a thread about the Gentle Typhoon AP-30.

The TR product is a sort of quick-and-dirty duct option, but is by no means less permanent. I'm flirting with the idea of adding Spire foam rubber to it, but it already has acoustic properties that the foam-art-board, by itself does not.

I'm still interested in Noctua heatpipe towers -- to see what they come up with. I waited for months last year (I think?) -- anticipating "serious" improvement over the D14, and I was prepared to pay for one -- just to satisfy my curiosity.

But the D15 in stock installation only proves at most 3 or 4C more effective than the D14. Since both the Hardware Secrets comparison review and my own testing proves that stock installation of an EVGA ACX heatpipe tower beats a D14 by ~6C degrees, it will also beat a stock installation of the D15.

These differences seems to be linearly constant with ducting and CFM enhancements that improve cooling for all the coolers I've mentioned. I measured approximately 5C improvement due to ducting. So comparing a stock-installed D15 to my EVGA ACX cooler, the latter is better by maybe 7 to 8C.

My HAF 922 cases are pressurized with two 200mm (front and sidepanel) fans. I replaced the limpy CM fans with BitFenix Spectre Pros -- rated at 144 CFM. No unused fan vents in the case are allowed to leak; they're blocked off with black art-board. So all the air from intake is forced through the heatpipe towers or the vents in my PSU, with the exhaust ducted out the rear.

 

[XavierMace]

I've only got the D14. If you reoriented the front pusher fan to the rear tower, wouldn't that alleviate the RAM conflict? [for the typical consumer motherboard, that is -- and maybe ignoring the orientation of slots on the X99 boards].

It's not the fan it wasn't clearing, it's the actual heatsink. If I still had the box, I'd take pictures but that's probably what soured my feelings on those types of heatsinks a bit.

 

[MisterLilBig]

It can be compressed; it should always make an interference fit between the case-metal (held in place by a 120mm exhaust fan frame) and the fins of most any single or double heatpipe cooler in the usual orientation.

Thank you for responding!

Hmm, by the looks of it I thought it could go from 120mm fan frame to 120mm fan frame, is that possible? Do you know of any other ducts? Mainly from fan to fan.

And what was the length of that TR duct?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Thank you for responding!

Hmm, by the looks of it I thought it could go from 120mm fan frame to 120mm fan frame, is that possible? Do you know of any other ducts? Mainly from fan to fan.

And what was the length of that TR duct?

[You troubled me to get into my indoors parts chest to find one of the two remaining in retail-wrap from my order couple months ago. Argghhh!]

The duct has an even surface on the side which fits standard 120mm square fan frames or shrouds. On the other side, 50% of the total square duct-edge are 1cm longer than the other half -- top/bottom or side-to-side.

So the longest out of the box length of the duct is 14cm, and the shortest is 13cm. For risking the $3 dollars/unit price in modding the product, you should be able to get some detail measurements from your cooler and exhaust-fan orientation reference the motherboard and cooler. After several "fittings" as-is, you should be able to custom trim the edge to get the largest coverage of contact with the array of cooler fins. If you don't achieve full coverage of the rear surface area, it shouldn't matter much if the contact is good and consistent: it will draw air through the uncovered edges on that plane. Shouldn't much matter.

But you could either design a foam-board collar for such a duct which fits the entire backside of the cooler tower/fin-array, or trim away some of the duct. It can even be refitted for the number of accordion folds in the center, using rubber-cement, vinyl cement, Pit-Crews or something reliable to glue duct pieces together in a slightly different way.

THAT BEING SAID : THE FULLY COMPRESSED LENGTH OF THE DUCT IS ~ 7cm. Doesn't matter except for the tedium with scissors, Xacto, glue, etc. already mentioned.

AND! FACT OF THE MATTER! You can just kloodge the duct to the rear of your cooler without any trimming, and it would have to be maybe 95% of it's maximum effectiveness. There are materials like black-rubber-hose-bandage. You can get it in a roll from the auto-parts shop, so you can glue a collar of the thin stuff around the duct and outermost cooler-fin edges.

You could do with Spire Acoustic foam-rubber pads -- cut to size and shape, glued together or with the duct -- what you can do with the rubber-radiatior-hose-bandage, and more.

In fact, I have an unusual inspiration as I write this . . . .

You can do all sorts of things. Depends on your assessment of the tedium, the time and effort, and your acceptance for "default installations."

 

[MisterLilBig]

Thank you again!

Aww, it's too short for what I was thinking of doing. I'll search around for other ducts and see what I can find.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Thank you again!

Aww, it's too short for what I was thinking of doing. I'll search around for other ducts and see what I can find.

I guess I'm too curious to avoid asking: What were you thinking to do?!

If it were just a matter of putting the duct between the rear of a heatpipe tower and a case-exhaust, ~13.5cm is hard to imagine not stretching that far for a majority of cases, and the ~14cm length of the duct is its "equilibrium" state. It can only be compressed to the 7cm length I mentioned.

I don't know what other flexible ducting items exist, but I'd seen some rather long ones -- don't know if they are 120mm wide -- inside diameter.

@ $3.00 each, you could trim and glue two of them together to mate in an accordion fold -- for whatever maximum length you're shooting for, within reason.

Or just acquire some foam-art-board and build a duct-box. The stuff has paper backing on both sides, so if you make a cut along a chosen bend-line and strip away an 1/8" strip of the paper, a panel will then bend along that line neatly. You can cut little tongue and groove fittings to glue edges together -- just requires planning and precise Xacto-knife work, and you need to use the appropriate glue. There's a cheap and serviceable glue you can get at the arts & crafts places (Michael's) that sell the art-board -- it's about $5 /tube. The expensive stuff can be had at hobby shops for $12+ per ounce bottle. It doesn't take a lot of it to make surfaces fuse together.

For very long ducts such as I've seen in certain Silverstone cases (front-panel to rear-panel with a hole for a heatpipe cooler), you can actually purchase clear lexan or Plexiglas tubing, but sure to be expensive. That supports the desire for "bling," but costs a lot and doesn't help any to suppress noise.

 

[MongGrel]

I run mine vertical actually.

You could always take the one off the front and put it in the rear and make it a pull pull I guess, more or less what I did on the D14.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Every time you show that picture, it refreshes thoughts I've had about how you can get the same result with two fans, some art-board and the cooler in the same orientation.

I won't burden you with those thoughts.

I run mine vertical actually.

You could always take the one off the front and put it in the rear and make it a pull pull I guess, more or less what I did on the D14.

 

[MongGrel]

The D15 is a beast. Concur, it won't make much difference and may even help a bit with over all airflow.

Can't wait until Noctua releases their 200mm fans this year, followed by a D20 heatsink that uses them. The thought of a 5Kg. 230mm x 180mm x 210mm heatsink that crushes everything on the motherboard and takes a section of the case with it while cooling in near silence brings little tears of anticipation to my eyes.

So they are finally going to do that ?

I always wondered why they never made a 200mm, I guess they had enough of a market before then they were covering.

 

[MongGrel]

Every time you show that picture, it refreshes thoughts I've had about how you can get the same result with two fans, some art-board and the cooler in the same orientation.

I won't burden you with those thoughts.

Works pretty well here at any rate.

It does feed up into the top 200mm well with the two on the rear pulling also.

Sorry if I've posted it too often.

I do like the little mini HAF in the bedroom myself, they are good little cases, I really hadn't read the whole thread enough before posting initially.

 

[MisterLilBig]

What were you thinking to do?!

Well, was kinda thinking of how a car works. So, a duct from a front fan to a push-fan on the cooler and a duct from the pull-fan of the cooler to the exhaust fan of the case.

I don't have the cpu cooler yet because I decided to wait for computex and see what they show, but I prematurely pulled the trigger on a pair of EK Furious Vardar 120mm fans(Max AF - 180.1 m3/h, Max SP - 57 Pa) that I plan on using.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, was kinda thinking of how a car works. So, a duct from a front fan to a push-fan on the cooler and a duct from the pull-fan of the cooler to the exhaust fan of the case.

I don't have the cpu cooler yet because I decided to wait for computex and see what they show, but I prematurely pulled the trigger on a pair of EK Furious Vardar 120mm fans(Max AF - 180.1 m3/h, Max SP - 57 Pa) that I plan on using.

Consider your needs for a gaming workstation, or whatever it is you want. I've got a front-panel hot-swap drive bay, an optical drive and a 3.5" 2x USB3 port on these cases I have, but they have 200mm intake fans.

On a smaller case, you can still have the optical drive and the USB3 ports and omit the hot-swap bay. If you can free up 3x such 5.25" cover plates, replace them with vented equivalents or a carefully shaped piece of perf aluminum, you can stick a 140mm fan in there (takes a bit more than 3 bays). You can literally glue the fan in there with blobs of Pit Crews with art-board shims. Or a more elegant solution would not be hard.

This should more or less mate up with the front side of a heatpipe tower. So it's quite possible. I did the bit with the fan, and thought about porting it to the cooler. But we didn't overclock my brother's new rig, so the cooling isn't a matter so dire. Of course . . . we haven't overclocked his 3570K -- YET. Not . . . YET.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Works pretty well here at any rate.

It does feed up into the top 200mm well with the two on the rear pulling also.

Sorry if I've posted it too often.

I do like the little mini HAF in the bedroom myself, they are good little cases, I really hadn't read the whole thread enough before posting initially.

Ah. . . that's right -- the rear ones are intake. And the bottom tower is sucking air off the dGPU card. Interesting concept . . .

 

[MisterLilBig]

Not sure what I'll end up doing, BonzaiDuck. Thank's for the help!

Ah. . . that's right -- the rear ones are intake. And the bottom tower is sucking air off the dGPU card. Interesting concept . . .

I would totally change that set-up. MongGrel, the best air should be going thru the cooler. Plus, you would also cool the dGPU at the same time!

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Not sure what I'll end up doing, BonzaiDuck. Thank's for the help!




I would totally change that set-up. MongGrel, the best air should be going thru the cooler. Plus, you would also cool the dGPU at the same time!

I was trying to be accommodating. It works for him!

All of these setups can involve some compromise between GPU cooling and CPU cooling, because it can be desirable to use a single exhaust fan unless there's a convenient way to use two. Most midtower cases only provide the single rear port as default exhaust -- you could choose a second vent, like the top, but that's still a slight complication. With AiOs and custom-H2O, the ballgame can change.

I don't want to belabor this point, since we're discussing the NH-D15. But MongGrel has two rear 120mm fan ports. It would be possible to use one of them to exhaust a smaller heatpipe tower, while the other could draw air off both the graphics and motherboard. Lotta tedium with that, though.

Truth is, he could still do that with his D14, and I think it's possible in either orientation. I just don't want to enter my foam-art-board pontifications. Too much trouble to explain, and too much trouble to do.

 

[MisterLilBig]

I was trying to be accommodating. It works for him!

All of these setups can involve some compromise between GPU cooling and CPU cooling, because it can be desirable to use a single exhaust fan unless there's a convenient way to use two.

To me it seems that he is following physics, put force surpasses physics.

In my opinion, he would see a performance increase by making the top fan an intake fan, and the CPU cooler getting that colder fresh hair to cool itself and to push it towards the graphics card.


Also: The D15 was shown to have worse performance in a vertical orientation than a horizontal one. I'll try to get the link for that.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

To me it seems that he is following physics, put force surpasses physics.

In my opinion, he would see a performance increase by making the top fan an intake fan, and the CPU cooler getting that colder fresh hair to cool itself and to push it towards the graphics card.


Also: The D15 was shown to have worse performance in a vertical orientation than a horizontal one. I'll try to get the link for that.

That stands to reason -- per the orientation -- and I'd also seen this before per other heatpipe towers and only including the dual variety. However, I proved to myself and possibly to some remaining forum members back in 2007 that you could build a duct box for the perpendicular orientation to rear exhaust, and get approximately the same performance -- sucking the air out with a decently beefy 120x38mm and pushing it in with a 140x25mm -- my configuration at that time.

Consider a reasonably pressurized case, with good intake airflow/CFM. If one simply exposes enough fin-area of a heatpipe cooler on one or more sides intended for intake to the cooler, you could put an obstruction between the towers as part of a duct to the rear exhaust. So the "perpendicular/vertical" orientation might break even, neither hurting nor helping, when such an orientation resolves other crowding of parts and so forth within the case. So you might build a duct with 1/4" or so of clearance between duct-walls and the broad outer sides of the two towers, with a tab or separator which blocks off -- also with narrow clearance -- the center space between the towers. you would still be sucking air through the forward half of the exposed fins. The pressurization and the narrow passages into the duct would really put a breeze on those fins.

You could even modify that design where the cooler fins are nice and close to the back of the graphics card, to fine-tune how the duct draws air off the latter. There, you're compromising graphics versus CPU again, but it might be a nice balance. The more you force air -- and remember that it's pressurized -- through narrow apertures, the better the cooling performance. How this would affect overall load temperatures for either CPU, GPU or both, is the only question. It might help all three aspects.

ADDENDUM: If you want a "pusher" fan in the proper orientation, release yourself from the insistence that it clip onto the cooler in the prescribed way. There are even metal fan brackets you can buy -- some intended to mount a fan with a PCI screw -- which can be fitted to the rear drive cage. Drill a couple holes -- Voila!

But you don't NEED a pusher fan in that arrangement with a good enough case exhaust and attention to . . . . "acoustic concerns."

Now here's an interesting thought -- per using all available remaining vents for intake including the top -- suggested in the post just before this one: MongGrel could easily build a duct box for both rear (twin?) fans acting only as exhaust -- to fit the cooler in a way I just suggested. Yes! Peace -- through su-per-ior fire-power . . ! Fan-power, to be exact. In that case -- FORGET messing with a pusher fan, if the duct-box is designed properly and there's sufficient case intake.