It’s close at the power connectors, and if you have short or stiff cabling, it may cause an issue. The rubber fan isolators are the closest fan component to the card, which is better and can help isolate any vibrations.
So there it is. It has a lot of presence to it, very cool and dominates the view. We looked around this before we mounted the motherboard for testing, we couldn’t get over the size of this thing, it’s massive!
Test Set Up
We tested the Noctua NH-D15 for sound and cooling performance using an i7 LGA2011 set up. We tested two configurations, stock with turbo and over clock with turbo.
- Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
- Processor: Intel i7-5820K
- Motherboard: Asus Rampage V Extreme Motherboard
- Graphics: PNY XLR8 GeForce GTX 770
- Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666Mhz
- Drives: 2 x 128GB SSDs OS RAID 0 (SanDisk SSD SATA III 128GB)
- PSU: Corsair HX1000i
- Chassis: MicroCool Banchetto 101 Chassis
- Rival: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3
Software used for load tests and temperature capture;
- HWiNFO64
- AIDA64 Extreme
We ran the AIDA64 Extreme stability test in 30 minute batches and recorded the results. We used the Core Max result as there was typically a variance across the cores of a couple of degrees. We only selected the cache, FPU and CPU tests, so no other component would generate impacting heat during the tests.
