Noctua NH-D15 G2 gains offset mounting bars for Arrow Lake CPUs to optimize cooling performance

Noctua has created a new mounting modification for its flagship NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler tailored specifically for Core Ultra 200S series CPUs. Its new NM-IB8 mounting bars provide up to a three-degree temperature improvement by shifting the center of the NH-D15 G2's contact plate north-east of the CPU package.

The NM-IB8 mounting bars only replace the NH-D15 G2's existing units; the rest of the mounting equipment (that comes with the cooler) including the washers and screws are reused. Noctua claims the adjusted mounting spot provides a 3-degree Celsius drop in temperature with the HBC version of the NH-D15 G2 and a 1-degree Celsius drop with the standard version.

The NM-IB8's new mounting location (and the chip's hotspot area) is allegedly 3.7mm north and 2mm east of the center of the LGA1851 socket. This location is directly above Arrow Lake's compute tile, which houses the P-cores and E-cores. Noctua claims this area is the hottest side of the package when running multi-core workloads, which makes sense. By contrast, the original mounting solution puts the contact point of the cooler directly in the middle of the CPU package, which resides directly over the right bottom edge of the compute tile, and nearer to the SoC tile and I/O tile.

All three versions of Noctua's NH-D15 G2 are compatible with the NM-IB8 mounting solution: the standard, HBC, and LBC versions. Other Noctua models are not compatible.

The NM-IB8 is Noctua's first offset mounting kit optimized for Intel processors. Previous generations of Intel CPUs (including LGA 1700 chips) took advantage of a monolithic die design, which always had a hotspot area very close to the center of the CPU package. As a result, they did not need any sort of mounting offset to improve cooling performance.

Noctua first started shipping offset mounts for AMD AM4 and AM5-based processors. These offset mounts also prioritize shifting a Noctua cooler's central portion toward the CPU's hottest part, namely the chiplet containing the CPU cores. However, on AMD Ryzen-based chips, the cores are located in a different location compared to Arrow Lake chips.

The NH-D15 G2 is the successor to the legendary NH-D15 that debuted all the way back in 2014. One of the most prominent upgrades with the G2 variant is the addition of two alternate variants of the cooler, tailored-made for specific CPUs. The HBC variant (High Base Convexity) has a modified contact plate optimized for LGA 1700 chips that bend heavily in their socket. LBC (Low Base Convexity) is aimed at relatively flat CPUs such as LGA 2011 or AM4 processors.

These alternate versions are primarily geared towards enthusiasts or overclockers who want to extract as much performance from the NH-D15 G2 as possible. There is still a vanilla version of the cooler that works with all types of chips and is tuned for balanced performance across a variety of chips.

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