https://www.hwhound.com/cooling/noctua-nh-d15-chromax-black-cooler-review/

 

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 the best cooler I’ve ever used to date is still the NZXT Kraken X62. This guy beats 360mm AIOs! Seeing the NH-D15 come within spitting distance of it blew my mind. However, that’s if we decide to leave noise levels alone.

 

In order to really see who’s on top, I decided to limit noise levels. At 38 dB, coolers are practically silent in my room. I had to tone down the Kraken to 60% fan speed to get there. While the Chromax also needed a bit of a tune down, something huge happens. Noctua has the lowest temperature on the chart. It’s true! The NH-D15 really does match or even outperform a ton of closed loop liquid coolers.

 

 

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Finally, I wanted to see one last metric. Manual overclocking is basically becoming a thing of a past. Enthusiasts can still do it, but Ryzen does such a good job of auto boosting based on cooling, that it isn’t very practical. On top of that, manual overclocking tends to cause a sacrifice to single core performance. I logged 5 runs of Cinebench R20 and recorded the highest score. Imagine my surprise when the Chromax Black pulled the highest score, even higher than a full blast Kraken X62! 

 

Like I've said so many times... AIO manufactures often cheat by installing noisy high RPM fans. 

Edited February 19, 20206 yr by martin-w

2 hours ago, martin-w said:

I logged 5 runs of Cinebench R20 and recorded the highest score. Imagine my surprise when the Chromax Black pulled the highest score, even higher than a full blast Kraken X62! 

Unless thermal throttling was going on (highly unlikely, particularly in the case of the Kraken), what difference to Cinebench could different coolers possibly make?

95W TDP isn't much of a thermal dissipation workload.  

Noise-normalized testing is also not my favorite method of testing cooling systems, as these systems are each engineered to operate at a certain noise level, adjusting this parameter can result in the cooling system operating outside of the "sweet spot" range of the efficiency curve.