Noctua NH-C14S, Premium CPU Cooler with NF-A14 PWM 140mm Fan (Brown)

As always they produce a great solution to the need for heat dissapation and form factor

TL;DR:Pros:- Highly efficient cooling- VERY quiet (fan only needs to run under pretty serious load)- Relatively easy installation in most scenarios- Price- SimplicityCons:- Large- Decently heavy- May present some installation challenges in specific scenarios, especially in SFF cases or with very tall RAM. For me the issue was with the PSU. But there are so many variables to consider, you might not not be able to forsee every issue until you dry-fit this sucker in your case.I like your whole story:I chose this cooler to go on a 5600X that went into a SFF gaming rig in the living room attached to a TV. Because of this environment, I wanted as quiet as possible. I considered an AIO -- which I still believe might be a good choice for this, especially since the case I have supports it -- but I love the simplicity of a large, efficient air cooler. And that's what this is. It's massive. It provides a huge amount surface area to keep the processor cool. The size of this thing does come with some potential pitfalls depending on your situation. Noctua has done a really good job of providing options in case there are issues with RAM clearance. You can simply move the fan to the top of the cooler to get more clearance under it. I suspect you would only have to do this in extreme cases (RAM with huge LED pipes or tall heat sinks). But I did have to customize my power supply mount to provide enough clearance for this cooler. Moving the power supply meant getting custom cables made to reach the now-longer cable runs. These are sacrifices I was willing to make to keep this cooler in my build, but your scenario might be different. Even under heavy gaming loads, the fan on this cooler barely runs. And when it does, it is very quiet. Inside the case, it is audible when it spins up, but only slightly. And usually there's enough yelling and shouting in my living room when gaming is that intense that we don't notice it. :-)One more thing to note: This cooler comes with a long Phillips screwdriver tool thing Noctua claims is designed to fit through the fan blades so you can tighten the screws on the mount without removing the fan. For me this was not true, one of the fan's structural beams holding the fan motor in place was blocking the path to one of the screws. It's a easy solution, you can simply remove the fan (I only removed the clip on one side and this gave me a path to reach the screw). It was such a minor inconvenience, to me it's not worth deducting a star!

Caught it on sale and replaced a Noctua NH-L9x65 (which moves less air), so the mounting bracket system was the same. Had to remove the fan to access the two hold-down screws then mounted the fan in the upper position (and blowing down). Not sure what the most efficient cooling position is and Noctua instructions did no say but they did note the upper position is the more quiet position besides including two extra fan wire holders if you want to run two fans in both mounting positions (and noted to use the throttle cable on the upper fan in that configuration).The setup is large but horizontal and would clear everything in my case even if using two fans. Upper PCIe slot is available with the setup. Memory sticks nearer the heat pipes can be removed without much trouble.At 500rpm for my AMD 65watt-TDP 'A' Series 4 cores + 8 graphic cores CPU/APU chip, this cooling system keeps it running 20c or less above ambient.temperature and does it silently and I mean silently. When I set the rpm to 1500rpm it will sound a noticeable 'whirr' and at the same time created a breeze outside my mid tower case (I kid you not). At this speed the chip temperature is about the same at idle when running at 500rpm. So, I set BIOS to 'normal' fan control and forget about it, not using the throttle down cable included in the kit.That is not to say I don't push the system when rendering because I do and get 100% core usage on all four cores for an hour or so. But I used Windows Experience Index test (base score 6.8 on this Gigabyte Sniper w/32g of 2,133 MHz memory, running A-10 7860K ) to max the cores out and temperatures hovered around 70c during the test versus about 55c at idle according to CPUID HWMonitoring software. Fan only maxed to 976rpm but I never heard it during the quick test. Entire system spiked once to 95watts but CPUs drew no more than 40watts during the test.Anyway, you get the idea and I get the silence I always dreamed about with a computer chip that is in the middle of the road for heat production (this model normally runs cool even if overclocked 4g+).Noctua literature says this newer model 'S' was tweaked to clear an upper PCIe slot and memory size conflicts plus made this design more efficient with the use of only one fan albeit a larger 140mm, works for me. It is the only fan inside my case beside the power supply unit's fan.I had cheap fans with heat sinks that were fairly quiet at idle but being cheap there was usually a 'buzz' or 'clicks' in the background heard when wearing headphones (esp. during the quiet pause between songs) annoyingly reminding me the cheap fan was turning besides winding up during renderings to be noticeably loud. Not no more with this fan.