Review on 🌙 Noctua NH-D15 SE-AM4 Review: Premium AMD AM4 Dual-Tower CPU Cooler (Brown) by Antonio Bly

I've just put together my first rig and I'm using a Ryzen 7 1700. While running various stress tests, I had the feeling that the CPU gets a bit warm with the stock cooler, even with the fan on runs at full speed, so between 2700-2800 rpm So I decided to upgrade the cooler. I run OCed at 3.7 GHz at 1.26875 volts. For stress tests I use CPU-Z and Cinebench R15. Standard cooler with reasonable fan curve (as fast as possible, inaudible 50% I think), idle was around 40C, sometimes as high as 38C. I'm sure background tasks introduced some volatility. At 100% fan speed during the CPU-Z stress test, temperatures fluctuated around 65 degrees. As a test, I removed the side panel, there were no improvements. I then pointed two external 120mm AC Infinity USB fans to the processor I usually use for my AV gear. It only knocked over 2c. By repeatedly running Cinebench R15 without giving the CPU a chance to cool down, I was able to get the temperature down to the mid 70's. With both CPU fans running at 40% on this Noctua, the idle temperature is around 32 degrees. The CPU-Z stress test hovered around 43 degrees with both CPU fans running at 50%. Increasing the number of fans to 100% earns me another 2 cents, which isn't worth it. I seem to have reached the airflow/temperature limit of my current case configuration. But the drop from 65c to 43c is huge. Rebooting Cinebench peaked at 46 degrees, an improvement of nearly 30 degrees. I've seen other people with varying degrees of improvement. Some of the improvements weren't that impressive in my opinion, and I was hesitant to try this thing, but figured I could return it if things didn't go as planned. Well, they fit me fine. I don't know if I could get the same results with something like the much cheaper 212 EVO because I haven't tried other coolers. Maybe that's superfluous. It's definitely not cheap compared to many other smaller and more efficient coolers. But I went all out on the rest of my rig, so why not the cooler? Anyway, this thing works. The real question is whether you can achieve the same performance with a smaller and cheaper cooler from Noctua or another manufacturer. You have to test them to find out. At full speed these things are loud, a lot louder than the smaller standard radiator fan which runs at 2800 rpm. But you never need to run these things that hard in normal use, maybe even reasonably heavy use.