Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U: A High-End Xeon Scalable Heatsink

[M@GOid]

You can talk all you want about the goofiness of the beige/brow color set, but those Austrian bastards know how to make a good air cooler.

They are not cheap, but I never saw a review where they under-performed.

[coder]

I didn't see 4 mini coolers and a heatsink with heatpipes around the motherboard VRMs, so no.

Don't forget about the external, desk-side 1 hp chiller.

[coder]

About vapor chambers, I think I've only seen that from CoolerMaster.

Vapor chambers are fairly popular in rackmount servers and high-end GPUs. Nvidia uses them in their Founders Edition GPUs >= GTX 1080.

For something like a huge server CPU, the benefit of a vapor chamber is their superior ability to evenly distribute heat. I guess it would make more sense if, as with GPUs, you're doing direct-die cooling, instead of putting it atop another heat spreader.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...=vapor+chamber

[schmidtbag]

Noctua is a great company. I fully endorse their products. But explain how are they expensive exactly? $90 is a rounding error when you look at some of the Epyc or high-end Xeon prices (that will need such cooling).

$90 is a lot of money for a fan attached to a chunk of aluminum, nickel, and copper. The fact there's not much competition for this socket allows them to inflate the price to such levels. As you could see from the benchmarks, the Supermicro heatsink wasn't that far behind, and it's half the price with a very dated and ugly design.

Noctua is very good, but I personally find them to be tremendously overrated. If I have money to burn, sure, I'll get Noctua, but I have a hard time recommending them. I bought into the hype once and frankly, I won't do so again. Their performance doesn't justify their prices.

[c2h5oh]

With the reduced price of water coolers these days I don't see much reason to buy traditional heatsink coolers other than lowest cost. No idea if they exist for Xeon scalable since I'm not in the market for one.

Actually $90 Noctua D15 beats closed loop water coolers with 240mm radiators on both cooling performance and volume - even with heavy OC.

[starshipeleven]

$90 is a lot of money for a fan attached to a chunk of aluminum, nickel, and copper.

It's not the Intel stock cooler. This has heatpipes and fins and a decent mounting system. There is some design behind it.

Also the fans themselves cost around 20$ apiece, so the heatsink price is more like 50$. And there is the 6 years warranty.

The fact there's not much competition for this socket allows them to inflate the price to such levels. As you could see from the benchmarks, the Supermicro heatsink wasn't that far behind, and it's half the price with a very dated and ugly design.

No, it costs exactly the same as their high-end coolers for Intel and AMD (like NH-D15), as it is basically the same thing.

You might say that high end coolers are overpriced, and that with a 30$ Cooler Master 212 EVO you can do fine in most cases, but 90$ is normal for high end coolers.

Noctua is very good, but I personally find them to be tremendously overrated. ... Their performance doesn't justify their prices.

Depends from how much you overclock. I mean, even thermal paste is well into the "who the fuck cares" realm and everyone is perfectly fine with Arctic MX-2 which is cheap and does perform within 5 degrees when overclocking.

High end coolers don't perform that much bette rthan midrange, but pricing for getting better performance does not usually scale linearly (also because thermodynamics)

Also, there isn't much overpricing for its midrange coolers, you can find them for 40 to 60$.

Last Noctua cooler I bought was a low-profile AM4 one, I might have paid 10$ more than something else, but it does the job, came with a 5g applicator of high end thermal paste (worth around 10$ alone, you can use it 4-5 times before it's empty), a sleeved resistor to slow the fan (common optional for high end heatsinks), and has standard fan mounts so if the fan dies I can screw in another random fan of the same size.

[M@GOid]

and has standard fan mounts so if the fan dies I can screw in another random fan of the same size.

That is something people often overlook. I'm the kind of cheap guy when I buy coolers, and be able to replace the cooler is big on my list of features. I recently passed a opportunity of buying a Arctic Cooling (excellent cheaper alternative to Noctuas) because of that.

Noctuas are particularly overpriced where I live, so I never bought one, but I respect their efforts on this segment. Heck, they even maintain a list of motherboard compatibility with their coolers, I can't remember other manufacturer doing that. I bought a low profile cooler from other manufacturer, and the thing didn't fit in 2 of 3 motherboards I tried using it, because the mount adapter was made 90 degrees to the wrong side.

[schmidtbag]

It's not the Intel stock cooler. This has heatpipes and fins and a decent mounting system. There is some design behind it.

Also the fans themselves cost around 20$ apiece, so the heatsink price is more like 50$. And there is the 6 years warranty.

I'm well aware of all of this. But like I said later in my post, despite all of the design efforts, the relatively cheap Supermicro with it's crude and basic design still ends up being very competitive.
As for the $20 price tag for fans, that's largely artificial. They charge that because they know people will pay for it; that doesn't mean they're actually worth their price. It's no different than designer fashion products or exotic cars - sure, they may be objectively better than many of the alternatives, but most of what you're paying for is the name. Noctua's fans aren't brown because of a more expensive manufacturing process, it's just their "signature" so everyone knows what you've got.

No, it costs exactly the same as their high-end coolers for Intel and AMD (like NH-D15), as it is basically the same thing.

No, they really don't. As stated by the article, the Noctua cooler is $90:

https://www.amazon.com/noctua-NH-D9-DX-3647-4U-premium/dp/B07DPQJH5J

The Supermicro ranges from around $45-$50 depending on the store:

https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-SNK-P0068APS4-3647-0-Purley-Platform/dp/B074TTK2FQ

You might say that high end coolers are overpriced, and that with a 30$ Cooler Master 212 EVO you can do fine in most cases, but 90$ is normal for high end coolers.

$90 for a heatsink is objectively overpriced. Also, being normal is a moot adjective (again, designer fashion or exotic cars are normally expensive). For just a little bit more money, you could buy a liquid cooling system (typically, an AIO). Spend half the money and you can get another air cooler with close (but slightly worse) performance.

Depends from how much you overclock. I mean, even thermal paste is well into the "who the fuck cares" realm and everyone is perfectly fine with Arctic MX-2 which is cheap and does perform within 5 degrees when overclocking.

In this context, these Xeons aren't going to be overclocked in real-world environments. But to give you the benefit of the doubt, let's look at something a little less extreme (like an i5 or i7). It's important to consider that many people (but not all) overclock with air coolers because they can't afford a good liquid cooling system or a higher-performance CPU.

High end coolers don't perform that much bette rthan midrange, but pricing for getting better performance does not usually scale linearly (also because thermodynamics)

Understood. For me personally (and I don't expect everyone to agree) that isn't worth it.

Last Noctua cooler I bought was a low-profile AM4 one, I might have paid 10$ more than something else, but it does the job, came with a 5g applicator of high end thermal paste (worth around 10$ alone, you can use it 4-5 times before it's empty), a sleeved resistor to slow the fan (common optional for high end heatsinks), and has standard fan mounts so if the fan dies I can screw in another random fan of the same size.

Depending on what that alternative was then sure, $10 more would totally be worth it. Remember, I'm not saying Noctua has bad products or that people should stay away from them, I'm just saying they're over-hyped and over-priced.

[starshipeleven]

Heck, they even maintain a list of motherboard compatibility with their coolers, I can't remember other manufacturer doing that. I bought a low profile cooler from other manufacturer, and the thing didn't fit in 2 of 3 motherboards I tried using it, because the mount adapter was made 90 degrees to the wrong side.

Also for the small or low-profile coolers they have CPU support tables to show what CPUs the cooler can actually keep cool in practice.

https://noctua.at/en/nh_l12s_tdp_guidelines

https://noctua.at/en/nh_l9i_tdp_guidelines (this is more strict as the heatsink is smaller, note how on some processors they go as far as recommending to use a UEFI option called "AVX offset" that lessens the impact of AVX heating)

And they offer free mounting kits to mount their cooler on new sockets, like for example for the AM4 socket when it came out, as long as you have a proof of purchase of both the cooler and the mobo you can ask for a kit. https://noctua.at/am4

So yeah, Noctua isn't all gold plating.

[Weasel]

I'm well aware of all of this. But like I said later in my post, despite all of the design efforts, the relatively cheap Supermicro with it's crude and basic design still ends up being very competitive.

Something crude and basic is cheaper? Who would've thought? Sometimes you pay for the design because, you know, you don't want something "crude and basic". You find it overpriced because you don't care if it's "crude and basic", but not everyone does.

And they offer free mounting kits to mount their cooler on new sockets, like for example for the AM4 socket when it came out, as long as you have a proof of purchase of both the cooler and the mobo you can ask for a kit. https://noctua.at/am4

This.

I've been using the same Noctua heatsink for well over 12 years now, on several units already, they always provided free mounting kits for newer sockets, only replaced the fan once because it was getting used and slightly noisy after so many years.