Review on Noctua NH-D15S Dual-Tower CPU Cooler with NF-A15 PWM Fan - Premium Brown Edition by James Thelin

I have used custom water cooling for many years and have always found it good. I've never had a leak or component failure in my ten years of water cooling - mainly because I buy good quality stuff and do my research very carefully. I can offer 240mm radiator. but in my case there is no room for a better heatsink or another heatsink and my system needs to be quite portable. So my only option was to buy a case that might work with my system along with an additional heatsink or two. After looking around, all I could find was spending about $300 for the entire upgrade. for a more complex system to carry around. Way more money than I wanted to spend on it. So I decided to look for the best air cooling systems available and of course I stumbled upon the NH-D15 (and the S variant). Having measured everything and since Noctua had already shown off their AM4 kit - and said it was free - I figured this would be a pretty surefire way to ensure compatibility with early adopters. I took NH-D15S. I wasn't expecting the cooler to perform as well as my water-cooled setup, but figured it would work well enough to meet my actual needs and I could keep my water-cooling. Kit for the future when I really want to go all out and spend a fortune on a beautiful scaffold that doesn't move. As it turned out, I was wrong. This thing works just as well as my custom loop set up for acceptable acoustic performance. Sure, I could crank the pump up to 100% and the fans up to 100% and the D15S wouldn't stand a chance of keeping up, but this system is a foot from my head and I just can't stand the noise the pump is making over 50% When using PWM, all of my fans, as well as the pump, would normally be idle and all of them would increase in temperature. I didn't want them to rise during gameplay, so I set a target temperature of 60°C for the fans and 45°C for the pump. As a result, my idle temp on the CPU was around 35C and the max temp was around 78C (i7 2600K @ 4.8GHz + 0.015V), but was able to reach 80C temporarily, surpassing my water. - Cooling setting with the same PWM settings! Idle 32°C and max 77°C (when using IBT @ Very High). What really struck me is how much quieter this thing is than my fairly quiet water-cooled rig. I added another fan to the D15S (a Cougar 120mm PWM fan) that can withstand peak temperatures of up to 76°C - so not a huge change. Obviously *IF* I go back to water cooling I will consider just doing it with a much larger heatsink. Surface. which would require a new expensive case over the heatsink and tubing cost. It is therefore difficult for me to justify such a step. I can definitely do without air cooling. and what could be better for a radiator than this one? In addition, the installation was easy, everything was very high quality, blah blah blah.