[citation][nom]mortuum[/nom]The thing is, Noctua HD14 set the standards too high. There is only a handful of coolers that can compete and they still can't reach Noctua's performance. They just have better size-to-performance ratio (meaning that they are smaller but work very well for their size).IMHO the Air-cooling market is a bit saturated, we can hardly expect any more breakthroughs.[/citation]
the only possibility of a breakthrough is in material sciences and a creation of a cheaper, ligher, or more thermal-conductive alloy (or any combination of the three). unfortunately this is not the job of any of these cooling companies 😛