PC cooling specialist Noctua has introduced a Chromax variant of its latest flagship CPU cooler, the NH-D15 G2. Launched in July 2024 in its traditional brown and beige aesthetics, the cooler is now available in an all-black finish with a listed price of $189.90 in the U.S. on Amazon and €159.90 in Europe. That makes it $40 or €10 more expensive (depending on your region), unless you don’t mind the company’s traditional color scheme. Noctua has also introduced Chromax versions of the NF-A14x25r G2 (round frame) and NF-A14x25 G2 (square frame) 140mm PWM fans, which start at $44.90 in the U.S. and €39.90 in Europe.
According to Noctua CEO Roland Mossig, the G2 series products have been well-received by the PC-building community, and the company is confident that the new chromax.black versions will be suitable for users who prefer a “stealthy, unobtrusive look.”
If you are interested in the new Chromax NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler or the NF-A14x25 G2 and NF-A14x25r G2 140mm PWM fans, you can grab them from Amazon using the following links.
Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Noctua) (Image credit: Noctua) (Image credit: Noctua)
The NH-D15 G2 features eight heat pipes as opposed to six on its predecessor. It also comes with denser asymmetrical fin stacks that are claimed to deliver 20% more surface area for convective heat dissipation. The cooler also features an offset design that is said to offer better clearance for the top PCIe x16 slot on most modern motherboards.
Rounding up the NH-D15 G2 are two NF-A14x25r G2 round-frame 140mm PWM fans which are made out of Noctua’s patented Sterrox liquid-crystal polymer (LCP). This material is said to offer high tensile strength and low thermal expansion characteristics compared to traditional thermoplastics. The fans feature a Progressive Bend impeller design with a Centrifugal Turbulator hub, winglets, and a tight tip clearance of 0.7mm, which results in improved performance-to-noise efficiency over the previous generation models.
Noctua suggests that cooling efficiency and low-noise performance of the new Chromax lineup should be similar compared to the non-Chromax variants. In our in-depth review, the Noctua NH‑D15 G2 delivered improved thermal performance over the original NH-D15, cooling about 10W more load (around 240W sustained) while maintaining a quiet profile. We also recorded temperature drops of about 2-degrees celsius under mixed CPU and GPU loads, and an overall improvement in CPU temperatures of up to 3-degree celsius compared to its predecessor.
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