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

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!

I purchased a Z370 motherboard and installed an I5 8400 CPU and intended on using the stock cooler, since the chip obviously wasn't going to be overclocked, and runs pretty cool compared to the Sandy Bridge CPU it replaced. That was last November.I had started noticing the fan on the stock cooler, which I had set to run at normal speed per the motherboard (around 2000 rpm). It has that characteristic small fan whine. That was keeping the CPU at around 60c when running intensive games. I tried setting the fan to quiet (1000rpm) which helped, and did notice the CPU temps ramping up into the high 60c range, so I reset the fan back to 2k. So, that started me on the 'maybe I should get a CPU cooler' research wagon. I had been running a Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B on my P67 Sandy Bridge setup, and had good luck with it. The installation was a PITA, but it did the job, and looked really nice.Anyway, after a few days of researching, I finally landed on this cooler. I wanted to keep the weight down somewhat, which this cooler is a bit heavier than the Zalman, is at least under 1k grams. Also, I liked that it blows air on the motherboard components, ram, etc. Also, since it is somewhat low profile, it doesn't have quite the board bending leverage the vertical coolers have. At least that was my theory.So, I made the purchase and installed the cooler. Installation was very simple. The hardware fits like a glove on my 1151 motherboard, and is very secure. The 'difficult' part of the installation was lining up the female threaded nuts on the heatsink with the male bolts on the motherboard bracket. It's a little difficult lining things up, since you can't really see what you are doing. But that was it. Everythign else was very straight forward.I must say, the cooler's performance has been great. I've stress tested it using CPU-Z, and running various games (The Division, Witcher 3, etc), and I haven't seen the CPU temp go above 45c. That is with the fans running at roughly 1000rpm. At that rpm, you really can't hear anything from the CPU fan. So, I've transformed this gaming rig from a somewhat whiny 2000 rpm intel fan with temps in the low 60c's, to a basically silent fan with temps in the low to mid 40c's. This is a low wattage, stock clock CPU, thus the relatively low temps. But its an awesome delta in temperature and noise. I really am very happy. Low temps, quiet fans, and a pleasant installation experience. Plus the cooler really looks AWESOME in my case.**** I want to buy another one to display on a shelf in my office!!! ****