Review: Noctua NH-D15 G2

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Installation

For installation, you’ll need to keep your AMD backplate, as Noctua doesn’t supply one. If you don’t have one any more, a quick look on eBay should enable you to find one easily.

NH-D15 G2 assembly:

NH-D12L montage Intel 1

As with previous Noctua heatsinks (tested here and here), the first thing to do on the Intel side is to prepare the backplate. Once again, there’s nothing tricky about this: simply thread triangular based screws into the backplate , then lock them in place with black plastic nuts. Of course, you’ll need to be careful how you position them:

  • Outward: LGA-1700/1851
  • Inward: LGA-115x/1200

For AMD sockets, as is often the case, you’ll need to remove the original plastic mounting arms. Nothing difficult either, as they can be removed with a simple Phillips screwdriver.

Next, we can move on to installing the mounting arms. For this, we’ll need to position plastic washers. Watch out for the color:

  • Grey: AMD platforms
  • Black: AMD platforms LGA-115x/1200
  • Blue: LGA-1700/1851

All that remains is to position the mounting arms and screw them in place with the screwdriver supplied.

If you have a Ryzen 3000/5000/7000 on an AMD socket, we can only recommend offset mounting. The aim is to slightly offset the base of the heatsink so that it’s just above the CCDs, for better cooling. This is what we’ve done, as you can see above.

Noctua NH-D15 G2 MBC

As you can see, the NH-D15 G2 is really imposing, and once installed, the first fan completely covers the memory slots. So be careful with the height of your memory sticks.

Finally, a quick inspection of the CPU contact: it’s perfect. With our two CPUs, we can see that the IHS shape of our CPUs is perfectly reproduced on the base of the cooler. On Intel, we didn’t use Noctua’s washers simply because we already have a Contact Frame.