Noctua’s NH-D15 has been the industry standard when it comes to high performance air CPU coolers. What is so impressive about this is that this cooler has been out since 2014. We’ve reviewed many different version of the cooler, while these might have been color changes or slight adjustments to support new CPU coolers, the overall cooler has not really changed. Well it looks like that is going to change as Noctua was showing off a 2nd generation NH-D15 CPU cooler at Computex 2023.
Noctua has been working on this cooler for quite a while and is going to give it a complete design overhaul. While the cooler does look very much the same as its predecessor a lot has changed. First the dual-tower fin stacks are denser, so now the gap between the fins is 1.6mm (compared to 1.9mm on the original NH-D15). This translates to roughly 20% more surface area for heat dissipation. The fin stacks are also made to not impede with VRM or SSD heatsinks that would be around the CPU socket.
The base of the cooler is made of nickel-plated copper and of course we have multiple heatpipes. Noctua is going with eight 6mm-thick heatpipes instead of the six that were on the original NH-D15. As you can see from the photo above the heatpipes go over the entire base of the cooler, which means this cooler is going to be ideal for even chiplet-based processors.
Noctua is going to use two “next-gen” 140mm cooling that which are said to offer superior performance and noise characteristics compared to anything in Noctua’s lineup right now. Currently there is no official name for this cooler. Noctua plans to release the cooler in Q2 2024.
Via Club386
