Noctua NH-U14S & NH-D9 Air Cooling For The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X

The Noctua NH-U14S TR5-SP6 and NH-D9 TR5-SP6 air coolers were compared to an NZXT Kraken 360 closed-loop liquid cooling setup, which was supplied by AMD as part of the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series review kit. The cooling performance of the NZXT Kraken 360 was compared then to the NH-U14S TR5-SP6 and NH-D9 TR5-SP6 4U with no other changes to the system hardware or software besides swapping out the CPU coolers.

Dozens of benchmarks were fired up while quite quickly it became clear that the Noctua heatsink fans didn't impact the Threadripper 7980X performance relative to the NZXT liquid cooling loop for this testing being done at stock frequencies.

The Threadripper 7980X temperatures were quite close between the NZXT heatsinks and the NZXT Kraken 360. Like with the other Zen 4 processors, the new Threadripper processors also look to take advantage as much thermal headroom as available for allowing the Zen 4 processors to run warm but delivering consistently great performance.

The NZXT NH-U14S TR5-SP6 was running slightly lower than the NH-D9 TR5-SP6 4U, which isn't a surprise given the size difference. Though the NH-D9 orientation with this motherboard is more optimal in a straight front-to-back airflow compared to the NH-U14S that ends up blowing the CPU fans sideways toward the power supply. And at least the NH-D9 is possible to run within a 4U rackmount server if so desired.

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