Will a Noctua NH-D15 Fit in my build?

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BNWilliams007

BNWilliams007

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Hello, I'm planning on buying an aftermarket cooler for my Gaming/Workstation PC build. I'm deciding between the Noctua NH-D15, Corsair h100i, and the Cooler master hyper 212 evo. I'm still a beginner and this will be my first build so I feel like leaning towards the Noctua as I feel a bit uneasy about the risks of water cooling but I wouldn't be completely against overclocking a few years from now when my components start to become outdated a lose value so I thought the Noctua would be the best option for now.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with the Noctua is it's large size. I'm worried that it would block ram memory stick space in my build.
Here is my build as of right now: http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/partlist/

As you can see, I plan to use the Asus Maximus VIII Hero motherboard in the Corsair 750D ATX Full Tower Case. Does anyone have any experience with these three components and know if the Noctua NH-D15 cooler can fit in this build with no worries of blocking ram slots or anything else? Thank you for your time. :)
 
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azaran
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azaran

azaran

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Without knowing your build, we cant say for sure.

The Noctua will fit on your board, but will likely overhang the first RAM slot. The heatsink itself has a 64mm clearance, but the fan only has 32mm clearance. However the fan can be shifted up to expand the clearance. This can be mitigated by going with low profile RAM and also choosing RAM that doesn't use an absurdly huge heatsink. Also the height of the fan will come in to play with case selection. Stock height is 67.5mm, and if you have to raise the fan up so the height could increase up to 93.5mm.

Now all that aside, there is some things to take in to consideration with the Noctua. It is a lovely heatsink, whisper quiet and damn efficient, but it is a massive and heavy chunk of metal hanging off your motherboard. If you intend on transporting it around a lot, save yourself a headache and go with a different cooler, and I say this as an owner of one.

Here is the web page for the fans stats
http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=compatibility_gen&products_id=68&lng=en


The Cooler master Hyper 212 Evo is a great cooler for replacing the stock (which I highly recommend you do), and it'll only give you modest overclocks. However it is much smaller than the Noctua and lighter. It's fairly easy to install and a lot of people, myself included, like it for a build. However it also overhands the first RAM slot on a lot of boards. Like the Noctua you can adjust the height of the fan up a bit to compensate for this.

The Corsair h100i I haven't played with, but I have installed its smaller brother the H80i. Solid construction, just make sure your case allows for it. The rad can be a bit thick and hard to place when installing.

Also look at the CRYORIG H7. Similar design to the Hyper 212 Evo, but shorter and narrower with equal to better cooling. It's narrower footprint means it wont overlap RAM on most boards.
 
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azaran

azaran

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You know you're building a pretty nice rig here for overclocking. You could easily fit a 280mm cooling system in it, and since you're going with a K series CPU there's no reason not to start off with good cooling. I'd consider dropping the Noctua for a good closed loop system like a Corsair Hydro Series H110i GT or a NZXT Kraken X61 (just installed one of these, very clean easy install and the software is much better than Corsair's). It does increase the price 40-50 respectively but you can play with overclocking right off. Otherwise if you're not going to OC right now I'd pop on a CRYORIG H7 since they're pretty inexpensive. There's a good sized cutout panel behind your motherboard so if you did decide to go water cooling later you wouldn't have to dismantle the whole system to do it.

Heres a couple of changes I would recommend for your build up
Thermal Compound: Swap out your artic silver for Noctua NT-H1. Its a couple bucks more but its rated better than Artic Silver and doesn't take 100hours to cure like the Artic stuff does, so you can get more reliable temps faster.

Swap out the Samsung Evo 840 for an Evo 850. Same capacity but much lower price and better performance. You also have the option of 2.5 SATA drive or an M.2 drive. Both of which your motherboard supports.
 
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Bearmann

Bearmann

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The Corsair 759D allows for a maximum cooler height of 170mm. The cooler is 160mm, but the fan sticks up 5mm above the cooler, making the height 165mm. Noctua says 32mm RAM will fit without moving the fan. You could push the fan up another 5m if needed in your case. I'm thinking of the same cooler and MB, and if I get it, I will remove the front fan and re-purpose it as a outtake rear case fan and only use the middle fan on the cooler since I am using high profile RAM (G. Skill Ripjaws V.) Another option would be to get the Noctua NH-U14s (height 165mm with or without fan) which has nearly the same cooling capacity as the NH-D15.

And definitely do not get the Samsung 840 EVO which is defective.
 
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BNWilliams007

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Thank you everyone for your feedback :) So I took your suggestions and changed my Thermal paste and SSD selection. Here is my updated parts list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wNdVNG

@Azaran, I did some thinking about placing a 280mm liquid cooling system in my rig for the potential of overclocking in the future and I looked at the Corsair Hydro Series H110i GT and the NZXT Kraken X61 and they get pretty impressive benchmarks, especially the Kraken. Not to mention that I wouldn't have to worry about losing room to place ram sticks if I decide to upgrade my memory over time. However, I still feel pretty scared in the back of my mind about liquid coolers. It's just that I can't help shake the idea that one may pay $150 for a liquid cooler and then if they get a single leak, then their $3,000 system is completely ruined. How common exactly are failures with liquid cooling? And is there anything or maintenance that the user can do to prevent leaks or other failures of the cooling system?

I was also doing a little bit of research on the m.2 SSD that you mentioned. I never even heard of such a thing until today. So I understand that m.2 SSD's are a little faster than 2.5 SATA SSD's and the PCI-E's are even faster than the m.2 SSD's. Well I compared the Samsung 850 EVO to a m.2 that I found on Amazon. They are both around the same price which concerns me as I would expect the m.2 SSD to be far more expensive than its 2.5 SATA SSD counterpart unless its not of good quality? I also wanted to ask hypothetically speaking, would my motherboard be able to support a PCI-E SSD since it can support the PCI-E wifi adapter in my build?

SSD's I was looking at:

2.5 SATA SSD: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E500B-AM/dp/B00OBRE5UE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1446681158&sr=8-1&keywords=samsung+evo+850+500gb

M.2 SSD: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-EVO-3-5-Inch-MZ-N5E500BW/dp/B00TGIW1XG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1446679777&sr=8-1&keywords=m.2+500gb+ssd

PCI-E SSD: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-PCIe-1-2TB-Internal-SSDPEDMW012T4R5/dp/B00UHJJQ3Q/ref=sr_1_7?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1446680898&sr=1-7&keywords=pcie+ssd

@Bearmann Ok so the Noctua NH-D15 and ram could possibly fit with the Cosair 750D Case (was 759D a typo)? That's good news, I'll look a little more into the Noctua and my ram choice as well then. Is there by any chance a website or resource that can calculate what ram sticks, coolers, and motherboards can fit inside particular PC cases?

@CTurbo, yeah I've been hearing really good things about the Cryorig H7. ^_^
 
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azaran

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Truth is any component can fail so the concern is to be expected. I've only seen a couple of horror stories online so the possibility does exist tho it seems to be rare. If you want to go for big overlocks tho you'll need to go past air cooling at some point, so water cooling in some form would be needed. However if your only interested in playing with OCing, coolers like the CRYORIG or the Hyper Evo are a great place to start and the Noctua would be good if you want to go in to bigger overclocks. By all means ease in to the idea, the only reason I brought it up was because you were looking at coolers in the Noctua's price point and water cooling is only a small step up from there. If you're concerned about RAM height compatibility, email the manufactures for the RAM height if its not listed, they'll happily email you back with specs. By and large you can fit most ram with small or reasonable sized heatsinks with little adjustment to the fan height, but there are limits. Corsair Dominator ram is a prime example of silly heights of heatsinks getting in the way.

As for the drives, firstly the notion that the Evo 840's on a whole are defective is straight up false. I recommended the 850's because they're better performing and cheaper, not because of any assumed flaw in the 840's. Now as for your list, unless you seriously need the speed and capacity of the Intel, which I doubt you do, you'd be fine with either of the Evo's. The advantage of the M.2 format is typically a faster interface and it resides on the board so small builds free up space. Since those two drives perform about the same, go with whichever is cheaper. For the price of the Intel, you'd be better throwing that money in to an X99 system and a 6-8 core CPU for workstation projects (assuming you meant workstation in your description in the rendering station sense). If you wanted to go for faster than Evos but keep it under the $400 mark, look at the SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 512GB that just came out for much faster specs.
 
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Zerk2012

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Water cooling is not needed the H7 cooler will do just fine with a mid range overclock and the R1 dropped my Prime95 temps 12C under my H100 cooler.
Their also no reason to even buy thermal paste what comes with the cooler will work just fine no matter what you buy.
 
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BNWilliams007

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Thank you everyone with your suggestions. I think for the time being, I'm either gonna stick to the Noctua NH-D14 or the Cryorig R1 Ultimate. Once I earn enough money to build my rig, I'll probably start off running my PC normally but slowly ease into OC'ing. I figured the D14 with a single fan will hopefully give my ram sticks a little more space and if it still can't fit, I'll just downgrade to a smaller cooler and then once I feel more comfortable and have more experience with OC'ing and PC building, maybe look into the possibility of getting a water cooler. Thank you for all of your comments everyone. :)
 
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Bearmann

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You are aware that the NH-D15 has cutouts for RAM that the the NH-D14 does not have? Of course, either will work well with low profile RAM. The Noctua U14s also has the cutouts.
 
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BNWilliams007

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Oops, I meant the Noctua U14S ^^; http://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NH-U14S-Sockets-Heatpipe-Cooling/dp/B00C9FLSLY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447095432&sr=8-1&keywords=noctua+nh-u14
 
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