Performance
The performance of the NH-D15 chromax.black has been tested on the AMD Ryzen 3000 platform. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, the 3700X CPU is one of the most popular in the last months and is still not the most power-hungry chip, so it is perfect for comparison on various cooling solutions.
As a side note, in our tests, we had similar results on the 3700X and the 3600/3600X even though there is a two-core difference, and the 3600X is 95W TDP processor while others are 65W TDP.
The 3900X CPU has about 5-6°C more under full load on 12 cores, but because of too much heat, it couldn’t be used for comparison on a big part of our coolers.
Our comparison includes three tests. The idle mode is a PC left without any load besides standard Windows services running in the background. The mixed-mode base on a PCMark 10 extended test that uses popular applications and simple games. The max load is a CPU+FPU AIDA64 stability test. Shows about maximum CPU load during the most demanding work on all CPU cores.
The NH-D15 is probably the best air cooling solution on the market right now. Only a higher series of water cooling kits are slightly better but usually require additional space in the case to be installed. The only cooler that could barely beat the NH-D15 was SilentiumPC Navis, with two 140mm fans and a 280mm radiator. I think it’s a great result as the difference is minimal, and the end-user wouldn’t see that during daily work. Not all users like any form of water cooling in their computers, and also air cooling solutions are usually more durable and higher quality.
Our maximum temperature seems high, but this is how the new Ryzen works. I won’t hide that for me it was quite disappointing compared to the previous generation.
The generated noise has been measured about 1m from the PC in which was installed the NH-D15 chromax.black. While idle, the fans were spinning at about 500-600 RPM and were nearly silent. It was hard to measure the noise because of other devices around. During mixed-load tests, we could see between 1000-1300 RPM, and depends on the test; it was or nearly silent or barely audible. The measured noise was around 27dB. The maximum load made the fan to work at 1300-1450 RPM with the result of 32dB. It was the noise of the whole PC, so I can say it’s impressive considering how much heat generates the 3700X processor.
Overclocking was again a bit disappointing because of the used CPU. New Ryzen series is not overclocking past its turbo frequency, and usually, it’s less. However, our CPU could reach 4350MHz on the NH-D15, and it’s about 50MHz better results than on the previous best cooler.
We are delighted with the results on the NH-D15 chromax.black, and I’m sure that anyone who decides on this cooler will be another happy user.
