Noctua Announces Redesigned Flagship Air Cooler for $149

In the world of CPU coolers that feature a tower design with heatsinks and fans, the Noctua NH-D15 has long been the industry standard as the pinnacle of air-cooling performance. That performance didn’t come cheap, though, as these coolers have always rivaled all-in-one liquid coolers in price. It’s always been one of the largest coolers you could ever strap onto your CPU. Now, Noctua has redesigned the NH-D15 for better performance and system compatibility by shrinking its size somewhat, all without adding additional noise to the cooler’s operation.

The upgraded version has the same name as before but with G2 added. The revamped version offers a wide range of updates to the original design, making it slightly more compact yet capable of handling even more demanding workloads than its predecessor. Noctua says the G2 cooler is capable of running a few degrees cooler than the OG model, even under extremely demanding workloads, so if you already have the original, it’s probably not worth upgrading. The cooler’s price has also been upgraded, going from $129 for the existing version to $149 for the G2 model, making it the most expensive air cooler on the market as far as we can tell.

Numerous changes have been made to the original, so let’s go through them one by one. The biggest change is that Noctua has added two heat pipes to the G2, going from six on the NH-D15 to eight. The company says these extra heat pipes come in handy when dealing with extreme workloads requiring over 250W of cooling, and this upgrade is where the G2 shows the most improvement over the original.

It’s also redesigned the fin stacks by moving them closer together, from 1.9mm spacing to just 1.6mm. This allowed Noctua to add 23 additional fins, boosting the total fin surface area by 20%. It has also moved to an asymmetrical design for the fin stacks, with the front stack being 5mm narrower than the one in the rear, which it says helps even out the load between the two fans.

Noctua says the NH-D15 G2 is now offset towards the upper portion of the motherboard, which provides additional clearance for a GPU nestled in the upper PCIe slot right below where the cooler is mounted. It had previously offered this feature on the NH-D15S, a version of the NH-D15 redesigned for maximum compatibility with various types of RAM and PCIe add-on cards.

The sales pitch is more heatpipes for better performance, slightly smaller, and just as quiet.
Credit: Noctua

The G2 cooler also allows for extra-tall memory up to 59mm if you don’t mind ditching the front-facing fan and going into “single fan mode.” If you choose to use the second fan, your RAM clearance is 32mm, so you won’t be able to use sticks with RGB light bars on them.

Noctua has also changed how the fans work to ensure silent operation at all times, which is a hallmark of its coolers. First, it allows them to stop moving completely when using a PWM connector that supports this feature, making them ideal for machines that aren’t always running at full load. Second, it’s varied the speed at which the two fans rotate by ~25 rpm to avoid the fans producing odd noises and vibrations when they are fully in sync with each other. Finally, it includes two low-noise adapters that connect to the fan power cables, which reduce the maximum rpm from 1,500 to 1,300. They can allow the fans to run at a fixed speed at all times or be capped at 1,300 rpm using PWM.