This is content marketing executed perfectly :) Reading it, I learned something new and interesting and they had an opportunity to show off one of their differentiators against the competition (low leakage flow due to tighter tolerances) and then at the end they casually mention the new product that has just opened for pre-orders.
I enjoyed reading it. Informative and showing of their processes and giving some intricate details. And yes, the end goal is to sell products which is fine by me. I take this over any generic non-saying marketing-blurb any time.
Okay. Seems like low noise is another big customer draw. So what's the difference for those measures between this difficult to manufacture fan and one with clearances that are easier to manufacture? If either is particularly significant, it's quite a bit more interesting than the measurement of the clearance.
Even if it is the case, and not simple an omission to focus the narrative, does it matter? Case fans pull what 4 watts? 5 watts? Who cares if it pulls 200 milliwatts more than a competitor when it's cooling a GPU and CPU that consume more than a hundred times what it can consume
That's really high. Like usually they are 100-150mA (so sub 2W) Lots of controllers would be 1A max.
The tolerances are for noise mostly. I'd consider the noise (and longevity) the single most important part of fans (else most fans can spin close to 3k rpm and cool)
The question is not about saving milliwatts-hours on your electricity bill, it is about where these milliwatts are going.
One is heat, heat is not great, it puts more stress on components, mechanical and electrical, reducing longevity.
Another, maybe more important is noise. The power that goes into making noise is power that is wasted, noise is inefficiency, and reducing noise is an efficiency problem.
The specific fan in question has a rated max power draw of 1.8 W. In actual deployments it's going to be a lot less since ~nobody is running a noctua fan at 100% speed unconditionally
"In actual deployments it's going to be a lot less since ~nobody is running a noctua fan at 100% speed unconditionally"
I run dual 36w Delta fans at 100% in my computer case. I use the outflow as positive pressure forced exhaust for my enclosed CO2 laser, which itself has an ultra-weak venting fan.
It isn't that loud. A simple no box does the trick.
Yeah, but those aren't noctua fans. Noctua's claim to fame is being lower noise, not moving the most air. I'm sure somebody is buying a premium low noise-focused fan and then pinning it to max, but that's definitely not going to be typical.
Tighter tolerance isn't universally a good thing. It might make the fan more susceptible to damage due to mishandling or dust. They might be selling a fan that has a shorter useful life for no real benefit.
As a physicist, it's not at all clear to me that tighter tolerances would lead to higher efficiency or less noise. I assume it shakes out in the CFD simulations, but I would be curious to know the explanation.
I thought the primary gain in efficiency came from the large blades, with the blade shape the next most important factor. Gaps between the blade and housing feels like a single-digit percent effect.
Case fans pull what 4 watts? 5 watts? Who cares if it pulls 200 milliwatts more than a competitor when it's cooling a GPU and CPU that consume more than a hundred times what it can consume
Yes, exactly. The high precision is marketing, not something needed in the product.
My understanding is that the precision is supposed to help with noise. Less turbulence, etc.
FWIW, in my setup (10th gen i5, RTX 5070 Ti in an old Define R3 case), the 12 cm Noctua G2 fans run quieter and have a much less obnoxious noise than the old P/F series, which wipe the floor with the Arctic fan I bought for a computer that lives in the basement and sounds like it's about to take off.
You lead me to believe that they are targeting a niche "audiophile" market and probably not a commercial market. The concern in the commercial market would be energy savings vs. capital expenditure. Some commercial spaces actually introduce white noise into spaces to increase occupant density.
They target people that want quiet/silent cases, obviously not commerical, unless you're going after the long life/warranty service. Or you go for their industrial line.
They are targeting people who want nearly-silent fans for computing devices and will pay considerably higher than average prices for them. I have several of them, and they are vastly quieter than the competition. Wouldn't be worth it in a commercial space, but I want my house to be quiet.
In my experience fans from manufacturers like Arctic can be almost as quiet similar Noctua, but cost 50% less. The difference definitely isn't vast for most models, although admittedly there's more QC issues and variation than with Noctua.
A lot of Noctua sales come from their brand value. People put Noctua fans into their gaming PC's, use headphones while gaming on them, and then turn off the PC. You don't really need the most silent fan for that, but people buy them anyway for the looks & premium quality.
I do love Noctua's coolers though, I appreciate the well thought design, manuals and free upgrade kits when you upgrade your system to a new socket type. But for case fans I'll jut buy Arctic and save money, except for things like server systems that run 24/7 in my bedroom where noise and durability are top priority.
I'd love more white, personally. I also don't understand the obsession with black. For me, black objects are very difficult to observe in detail, and that irks me.
Well, I have a bunch of lower-end black fans, some of them quite old, from before transparent cases were a thing. They're actually pretty much gray if I don't wipe them off.
Noctua's signature... brown-orange? Whatever that color is, it has the same issue. The blades are basically gray if I don't wipe them.
Haven't seen anybody start a gray craze, though. Though I have a grayish motorbike that also shows dust and dirt like nobody's business (it's a bike I use strictly on paved roads).
Silver is the ideal color for hiding dirt. I had a silver car once. Unless you drove it down a dirt road during a rainstorm, you basically never had to wash it.
If it were about performance and not marketing, they'd try to optimize for resistance to dust adhesion and resource consumption: energy, cost, durability, etc.
I have them. They get dusty at about the same rate as a pure black fan (which also shows gray/brown dust quite easily). I need to clean mine about every 6-9 months to keep them looking good enough to "show off". I generally run a Winix HEPA filter in each room of my apartment.
I don't think matte white is worse than matte black in terms of showing dust. They both do.
Totally. I used to favor black a long time ago when most computers were still gray and the idea of having everything in black was really cool, but since realizing that details and controls are harder to discern on black, I’m all in on white and silver. It’s also less prone to showing fingerprints.
TIL: Generally all plastics exposed to UV start to photodegrade. If you google why old computers turn particularly yellow most sources point to bromine-based flame retardant agents in the plastic, but some people make a convincing case[1] that ABS just naturally turns yellow in UV light.
Not much real research into that topic, interestingly.
Not sure why all the fire retardants are needed. Besides, steel probably retards fire more effectively than most fire retarded resins and is probably far more recyclable.
Not all marketing is bad. Many of the beloved cartoons from decades ago were meant as marketing materials for toys and various kid items (i.e. lunch boxes). It doesn't mean it's automatically soulless.
In this case, I finally understand why they chose their most iconic colors, and appreciate the time they take on precision engineering.
With Noctua I highly doubt that is the case given their track record for quality overall and all other information available around their design and engineering process. As far as I know based on all the information I have seen all the design and engineering is done in Austria. They also have a track record of only releasing things once they are satisfied something performs within their standards. Something that would be next to impossible when solely relying on external fabs and process engineering.
They also utilize different manufactures afaik (historically Taiwan, but also China these days) meaning they need to have pretty solid in house knowledge and expertise to make sure different factories produces similar results. When they first started utilizing Chinese factories people noticed visual differences and were worried about that. But Noctua at the time claimed that they made sure that performance was still the same. A claim that was put to the test by various review outlets at the time (I want to say gamer nexus did a big piece about it?) and confirmed to be true.
Having said that, if you do utilize external factories you automatically are making use of their process engineering to some degree as well. But, and this is difficult for many people to understand, that isn't a binary thing either. You can entirely rely on the factory to basically do everything for you and just send feedback on iterations but you can also work closely with them and actually get involved in the process itself.
Yep, if you're a big enough source of income for the factory you can basically do whatever you want, up to and including stationing your employees in their factory year round.
I enjoyed reading this. As others have said, it's both interesting and good marketing communication.
I'm a dev and for the last year I've been working for a company that manufactures pretty complex and advanced machines. I work with proper engineers - electronic, electrical, control, mechanical - and actual scientists. One of the things I've come to appreciate from this is the hidden depts of detail and complexity in so many aspects of the objects that surround us. People work hard on small details that hide in the background but are vital to making things work. And there's often code in everything, all the way down.
And now I can add plastic injection moulding to that. The rabbit hole goes very deep.
Edit to add:
My dad worked forty-plus years as an engineering pattern maker. He made, by hand, the high-tolerance wooden "negatives" that were used to form moulds made from sand and resin. The moulds were used to cast parts for industrial valves: molten brass and gunmetal was poured into them, in a foundry, and left to cool. I think he would have deeply appreciated what this article was saying about craft and engineering and patience.
When it comes to industrial manufacturing, a think of lot of people are not realizing (by lack of education on the matter in general knowledge or schooling) the difference between levels of manufacturing, the precision required for some things, and how the hard part is having the full chain (making the tool that can make the tool that can make the tool that ...) because you can't jump from nothing to milimeter precision.
Also known as "why did China who already owned world manufacturing insisted and struggled on making ballpoint pen until 2017", "why are car manufacturers not making random cheap cars that have the curbs of beloved sports cars", "why are barely 5-6 countries able to make decent jet engines" and all that.
Manufacturing is hard. It's built upon layers and layers of deep knowledge and abilities. And when don't have it or you lose it, just knowing how to make the last layer is not enough, you need to rebuild the entire stack.
Which in this case becomes "painting something black is easy, making a fan black is easy, making a high quality high precision fan black from the starting point of the same fan in another color is an industrial challenge".
We are so used to high quality high precision manufacturing, we have a bazillion factories pumping out millions of very high tech things for random usages or tools now and we stopped noticing it ... And then someone makes a small mistake and you get a "Samsung Note 7 explodes randomly" because of a margin of error small than what our brain can easily comprehend.
(I did a couple months of industrial engineering in university and while it wasn't for me, I loved what I learned about the field)
A lot of times it's cheaper to just full send it than produce a full run at a given quality with a low rejection rate.
The "old" way of making a black fan is you just QC check them, send the good ones to Noctua, send the crappy ones to someone who DGAF because they're putting them some sort of industrial appliance that needs airflow through the box.
Everyone "wins" this way because Noctua gets their fan to spec cheaper and the people building plasma cutters or control units for chemical washers or ATMs get a fan that's "fundamentally good" if sloppily executed and the manufacturer gets less waste. Ain't no different than how the pork belly that doesn't become your bacon becomes dog food and die lubricant.
I suspect this is where a lot of the "X compatible" power tool stuff on Amazon comes from. That and/or the repurposing of "worn out" dies.
This seems to be AI written, or co-written, hard to tell though. It seems AI is converging on a more terse information dense style that is closer to my own, which is good but I do worry that it’ll make my writing look like AIs.
I did predict as much, I figured it would occur as a side effect of improved information density. As the models got smarter they would have more useful pints to make. On one hand it feels validating, on the other hand I am a bit worried that my written work will look like AI. While I would consider it no longer slop I do worry about a loss of relative advantage.
I love Noctua, and just wish they'd branch out from PCs and build more types of fans. Our lives are filled with so much irritating noise from noisy fans. Air conditioners, kitchen extractors, hair dryers, box fans, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners, leaf blowers, car climate control & radiator fans, just to name a few. I'd happily pay a premium for quieter things.
I don't own a (stationary) PC, but I have bought Noctua for other projects due to them having good reviews. Was surprisingly hard to find good fans for my usecase, that wasn't industrial (pricey). And PC fans are easy to control.
I'm just expecting a reduction in volume, vibration, and unpleasant resonance.
In any of these categories you can already find some machines are quieter than others despite comparable air flows. So its definitely possible to reduce noise through clever engineering and precision manufacturing.
> which is easy, and more like changing the colour of a carbon-fibre Formula 1 part, which requires re-calculating the weight, strength and aerodynamics.
Seems like a bit overstated for a CPU fan but I might be wrong
> we have implemented a tip clearance of only 0.5mm (120mm models) or 0.7mm (140mm models) in order to minimise leak flows through the gap between impeller and frame.
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce
For folks thinking about Lego tolerances [1] that are an order of magnitude tighter at 10 microns or 0.01 mm, it turns out that the largest Lego moving parts are a turntable at 50mm or so, and rotate at an rpm an order of magnitude slower (100 or so rpm vs 1200 rpm), so these tight clearances (not tolerances [2]) are quite tricky to achieve, and more importantly, maintain over the life of the product, apparently.
So if I've got the right idea, the clearances harder to achieve for a fan vs a lego piece because you're not just concerned with the static tolerances of the shape of the fan, but also the dynamic forces that will make the blades flex and bend under load.
Clearance in this case is how far away the blades have to be at rest, such that the dynamic forces the blades experience under load won't flex them outwards to the point they scrape against the enclosure. Which I'd assume has far more to do with material properties than it does the raw geometry of the blade.
Now I wish I had a high-speed camera to be able to inspect the dynamic deformation of a noctua fan. I'm curious about how rigidly they behave under load.
The plastic will also shrink and grow depending on its temperature (yes this will have a significant impact over the normal temperature range of the inside of a computer).
Yeah, everything being black on modern motherboards might look cool with RGB lighting, but makes it harder to work on. I like the older green PCBs with white PCI slots.
I also lament the demise of color coded connectors at the back. I knew to plug my speakers into the green 3.5mm jack. Now everything is black, so I need to look at the manual again to see which of the 5 connectors is the right one.
I remember being a kid when standardized port colors came 'round (what was that, part of the AC'97 spec or something?). I thought that was dumb: I knew that the speakers plugged into the third hole from the top, and that was good enough for me. ;)
Back then: I would have loved black-on-black, labelled-in-black, with black cables and and black highlights on a black background. The accessories would be black, too: Black keyboard, black featureless keycaps, black mouse, with a black mousepad, on a black desk, in a black room with black walls and black windows.
Black.
I couldn't get black back then, of course. Computers were beige. The necessary floppy and optical drives were beige. Cables were beige. Keyboards were beige. Motherboards were some moral equivalent to beige. It might be possible to get one or two components in black at some points, but the rest were going to be beige so therefore the whole thing might as well just be resolutely beige.
That really annoyed me.
But I'm not a kid anymore; I'm old. I just want stuff that works well, and that is expandable enough to do some fun and unusual computing stuff with, and that I can see so that when I'm futzing around with it then my job is easier than it would otherwise be.
I don't want RGB or a tempered glass aquarium that shatters when part of it touches a tile floor the wrong way. I don't care about having multiple choices for the color of the anodizing on the heatsinks for the RAM. I don't want water cooling when a big slow-moving fan and some heat pipes does the job very quietly, with improved simplicity therefore longevity. I'm not trying to win a cooling benchmark; I'm just trying to keep the CPU within its specified thermal range while it does work for long periods at its maximum speed. I don't care what color the fans are as long as I can't hear them.
If I want to play with RGB by making or buying some party lights, then I know how to do that. Party lights for the room (or the whole house!), not the guts of the PC. :)
Otherwise: The computer is on the floor under the desk and the USB hub is on top of the desk, and that's all I need to deal with. It is purposeful and functional. There's no style points here, but I just don't care about that anymore.
(I'll be outside yelling at clouds if anyone needs me for anything.)
Agreed. My computing philosophy: If you aren't looking at the display, you're computing wrong.
I have a black case (some 10+ year old Fractal Design model) and an all black keyboard with no labels. Back in the pandemic, I was fortunate enough to score a videocard that happens to be light up RGB unicorn poop. I hate that part about it, so that helps remind me to keep the side panel of the case on. (I could, but I'd rather not disassemble it to unplug the LEDs.)
Maybe progress in terms of pure GHz measures or similar, but new and better CPUs are still being released, even outside of Apple. The CPU I'm on right now (AMD) was released in Q3 2025, and almost every CPU released today offers better value for the money than the previous generations.
This colour combo is more 1970s than 80s. 80s was more gaudy neon and transparent stuff. The 70s loved their murky browns. OK PC boxes of the 80s and 90s were all beige too but they didn't have any brown. It also fit in with manufacturing in those days: In the 70s a lot of wood was still used, whereas in the 80s everything shifted to plastics.
But whether you love or hate (as I do) the brown Noctua colours, the one thing is that they are kinda polarising. They're not a "clean fit" in any build unless you really wanna show that you use Noctua and use them as a centrepiece. Which I guess is the point of their marketing. They want to make it seem their fans are so good people are willing to put up with the colour.
I love Noctua fans and I don't care about their colour. For all I cared they could be pink as long as they are best in class on noise and reliability.
They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible. The point of a computer to me is to be powerful while being as discrete about it as it can be (i.e. quiet and no blinking rgb lights). I don't have a glass side panel, I run an older Fractal case with aluminum sides with sound dampening instead.
I never understood "form over function", but each to their own.
> They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible.
Speak for yourself :) My computer is pretty open, the fans are visible through the front and through the side panel.
I don't run RGB either though but I do like to style it.
And of course the "form over function" is part of that market niche that really pays a lot for something like a fan. Noctua aren't that special, as others have mentioned there are much cheaper brands with the same performance including sound level. You do pay a lot for just the branding.
Every other brans of fans I have used (which to be fair is far from all of them) have only lasted 3 maybe 4 years before they started making more noise than when new. They weren't completely broken, but any increase in noise is unacceptable to me. I live in an old quiet house, there is no noise from forced ventilation but because it doesn't have that. There is no city noise. On a still day in the winter with no wind or birdsong it can be extremely quiet.
I have some Noctua fans still going strong after a decade. Are there other brands that can also do that? Probably, I have some BeQuiet fans now too in a tower CPU cooler (couldn't get hold of a Noctua cooler during the pandemic), it will be interesting to see what happens in another 6 years or so with them.
And no, I don't change my computer every 3 years or so any more, so longevity does matter to me.
>Semple developed a pigment called the "pinkest pink" and specifically made it available to everyone except Anish Kapoor and anyone affiliated with him
Funny how the world works. People once bought cheap children’s play carpets and cut them up as car mats out of poverty. Now people pay €75 to get that same look.
I've had mine for about two weeks and I love it. It's absolutely massive inside, like a tardis. It drives like a magic carpet and it's got more than enough power for it's size. It's replacing a 2019 Hyundai Kona EV, and the ride quality and comfort is night and day. It's got a very tight turning circle so it's surprisingly nimble in tight spaces.
I have not really had the chance to properly test range, but it's not going to be amazing. It's reporting about 6.1km/kWh average at the moment, with about 50% motorway driving not really exceeding 110km/h. I'd expect no more than 350km. I rarely drive it 100%-0%, so real world (80-20) is probably 300km max. I might be underestimating the range if I do some math though! I live in Ireland, so that is an absolute massive amount of range for roadtrips. My Kona did about 6.5-7.5 depending on the season.
If you have a family, even a small one, then I reckon this is a no brainer. The price is ridiculous, and in my books it beats out an SUV in almost every category except maybe offroading.
Noctua is one of few companies that has not broken my trust (yet). They promise me a really good fan, they're ten toes in on the promise and they have yet to fail to deliver.
My fan broke after five? years of near 24/7 use. Customer support was very easy to reach. They sent me a new one after I sent some serial numbers as proof. They asked me then to break off a blade, and a picture of it so I didn't have to sent it back.
Well, if it can still be repaired but the producer doesn't want to bother and just sends a new fan, that's fine. That doesn't mean a repairable product should be destroyed and sent to a landfill just because it makes Noctua's logistics easier.
The point is, if the owner thinks it can be repaired, they shouldn’t call for a replacement in the first place. And indeed they wouldn’t get one, because they wouldn’t break the blade. So it’s completely under control of the owner.
Don't Noctua fans generally go in builds made by people who like silence?
In which case they'd have silent cases with no glass panes, because those are thinner and a possible source of vibration. They may even glue (opaque) sound absorbing material to the inside of their cases.
In which case, who cares what colour the fans are?
I built a PC this year in a Meshroom S V2[1]. The NF-A14x25 G2 fans I used for the AIO didn't seem so expensive when I was spending $600 on RAM, and I was happy that they were available in black.
Not every quiet PC is built in a dense box. Good airflow with big, slow fans is working for me to cool a 9800X3D and a 5070 Ti quietly under load.
I use Noctua for the silence but I also literally don't have any of the panels attached to my case. The main panel doesn't even fit because the DH-15[1] would stick out.
My DH-15 isn't particularly silent because the fans are silent but it's so effecient that the fans barely need to spin.
I'm firmly in the I-want-a-quiet-case-which-sits-under-a-desk-so-I-can't-see-through-the-panes-anyway camp, but I sometimes wondered if glass wouldn't actually be better, since those models appear to be heavier than their opaque brethren. So I'd expect them to vibrate less, etc.
I really miss that they don't release white versions. In my all-white case I just can't have Noctua. The brown ones I think are extremely ugly and the black ones stand out too much.
White doesn't really look bad in any case (except perhaps a full black one). The brown is very identifiable but that's only really a point if you desire to flaunt your expensive fans. Because it will stand out too much in almost any build. I honestly don't care about that, and for a fan this price I shouldn't have to put up with hidden advertising.
But I have BeQuiet Silent Wings and they're not bad. Quietness isn't something I'm optimising for anyway as I only use my desktop for gaming and when I do I wear headphones anyway. I do want to optimise more for pressure (as I have air filters) but these fans are no worse than Noctua.
I usually look at the monitor, not the case under the desk. ;)
That said, I don't want RGB bleed, nor do i want a case where I see the insides. The computer is there to be powerful and discreet (both when it comes to noise and looks).
But sure, you could skip the walnut. I think Noctua should also go well with lighter woods. Oak perhaps but probably not all the way to birch.
We don't know what Noctua's tolerance is. The clearance in this case has to account for the flexing that will inevitably happen as the fan spins around in an environment than can easily see 50C temperatures. ABS (what Lego uses) begins softening at around 40C, which will increase how much it's deforming at 1500-2500 RPM.
This level of quality is why they have my business. We had a CI setup with rpi boards that needed fans (uart clock tied to cpu clock so heat meant slowing down and the uart dropped characters). I got tired of seeing random test failures on some board and driving up to the office to replace the fan that had failed. And they were loud and annoying. I ended up frustrated and expensing hundreds of dollars of noctua fans. Dead quiet, did a better job, and not even one ever failed on me.
A quiet PC is one reason I've always removed the GPU cards from used ones I've gotten. The crappy little fans on GPUs that constantly whir up and down drives me nuts.
When my GPU fans went bad and I didn't want to buy a new GPU (nothing wrong with my 1070, it still runs the games I care about) I bought some smaller noctua fans and 3D printed an adapter plate (in PETG). The connectors were non-standard, but the signals weren't, so I had to splice together some cables with soldering and heatshrink tubes.
Functional premium product at premium price. Cheaper mid-class does the job most of the way. But I suppose there is slightly better characteristics and probably higher reliability in design. Not a fake luxury like too many products these days.
I suppose we should be somewhat positive that some company still aims to deliver best possible products. Not just products with cheapest possible cost and some perceived luxury if even that.
You must not be familiar with the iPPC 3000's. A single 120mm fan moves more air than the exhaust fan in your bathroom. The 140mm encroaches on kitchen fan territory (158cfm). At static pressures slightly higher than what either of those typically has, 24/7, for years.
They're not toys. If you stick your finger into one of these it does not peacefully come to a halt, the tip of your finger gets buzzsawed off and then it stops about halfway through your fingernail.
I used to really like Noctua fans, for a while they were obviously the best fans by a significant margin.
But for all their tight tolerances and exotic materials and a high price to match, they generally don't outperform BeQuiet's more regular materials but use-focused fans that are half the price. Nor are they significantly better than Arctic's general purpose fans at a quarter the price.
It'd make more sense to just buy the fan optimized for the specific common purpose (airflow or radiator) than pay double for the Noctua for a more generalized fan, but is not the best at either common use case.
Seems like these days their target audience is those who believe their marketing materials about them being the best, instead of believing the benchmark performance data.
I have used Noctua fans in computers where they worked for a decade or so, even 24x7, until an upgrade or replacement of the computer was required by other reasons than because of the fans.
I have also had many problems caused by cheaper fans.
So now I always prefer to use rather expensive fans and power supplies, from brands with which I have accumulated many years of experience, for peace of mind.
Perhaps other brands of fans that nowadays give similar results in benchmarks also have similar reliability, but I am not willing to bet on it.
If we're going by anecdotes, my last Noctuas showing signs of failure (I had 6 of them, one was ~200rpm slower than it should be, one took a several seconds longer to start spinning from a stop) about a year after the end of warranty was partially why I retired them. Same with the set of Noctuas before them (apparently my first set was from 2010). I suppose they all technically still spun so they were still usable, just not to original performance; still, hard to be too upset about the product making it through the long warranty period without issue.
But my Arctics that was installed in the same case that ran for the same amount of time are still chugging along strong, and those are about as cheap as fans get. Different load/use case though so it's probably not a fair comparison.
These days, I really think the competition has caught up or passed Noctua.
2×? Try 5× for the Noctua NF-A12x25 compared the the Arctic P12 Pro that matches or beats it in most metrics. Which isn't to say the Noctua fan is bad, it's just a luxury product for reasons other than performance.
2x more than other premium offerings that often perform noticeably better, which I'd say are usually from BeQuiet, LianLi, and Phanteks.
But yes, sometimes up to 5x more than the comparative Arctic in common size categories where it basically trades blows for most metrics that matter. Arctic is seriously unbeatable in value:performance if you just need a basic fan without other QoL or aesthetic features.
120mm is the most competitive category, and it's the most obvious category how Noctua can't keep up with the faster iterating/innovating competition.
Disclaimer: I read HWCooling like everyone serious about the subject. These reviews aren't everything, the appalling QC that results in resonances or coil whine lottery isn't mentioned.
In general, yes, Noctua is overpriced and Arctic is an incredible value, but when you want to optimize your silence/performance ratio, it's still Noctua, BeQuiet or (sometimes) Thermalright.
To be fair, half a millimeter isn’t even that much precision, generally speaking. You wouldn’t be anywhere close to manufacturing a working ball pen at that precision. Or even an acceptable keyboard, if we stay with plastic. With fans blades, the difficulty is probably the precision relative to the fan diameter.
Thermalright etc. have definitely shown that a slab of metal and some generic fans can be rather quiet and easily compete with Noctua at a fraction of the cost.
It's par for the course in the premium PC parts industry. It's overkill in a way that does not impact performance at all because gamers will pay for that.
I do not play often on my PCs. I just like well engineered devices and do have more than enough money to buy a more expensive fan every five years or so. I like the item, it works well, is silent, I’m satisfied ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Noctua fans are still the top #1 performers in the world. You can argue that it's diminishing returns and you can get a fan with 90% of the performance for 50% of the money, but that doesn't change Noctua's position at the top.
Last I checked they weren't really any quieter than their competitors at the same airflow and pressure (which is a little subjective because your curve will never match perfectly). They do have a really low number on their specs because they have a really low max RPM, but that's not really relevant when you can just lower the speed of other fans.
They're still really good fans, but a lot of this is just marketing.
At max power the Noctua NF-A12x25 has 56 CFM and 2.3 mmAq for 31dBA [1]. At 70% the Artic A12 Pro is 56 CFM, 4.3 mmAq, and 31dBA [2]. At 60% the Asus ProArt PF120 is 61 CFM, 2.6 mmAq, and 30 dBA [3].
Note that the ProArt is a bit thicker (25 vs 30 mm) and all these dBA numbers are almost certainly unobstructed airflow. The Noctua is certainly good, but it's literally over 5× the price of the Artic.
On the other hand, if I recall right the internet is rife with customer reports of the Arctic fans having noose spikes / unpleasant hums or resonances at certain RPMs. Lots of people using config tuning to avoid it.
I ended up buying Pure Wings as mentioned. Also much cheaper than Noctua and seemingly not having those issues.
It's funny because I replaced my NF-A14 and NF-F12 because they had hums at certain rpms when used on radiators, and neither the Arctics before them, nor the BeQuiets that replaced them, had that issue.
Noctua is working at the last five percentages of performance AND lifespan. They want their fans to perform (and sound) identical ten years later with daily use.
Most people change fans far earlier than that.
Indeed, the main reason why I choose Noctua fans from those that are silent enough and efficient enough is because I trust their reliability.
I still have computers from 2017, with Kaby Lake CPUs, which have been used as servers and in which the Noctua fans work as well as in the first day. Prior to that I had some computers with Noctua fans that had been used for more than a decade without fan problems, and which were upgraded or replaced for reasons unrelated to fans.
Thus the good experience that I had with the reliability of Noctua fans, coupled with some bad experiences with cheaper fans, which had to be replaced prematurely, make me reluctant to experiment now with other brands, which might have the same performance when new, but I could learn about their reliability only after a few years.
This is a really nice write up. The reason itself — why the delay — is totally within my own speculation, but the sheer quality of the writing dragged me through the whole article. That is something.
I think this shows how Noctua value their customers, including myself. I really love how they are nice to their customers — both their products and services — especially because experience like this is getting more and more scarce. I really appreciate their work.
Explains why LEGO had a leg up for multiple years. You can’t just change the color pigments and hope the parts fit in the same way. Of course these times are over and other brick manufacturers caught up or overtook Lego.
I recently built a home server and used Noctua fans for the first time. I absolutely love how quiet they are. If I didn't know the room had my server in it and was running, I wouldn't even notice the very quiet sound of the fans.
I am running them at about 800rpm and the CPU is usually between 33~37 degrees.
When I rebuild my main PC, I will surely go with them again.
Branding, you're never in doubt when some YouTuber is building a PC using Noctua fans. There's probably some weird psychology in the colour as well. Why would anyone want a fan in such an ugly colour, unless it's really good. The weird beige and brown is highly recognizable, and even if you already don't know about Noctua you're likely to ask questions about the fan solely based on the colour.
The black fans are really only needed by those who build show piece in those cases with glass panels, but they might equally well need white fans, which Noctua doesn't make. Personally I don't really care about the colour of my fans, you can't see them anyway.
They are enthusiast targeted brand and majority of enthusiast (heck even entry level cases) have windows in it.
Enthusiasts care about the details - airflow, cable management and of course aesthetics. Noctua doesn't. I respect their engineering/no bullshit approach, the price bump is worth it but they lost my money on multiple builds by sticking to their 'brand color'.
They're the Soylent of the fan world - everything you need but spark zero joy.
I'd be interested in seeing sales figures for same fans in their brand and other colors.
Noctua fans have a distinct look, you could say the same about black, if you want to black them out just get a case that hides them since that would look the same.
I think tips are one of the more crucial parts of a blade, so if you care about how that blade works you probably don't want the shape to deviate there.
This is answered in the first paragraph of the article. Painting requires re-calculating the weight, strength and aerodynamics. Paint does not weigh zero, it changes the flexibility of the plastic, and the texture which changes flow.
But the article didn't give any ballpark numbers, so the interesting bit is missing, and we still know basically nothing.
It can very well be like the snake oil which makes you feel better maybe for the three seconds after you bought it. Or those gold plated audio jacks which are 0.0001% improvement in quality.
Hi there! I want to talk to you about ducts. Do your ducts seem old-fashioned, out of date? Central Services' new duct designs are now available in hundreds of different colours, to suit your individual taste. Hurry now, while stocks last, to your nearest Central Services showroom! Designer colours to suit your demanding taste.
Well as someone who does buy PC fans, let me tell you that Noctua is clearly superior. It may be just a plastic fan with some bearings, but it doesn't seem to be easily replicable because nobody has managed to do it.
And it’s quieter than many of its counterparts from other vendors. And it actually doesn’t cost that much - more expensive than cheap-o versions for sure, but then again significantly quieter, that’s their whole premise.
The devil is in the details. Noise, static pressure efficiency, reliability, bearing quality, motor quality. Yes, there's a huge brand premium too. For critical uses, using a crap fan is an absolutely stupid decision especially where damage or malfunction is likely.
In zie olden PC days™, there weren't many options for quality fans except maybe whatever random fans Delta made that generally weren't optimized for low noise or low power consumption. Ancient, no name sleeve bearing fans would almost always go out within 1-2 years at 24/7 100% duty cycle.
I always expected that black was the easiest color, since you just add enough pigment to wipe out any colors from other materials. Are they implying that that brown color is the natural look of the materials they used, so the simplest to engineer?
From what I understood, any color and material involved in high precision manufacturing requires careful design and thorough testing. They likely prioritize the brown color and material due to branding, so changing this to anything else requires redoing large parts of the pipeline.
You have to redo injection moulds anyway as they have a limited life. And you can do a lot with materials too, some materials simply shrink more than others as they cool down.
Where do you draw the line though? They have an amazing reputation for quality fan products, they clearly feel it needs a new injection mould which aren't cheap investments.
I've got a Noctua NHD14 in my current build that I bought in 2011 and it performs perfectly still (including 2 free socket upgrades from Noctua).
When the additional engineering adds no extra end user value. e.g. You need the blades to be strong enough to not shatter or flex, but beyond some level of strength it adds no additional utility
> engineer it beyond what the consumers use case requires
This mindset I think is why companies tend to favor releasing slightly broken and shit stuff, instead of waiting until they feel like they made something the best it could.
While I don't think they do, I think this is a valid thing to ponder and I'm sorry it's getting downvoted.
Generally, I think it's not overengineering that's the issue, it's how the consumer need for that particular level of quality/performance is marketed to the wrong audience. Cars are the classic example. Most people who drive a car that was precision engineered for speed or offroading capability rarely if ever need that functionality.
That said, in a world of consumer good racing to the bottom and physical enshittification, I'll generally pick the item that's obviously well designed, even if beyond the capabilities I need. The alternative is often a slew of indistinguishable crap.
I'm glad companies like Noctua exist that put so much thought and care into their products. I don't even mind being advertisted to when that's the case.
One of the first things mentioned on that page is:
> To protect our intellectual property, certain features – such as fan impeller geometries – have been slightly modified while remaining visually very close to the actual product.
So you do have to 3d scan them yourself if you're trying to print a copy.
Depending on what printers you have available I'll put in the work to get you a ~0.02mm deviation scan of a blade off a 120mm noctua fan I broke. I expect it to under-perform notably due to the surface texture and the lack of rigidity under load causing contact with the shroud walls at high RPMs, but I wouldn't bet my lunch on it, would be fun to find out.
Somewhat unrelated anecdotal praise of Noctua: due to various life factors, I hadn't built a PC since maybe 2010 or thereabouts - something I did relatively often before then and had quite a bit of experience with. Then a few months ago I finally did it again. Forgetting about the absurdity of the RAM situation, I gotta say my biggest surprise was cooling. I wanted a quiet media center machine. The internet and friends kept recommending Noctua. While researching, I got a bit of a cult vibe, and their prices seemed a bit stiff. But I went for it, with some hesitation.
Goddamn was I wrong! Their CPU coolers are the most well-designed, thoughtfully planned, amazingly performing consumer product I've seen in a while. 10/10, highly recommend! I'll use them for all PC cooling needs going forward.
I agree! For case fans there are cheaper, good enough alternatives for most use cases, but their coolers definitely are worth the premium. The design, manuals and specifications online are just so good compared to competitors, plus they give away free upgrade kits when new CPU sockets come available, so you could probably use same cooler for decades as you upgrade the system.
This is content marketing executed perfectly :) Reading it, I learned something new and interesting and they had an opportunity to show off one of their differentiators against the competition (low leakage flow due to tighter tolerances) and then at the end they casually mention the new product that has just opened for pre-orders.
I enjoyed reading it. Informative and showing of their processes and giving some intricate details. And yes, the end goal is to sell products which is fine by me. I take this over any generic non-saying marketing-blurb any time.
If all advertising was this interesting maybe I wouldn't hate it
Seems a little revealing that they tout the clearance and not the difference in efficiency.
Noctua’s fans are known for their class-leading efficiency, with a few exceptions.
The people demanding black versions of their fans for their color matched builds already know they’re the best fans in their class.
Fan tip clearance is the main driver of fan efficiency at the price bracket this fan is competing at
Okay. Seems like low noise is another big customer draw. So what's the difference for those measures between this difficult to manufacture fan and one with clearances that are easier to manufacture? If either is particularly significant, it's quite a bit more interesting than the measurement of the clearance.
[delayed]
Does it? Not everything is a sign of deception.
Even if it is the case, and not simple an omission to focus the narrative, does it matter? Case fans pull what 4 watts? 5 watts? Who cares if it pulls 200 milliwatts more than a competitor when it's cooling a GPU and CPU that consume more than a hundred times what it can consume
>Case fans pull what 4 watts? 5 watts?
That's really high. Like usually they are 100-150mA (so sub 2W) Lots of controllers would be 1A max.
The tolerances are for noise mostly. I'd consider the noise (and longevity) the single most important part of fans (else most fans can spin close to 3k rpm and cool)
Very high. A Mac mini averages about 6w all up. Though with that fan it would sure run cool.
A mac mini uses a lot more than 6w under load. 2024 M4 base mac mini has a rated max of 65W[1] and the M4 more than doubles that number to 140w
1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253
The question is not about saving milliwatts-hours on your electricity bill, it is about where these milliwatts are going.
One is heat, heat is not great, it puts more stress on components, mechanical and electrical, reducing longevity.
Another, maybe more important is noise. The power that goes into making noise is power that is wasted, noise is inefficiency, and reducing noise is an efficiency problem.
The specific fan in question has a rated max power draw of 1.8 W. In actual deployments it's going to be a lot less since ~nobody is running a noctua fan at 100% speed unconditionally
"In actual deployments it's going to be a lot less since ~nobody is running a noctua fan at 100% speed unconditionally"
I run dual 36w Delta fans at 100% in my computer case. I use the outflow as positive pressure forced exhaust for my enclosed CO2 laser, which itself has an ultra-weak venting fan.
It isn't that loud. A simple no box does the trick.
Yeah, but those aren't noctua fans. Noctua's claim to fame is being lower noise, not moving the most air. I'm sure somebody is buying a premium low noise-focused fan and then pinning it to max, but that's definitely not going to be typical.
Tighter tolerance isn't universally a good thing. It might make the fan more susceptible to damage due to mishandling or dust. They might be selling a fan that has a shorter useful life for no real benefit.
As a physicist, it's not at all clear to me that tighter tolerances would lead to higher efficiency or less noise. I assume it shakes out in the CFD simulations, but I would be curious to know the explanation.
I thought the primary gain in efficiency came from the large blades, with the blade shape the next most important factor. Gaps between the blade and housing feels like a single-digit percent effect.
I take it you've never dealt with Noctua for warranty issues (or any issues).
They go above and beyond.
Case fans pull what 4 watts? 5 watts? Who cares if it pulls 200 milliwatts more than a competitor when it's cooling a GPU and CPU that consume more than a hundred times what it can consume
Yes, exactly. The high precision is marketing, not something needed in the product.
My understanding is that the precision is supposed to help with noise. Less turbulence, etc.
FWIW, in my setup (10th gen i5, RTX 5070 Ti in an old Define R3 case), the 12 cm Noctua G2 fans run quieter and have a much less obnoxious noise than the old P/F series, which wipe the floor with the Arctic fan I bought for a computer that lives in the basement and sounds like it's about to take off.
A 5 pack of arctic pwm fans was 25€. I was considering noctua but the G2 fans were always delayed. But I doubt I would have paid 150-200€ for 5 fans.
They do have the most insane pricing. I could see myself buying some in the 15€ range but not 35€.
You lead me to believe that they are targeting a niche "audiophile" market and probably not a commercial market. The concern in the commercial market would be energy savings vs. capital expenditure. Some commercial spaces actually introduce white noise into spaces to increase occupant density.
They target people that want quiet/silent cases, obviously not commerical, unless you're going after the long life/warranty service. Or you go for their industrial line.
They are targeting people who want nearly-silent fans for computing devices and will pay considerably higher than average prices for them. I have several of them, and they are vastly quieter than the competition. Wouldn't be worth it in a commercial space, but I want my house to be quiet.
In my experience fans from manufacturers like Arctic can be almost as quiet similar Noctua, but cost 50% less. The difference definitely isn't vast for most models, although admittedly there's more QC issues and variation than with Noctua.
A lot of Noctua sales come from their brand value. People put Noctua fans into their gaming PC's, use headphones while gaming on them, and then turn off the PC. You don't really need the most silent fan for that, but people buy them anyway for the looks & premium quality.
I do love Noctua's coolers though, I appreciate the well thought design, manuals and free upgrade kits when you upgrade your system to a new socket type. But for case fans I'll jut buy Arctic and save money, except for things like server systems that run 24/7 in my bedroom where noise and durability are top priority.
Audiophile products are a known scam.
This is an enthusiast product, as evidenced by the premise that you care about color-coordinating the inside of your computer.
I'd love more white, personally. I also don't understand the obsession with black. For me, black objects are very difficult to observe in detail, and that irks me.
I imagine a white PC fan would look terrible if not cleaned daily or used in a room with very filtered air.
All white builds are common. There are a lot of white GPUs, motherboards, RAM, cases, and fans.
If you need daily dust cleaning you should invest in a room air filter.
Well, I have a bunch of lower-end black fans, some of them quite old, from before transparent cases were a thing. They're actually pretty much gray if I don't wipe them off.
Noctua's signature... brown-orange? Whatever that color is, it has the same issue. The blades are basically gray if I don't wipe them.
Haven't seen anybody start a gray craze, though. Though I have a grayish motorbike that also shows dust and dirt like nobody's business (it's a bike I use strictly on paved roads).
Silver is the ideal color for hiding dirt. I had a silver car once. Unless you drove it down a dirt road during a rainstorm, you basically never had to wash it.
They never did catch you riding dirty.
I don't know why someone downvoted you. For an offtopic joke, this one is pretty good.
I found that having a positive pressure setup with an intake filter practically eliminated the dust buildup on my fans.
If it were about performance and not marketing, they'd try to optimize for resistance to dust adhesion and resource consumption: energy, cost, durability, etc.
I have them. They get dusty at about the same rate as a pure black fan (which also shows gray/brown dust quite easily). I need to clean mine about every 6-9 months to keep them looking good enough to "show off". I generally run a Winix HEPA filter in each room of my apartment.
I don't think matte white is worse than matte black in terms of showing dust. They both do.
I suspect there's a reason brown is Noctua's signature color.
Black cars show road dust immediately. White cars don't. I image it's similar for computer fans
Dust can actually be more visible on black than on white.
Totally. I used to favor black a long time ago when most computers were still gray and the idea of having everything in black was really cool, but since realizing that details and controls are harder to discern on black, I’m all in on white and silver. It’s also less prone to showing fingerprints.
Have we solved the yellowing? I guess many of us have memories of old and ugly yellow computers.
TIL: Generally all plastics exposed to UV start to photodegrade. If you google why old computers turn particularly yellow most sources point to bromine-based flame retardant agents in the plastic, but some people make a convincing case[1] that ABS just naturally turns yellow in UV light.
Not much real research into that topic, interestingly.
[1] https://medium.com/@pueojit/a-look-into-the-yellowing-and-de...
Not sure why all the fire retardants are needed. Besides, steel probably retards fire more effectively than most fire retarded resins and is probably far more recyclable.
Yeah it's more marketing than anything IMO.
Not all marketing is bad. Many of the beloved cartoons from decades ago were meant as marketing materials for toys and various kid items (i.e. lunch boxes). It doesn't mean it's automatically soulless.
In this case, I finally understand why they chose their most iconic colors, and appreciate the time they take on precision engineering.
Wondering if it's just the marketing that Noctua did, and the actual mold and process engineering left to some fab in China?
With Noctua I highly doubt that is the case given their track record for quality overall and all other information available around their design and engineering process. As far as I know based on all the information I have seen all the design and engineering is done in Austria. They also have a track record of only releasing things once they are satisfied something performs within their standards. Something that would be next to impossible when solely relying on external fabs and process engineering.
They also utilize different manufactures afaik (historically Taiwan, but also China these days) meaning they need to have pretty solid in house knowledge and expertise to make sure different factories produces similar results. When they first started utilizing Chinese factories people noticed visual differences and were worried about that. But Noctua at the time claimed that they made sure that performance was still the same. A claim that was put to the test by various review outlets at the time (I want to say gamer nexus did a big piece about it?) and confirmed to be true.
Having said that, if you do utilize external factories you automatically are making use of their process engineering to some degree as well. But, and this is difficult for many people to understand, that isn't a binary thing either. You can entirely rely on the factory to basically do everything for you and just send feedback on iterations but you can also work closely with them and actually get involved in the process itself.
Yep, if you're a big enough source of income for the factory you can basically do whatever you want, up to and including stationing your employees in their factory year round.
I enjoyed reading this. As others have said, it's both interesting and good marketing communication.
I'm a dev and for the last year I've been working for a company that manufactures pretty complex and advanced machines. I work with proper engineers - electronic, electrical, control, mechanical - and actual scientists. One of the things I've come to appreciate from this is the hidden depts of detail and complexity in so many aspects of the objects that surround us. People work hard on small details that hide in the background but are vital to making things work. And there's often code in everything, all the way down.
And now I can add plastic injection moulding to that. The rabbit hole goes very deep.
Edit to add:
My dad worked forty-plus years as an engineering pattern maker. He made, by hand, the high-tolerance wooden "negatives" that were used to form moulds made from sand and resin. The moulds were used to cast parts for industrial valves: molten brass and gunmetal was poured into them, in a foundry, and left to cool. I think he would have deeply appreciated what this article was saying about craft and engineering and patience.
When it comes to industrial manufacturing, a think of lot of people are not realizing (by lack of education on the matter in general knowledge or schooling) the difference between levels of manufacturing, the precision required for some things, and how the hard part is having the full chain (making the tool that can make the tool that can make the tool that ...) because you can't jump from nothing to milimeter precision.
Also known as "why did China who already owned world manufacturing insisted and struggled on making ballpoint pen until 2017", "why are car manufacturers not making random cheap cars that have the curbs of beloved sports cars", "why are barely 5-6 countries able to make decent jet engines" and all that.
Manufacturing is hard. It's built upon layers and layers of deep knowledge and abilities. And when don't have it or you lose it, just knowing how to make the last layer is not enough, you need to rebuild the entire stack.
Which in this case becomes "painting something black is easy, making a fan black is easy, making a high quality high precision fan black from the starting point of the same fan in another color is an industrial challenge".
We are so used to high quality high precision manufacturing, we have a bazillion factories pumping out millions of very high tech things for random usages or tools now and we stopped noticing it ... And then someone makes a small mistake and you get a "Samsung Note 7 explodes randomly" because of a margin of error small than what our brain can easily comprehend.
(I did a couple months of industrial engineering in university and while it wasn't for me, I loved what I learned about the field)
This analysis is missing price though.
A lot of times it's cheaper to just full send it than produce a full run at a given quality with a low rejection rate.
The "old" way of making a black fan is you just QC check them, send the good ones to Noctua, send the crappy ones to someone who DGAF because they're putting them some sort of industrial appliance that needs airflow through the box.
Everyone "wins" this way because Noctua gets their fan to spec cheaper and the people building plasma cutters or control units for chemical washers or ATMs get a fan that's "fundamentally good" if sloppily executed and the manufacturer gets less waste. Ain't no different than how the pork belly that doesn't become your bacon becomes dog food and die lubricant.
I suspect this is where a lot of the "X compatible" power tool stuff on Amazon comes from. That and/or the repurposing of "worn out" dies.
This seems to be AI written, or co-written, hard to tell though. It seems AI is converging on a more terse information dense style that is closer to my own, which is good but I do worry that it’ll make my writing look like AIs.
"AI style" is an artifact of certain writing styles being overrepresented in training data. I expect in the long run it will be impossible to distinguish AI writing reliably. https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
I did predict as much, I figured it would occur as a side effect of improved information density. As the models got smarter they would have more useful pints to make. On one hand it feels validating, on the other hand I am a bit worried that my written work will look like AI. While I would consider it no longer slop I do worry about a loss of relative advantage.
> This seems to be AI written, or co-written, hard to tell though.
I didn't get that at all. Calling out AI for the sake of it is the new virtue signal, unfortunately.
I don’t agree, it seems pretty normal.
I also don’t really like policing writing style when there aren’t any glaring errors.
I love Noctua, and just wish they'd branch out from PCs and build more types of fans. Our lives are filled with so much irritating noise from noisy fans. Air conditioners, kitchen extractors, hair dryers, box fans, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners, leaf blowers, car climate control & radiator fans, just to name a few. I'd happily pay a premium for quieter things.
I’m getting tired of the grayscale colors of the 2010’s too. I could use more brown and beige in my life.
https://a.co/d/0eRatANA
Have you tried Vornado’s alchemy line? I splurged on it due to similar feelings and have been quite pleased. I use the petit as a desk fan.
I don't own a (stationary) PC, but I have bought Noctua for other projects due to them having good reviews. Was surprisingly hard to find good fans for my usecase, that wasn't industrial (pricey). And PC fans are easy to control.
They do have industrial fan series
I'm not sure what you're expecting but it simply isn't possible to move the volumes of air those things utilize without making noise.
I would suggest taking that money and buying larger speakers
I'm just expecting a reduction in volume, vibration, and unpleasant resonance.
In any of these categories you can already find some machines are quieter than others despite comparable air flows. So its definitely possible to reduce noise through clever engineering and precision manufacturing.
I don’t think we need complete silence? Surely we can have something better?
> which is easy, and more like changing the colour of a carbon-fibre Formula 1 part, which requires re-calculating the weight, strength and aerodynamics.
Seems like a bit overstated for a CPU fan but I might be wrong
> we have implemented a tip clearance of only 0.5mm (120mm models) or 0.7mm (140mm models) in order to minimise leak flows through the gap between impeller and frame.
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce
For folks thinking about Lego tolerances [1] that are an order of magnitude tighter at 10 microns or 0.01 mm, it turns out that the largest Lego moving parts are a turntable at 50mm or so, and rotate at an rpm an order of magnitude slower (100 or so rpm vs 1200 rpm), so these tight clearances (not tolerances [2]) are quite tricky to achieve, and more importantly, maintain over the life of the product, apparently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego?#Design
[2] changed 'tolerances' to 'clearances' per note below
So if I've got the right idea, the clearances harder to achieve for a fan vs a lego piece because you're not just concerned with the static tolerances of the shape of the fan, but also the dynamic forces that will make the blades flex and bend under load.
Clearance in this case is how far away the blades have to be at rest, such that the dynamic forces the blades experience under load won't flex them outwards to the point they scrape against the enclosure. Which I'd assume has far more to do with material properties than it does the raw geometry of the blade.
Now I wish I had a high-speed camera to be able to inspect the dynamic deformation of a noctua fan. I'm curious about how rigidly they behave under load.
The plastic will also shrink and grow depending on its temperature (yes this will have a significant impact over the normal temperature range of the inside of a computer).
0.5mm is the clearance, not the tolerance. Tolerance must be significantly smaller than clearance.
yes, good point. fixed.
I like the brown ones. Everything is black, it's dumb, and I'm happy to have any contrast.
Yeah, everything being black on modern motherboards might look cool with RGB lighting, but makes it harder to work on. I like the older green PCBs with white PCI slots.
I also lament the demise of color coded connectors at the back. I knew to plug my speakers into the green 3.5mm jack. Now everything is black, so I need to look at the manual again to see which of the 5 connectors is the right one.
> everything being black on modern motherboards might look cool with RGB lighting
I always figured white would look better for RGB-lit computers. I don't know why white is so rare.
Commonly, white finishes don't age well. That's at least part of the historical reason.
So they can upsell you a white version for €30-€300 more. (Looking at you Sapphire.)
I remember being a kid when standardized port colors came 'round (what was that, part of the AC'97 spec or something?). I thought that was dumb: I knew that the speakers plugged into the third hole from the top, and that was good enough for me. ;)
Back then: I would have loved black-on-black, labelled-in-black, with black cables and and black highlights on a black background. The accessories would be black, too: Black keyboard, black featureless keycaps, black mouse, with a black mousepad, on a black desk, in a black room with black walls and black windows.
Black.
I couldn't get black back then, of course. Computers were beige. The necessary floppy and optical drives were beige. Cables were beige. Keyboards were beige. Motherboards were some moral equivalent to beige. It might be possible to get one or two components in black at some points, but the rest were going to be beige so therefore the whole thing might as well just be resolutely beige.
That really annoyed me.
But I'm not a kid anymore; I'm old. I just want stuff that works well, and that is expandable enough to do some fun and unusual computing stuff with, and that I can see so that when I'm futzing around with it then my job is easier than it would otherwise be.
I don't want RGB or a tempered glass aquarium that shatters when part of it touches a tile floor the wrong way. I don't care about having multiple choices for the color of the anodizing on the heatsinks for the RAM. I don't want water cooling when a big slow-moving fan and some heat pipes does the job very quietly, with improved simplicity therefore longevity. I'm not trying to win a cooling benchmark; I'm just trying to keep the CPU within its specified thermal range while it does work for long periods at its maximum speed. I don't care what color the fans are as long as I can't hear them.
If I want to play with RGB by making or buying some party lights, then I know how to do that. Party lights for the room (or the whole house!), not the guts of the PC. :)
Otherwise: The computer is on the floor under the desk and the USB hub is on top of the desk, and that's all I need to deal with. It is purposeful and functional. There's no style points here, but I just don't care about that anymore.
(I'll be outside yelling at clouds if anyone needs me for anything.)
Agreed. My computing philosophy: If you aren't looking at the display, you're computing wrong.
I have a black case (some 10+ year old Fractal Design model) and an all black keyboard with no labels. Back in the pandemic, I was fortunate enough to score a videocard that happens to be light up RGB unicorn poop. I hate that part about it, so that helps remind me to keep the side panel of the case on. (I could, but I'd rather not disassemble it to unplug the LEDs.)
Actual CPU progress stopped so it's become a color and light show.
Maybe progress in terms of pure GHz measures or similar, but new and better CPUs are still being released, even outside of Apple. The CPU I'm on right now (AMD) was released in Q3 2025, and almost every CPU released today offers better value for the money than the previous generations.
Me too. All my computers have Noctua fans and I don't care in the slightest that they're the same colour as my parents' sofa in the 1980s.
I have a couple of their screwdrivers too. I'm with with brown.
This colour combo is more 1970s than 80s. 80s was more gaudy neon and transparent stuff. The 70s loved their murky browns. OK PC boxes of the 80s and 90s were all beige too but they didn't have any brown. It also fit in with manufacturing in those days: In the 70s a lot of wood was still used, whereas in the 80s everything shifted to plastics.
But whether you love or hate (as I do) the brown Noctua colours, the one thing is that they are kinda polarising. They're not a "clean fit" in any build unless you really wanna show that you use Noctua and use them as a centrepiece. Which I guess is the point of their marketing. They want to make it seem their fans are so good people are willing to put up with the colour.
I love Noctua fans and I don't care about their colour. For all I cared they could be pink as long as they are best in class on noise and reliability.
They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible. The point of a computer to me is to be powerful while being as discrete about it as it can be (i.e. quiet and no blinking rgb lights). I don't have a glass side panel, I run an older Fractal case with aluminum sides with sound dampening instead.
I never understood "form over function", but each to their own.
Hunh now that you bring it up, I would care if they were pink. I wouldn’t have them in my build if they were.
> They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible.
Speak for yourself :) My computer is pretty open, the fans are visible through the front and through the side panel.
I don't run RGB either though but I do like to style it.
And of course the "form over function" is part of that market niche that really pays a lot for something like a fan. Noctua aren't that special, as others have mentioned there are much cheaper brands with the same performance including sound level. You do pay a lot for just the branding.
Any examples for these cheaper brands with same performance?
Every other brans of fans I have used (which to be fair is far from all of them) have only lasted 3 maybe 4 years before they started making more noise than when new. They weren't completely broken, but any increase in noise is unacceptable to me. I live in an old quiet house, there is no noise from forced ventilation but because it doesn't have that. There is no city noise. On a still day in the winter with no wind or birdsong it can be extremely quiet.
I have some Noctua fans still going strong after a decade. Are there other brands that can also do that? Probably, I have some BeQuiet fans now too in a tower CPU cooler (couldn't get hold of a Noctua cooler during the pandemic), it will be interesting to see what happens in another 6 years or so with them.
And no, I don't change my computer every 3 years or so any more, so longevity does matter to me.
At least some Apple ][ key caps from the 80's appear to have been brown.
Preference. Some people like their PCs to look like a rainbow alien LED spaceship, others would go for vanta black if they could get it
Stuart Semple changed his name to Anish Kapoor, because only Anish Kapoor has the rights to use Vantablack for artistic purposes.
I think there might also be export restrictions, but I'm not sure.
Also
>Semple developed a pigment called the "pinkest pink" and specifically made it available to everyone except Anish Kapoor and anyone affiliated with him
Anish seems like a bit of a dick
I love the petty little fight over the blackest black and pinkest pink or whatever that whole drama is. It's hilarious.
Both of which are rather disappointing and wouldn't really stand out more than any other nice colour
The beige/brown fans give me a woodgrain vibe more than anything. Straight white would probably be more popular with LED folks imo.
yep, white pc component are almost always at a premium :p
I'm at an age where I feel the same about many things in life. Black, sleek and minimalist is so boring and blends into the background.
Just this morning I purchased these car mats for my black, korean-spec-tinted people carrier electric van:
https://carmats.ie/products/kia-pv5-passenger-2026-van-mats?...
Funny how the world works. People once bought cheap children’s play carpets and cut them up as car mats out of poverty. Now people pay €75 to get that same look.
On sidenote: I'm quite interested in the PV5 and have only seen one in the wild so far. How is it for you? And how is the range in practice.
I've had mine for about two weeks and I love it. It's absolutely massive inside, like a tardis. It drives like a magic carpet and it's got more than enough power for it's size. It's replacing a 2019 Hyundai Kona EV, and the ride quality and comfort is night and day. It's got a very tight turning circle so it's surprisingly nimble in tight spaces.
I have not really had the chance to properly test range, but it's not going to be amazing. It's reporting about 6.1km/kWh average at the moment, with about 50% motorway driving not really exceeding 110km/h. I'd expect no more than 350km. I rarely drive it 100%-0%, so real world (80-20) is probably 300km max. I might be underestimating the range if I do some math though! I live in Ireland, so that is an absolute massive amount of range for roadtrips. My Kona did about 6.5-7.5 depending on the season.
If you have a family, even a small one, then I reckon this is a no brainer. The price is ridiculous, and in my books it beats out an SUV in almost every category except maybe offroading.
Go test drive one!
Agreed. It's like Tatooine themed from Star Wars
Black is some weird masculine thing where it all has to be “tactical”
Noctua is one of few companies that has not broken my trust (yet). They promise me a really good fan, they're ten toes in on the promise and they have yet to fail to deliver.
My fan broke after five? years of near 24/7 use. Customer support was very easy to reach. They sent me a new one after I sent some serial numbers as proof. They asked me then to break off a blade, and a picture of it so I didn't have to sent it back.
I get why. But that still seems wasteful
But would it be more wasteful than shipping a parcel with broken equipment?
It’s a chilling effect on folks that buy one noctua fan and want to get another free one by claiming the first one is broken.
If the old one could still be used, they shouldn’t send a new one anyway.
Well, if it can still be repaired but the producer doesn't want to bother and just sends a new fan, that's fine. That doesn't mean a repairable product should be destroyed and sent to a landfill just because it makes Noctua's logistics easier.
The point is, if the owner thinks it can be repaired, they shouldn’t call for a replacement in the first place. And indeed they wouldn’t get one, because they wouldn’t break the blade. So it’s completely under control of the owner.
Sure but the owner could've technically been left with a spare part in this case
Though it's not that likely that users will try to replace the blades on a fan.
They have many dedicated fans, both mechanical and biological.
Yeah, their products are expensive but every one of them proved high quality and reliable.
Anyone else getting the optical illusion of the fans spinning in your peripheral vision while reading the top paragraphs?
Yep! Made me look a few times to make sure they weren't actually spinning.
Yup.
Don't Noctua fans generally go in builds made by people who like silence?
In which case they'd have silent cases with no glass panes, because those are thinner and a possible source of vibration. They may even glue (opaque) sound absorbing material to the inside of their cases.
In which case, who cares what colour the fans are?
I built a PC this year in a Meshroom S V2[1]. The NF-A14x25 G2 fans I used for the AIO didn't seem so expensive when I was spending $600 on RAM, and I was happy that they were available in black.
Not every quiet PC is built in a dense box. Good airflow with big, slow fans is working for me to cool a 9800X3D and a 5070 Ti quietly under load.
[1]: https://ssupd.co/products/cases-meshroom-s-v2
I use Noctua for the silence but I also literally don't have any of the panels attached to my case. The main panel doesn't even fit because the DH-15[1] would stick out.
My DH-15 isn't particularly silent because the fans are silent but it's so effecient that the fans barely need to spin.
[1]: https://www.noctua.at/en/products/nh-d15
I'm firmly in the I-want-a-quiet-case-which-sits-under-a-desk-so-I-can't-see-through-the-panes-anyway camp, but I sometimes wondered if glass wouldn't actually be better, since those models appear to be heavier than their opaque brethren. So I'd expect them to vibrate less, etc.
Maybe, but it seems like a waste to glue the paxmate to the inside of the glass :)
So the lesson here is to wait for the black part to become available, then buy the beige or brown because you know their teething problems are gone?
I really miss that they don't release white versions. In my all-white case I just can't have Noctua. The brown ones I think are extremely ugly and the black ones stand out too much.
White doesn't really look bad in any case (except perhaps a full black one). The brown is very identifiable but that's only really a point if you desire to flaunt your expensive fans. Because it will stand out too much in almost any build. I honestly don't care about that, and for a fan this price I shouldn't have to put up with hidden advertising.
But I have BeQuiet Silent Wings and they're not bad. Quietness isn't something I'm optimising for anyway as I only use my desktop for gaming and when I do I wear headphones anyway. I do want to optimise more for pressure (as I have air filters) but these fans are no worse than Noctua.
Just make a brown case (maybe with some walnut accents?) and the brown Noctua fans will be a perfect fit.
Alternative - return to tradition with beige - https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...
Nice, turbo button and all.
Then I have to look at that brown thing all day :) Yuck
I like wood but only light wood, not the dark kind. That reminds me way too much of my grandparents' furniture.
I usually look at the monitor, not the case under the desk. ;)
That said, I don't want RGB bleed, nor do i want a case where I see the insides. The computer is there to be powerful and discreet (both when it comes to noise and looks).
But sure, you could skip the walnut. I think Noctua should also go well with lighter woods. Oak perhaps but probably not all the way to birch.
Buy a Fractal North.
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...
Huh interesting. I think the black one is super ugly with the dark wood but the white one isn't bad.
Still not something I'd buy though.
Isn’t the Lego Group incredible at this? Their parts are tiny, all different colors, and their tolerances are incredible.
Interestingly enough, I just read about the brown Lego issues earlier today: https://blocksmag.com/brittle-bricks-the-lego-groups-biggest...
We don't know what Noctua's tolerance is. The clearance in this case has to account for the flexing that will inevitably happen as the fan spins around in an environment than can easily see 50C temperatures. ABS (what Lego uses) begins softening at around 40C, which will increase how much it's deforming at 1500-2500 RPM.
Lego is quite impressive, but most of their parts are static and not moving at 500-2000rpm, so they're optimizing for a different problem.
If you need that kind of precision, yes.
But I don't think they really need that.
This level of quality is why they have my business. We had a CI setup with rpi boards that needed fans (uart clock tied to cpu clock so heat meant slowing down and the uart dropped characters). I got tired of seeing random test failures on some board and driving up to the office to replace the fan that had failed. And they were loud and annoying. I ended up frustrated and expensing hundreds of dollars of noctua fans. Dead quiet, did a better job, and not even one ever failed on me.
A quiet PC is one reason I've always removed the GPU cards from used ones I've gotten. The crappy little fans on GPUs that constantly whir up and down drives me nuts.
When my GPU fans went bad and I didn't want to buy a new GPU (nothing wrong with my 1070, it still runs the games I care about) I bought some smaller noctua fans and 3D printed an adapter plate (in PETG). The connectors were non-standard, but the signals weren't, so I had to splice together some cables with soldering and heatshrink tubes.
I think Noctua makes GPU heatsinks now too, so you're in luck. MSI was pretty good at making almost dead silent cards once upon a time too.
> I think Noctua makes GPU heatsinks now too
I got really excited for a while, been struggling to find a 3rd party heatsink for a noisy GPU that won't make it even more noisier.
But, seems what you're talking about is this? https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/air-cooling/noctu..., which seems to have been just for the GH200 and seems to be more like a "super-cooler", as it's cooling both the CPU and the GPU.
Went to Noctua's website and found no GPU coolers at all, so I think it might have been limited to just showing off at Computex 2024 maybe.
It's luxury watch engineering for gamers. You do not need it, but it's kind of charming when anyone competently takes a niche to its extreme, imho.
That said, on my last PC build I ended up buying Pure Wings 3, which are quite competitively silent at similar airflow and much cheaper.
And white. Because I do like silly pretty PCs, as long as they don't have RGB on.
https://eikehein.com/pc/pc2.webp
Functional premium product at premium price. Cheaper mid-class does the job most of the way. But I suppose there is slightly better characteristics and probably higher reliability in design. Not a fake luxury like too many products these days.
I suppose we should be somewhat positive that some company still aims to deliver best possible products. Not just products with cheapest possible cost and some perceived luxury if even that.
Indeed.
Also, if their product ever does enshittify, the shit would truly hit the fan.
You must not be familiar with the iPPC 3000's. A single 120mm fan moves more air than the exhaust fan in your bathroom. The 140mm encroaches on kitchen fan territory (158cfm). At static pressures slightly higher than what either of those typically has, 24/7, for years.
They're not toys. If you stick your finger into one of these it does not peacefully come to a halt, the tip of your finger gets buzzsawed off and then it stops about halfway through your fingernail.
(The i stands for industrial)
I used to really like Noctua fans, for a while they were obviously the best fans by a significant margin.
But for all their tight tolerances and exotic materials and a high price to match, they generally don't outperform BeQuiet's more regular materials but use-focused fans that are half the price. Nor are they significantly better than Arctic's general purpose fans at a quarter the price.
It'd make more sense to just buy the fan optimized for the specific common purpose (airflow or radiator) than pay double for the Noctua for a more generalized fan, but is not the best at either common use case.
Seems like these days their target audience is those who believe their marketing materials about them being the best, instead of believing the benchmark performance data.
The benchmarks do not tell everything.
I have used Noctua fans in computers where they worked for a decade or so, even 24x7, until an upgrade or replacement of the computer was required by other reasons than because of the fans.
I have also had many problems caused by cheaper fans.
So now I always prefer to use rather expensive fans and power supplies, from brands with which I have accumulated many years of experience, for peace of mind.
Perhaps other brands of fans that nowadays give similar results in benchmarks also have similar reliability, but I am not willing to bet on it.
If we're going by anecdotes, my last Noctuas showing signs of failure (I had 6 of them, one was ~200rpm slower than it should be, one took a several seconds longer to start spinning from a stop) about a year after the end of warranty was partially why I retired them. Same with the set of Noctuas before them (apparently my first set was from 2010). I suppose they all technically still spun so they were still usable, just not to original performance; still, hard to be too upset about the product making it through the long warranty period without issue.
But my Arctics that was installed in the same case that ran for the same amount of time are still chugging along strong, and those are about as cheap as fans get. Different load/use case though so it's probably not a fair comparison.
These days, I really think the competition has caught up or passed Noctua.
2×? Try 5× for the Noctua NF-A12x25 compared the the Arctic P12 Pro that matches or beats it in most metrics. Which isn't to say the Noctua fan is bad, it's just a luxury product for reasons other than performance.
2x more than other premium offerings that often perform noticeably better, which I'd say are usually from BeQuiet, LianLi, and Phanteks.
But yes, sometimes up to 5x more than the comparative Arctic in common size categories where it basically trades blows for most metrics that matter. Arctic is seriously unbeatable in value:performance if you just need a basic fan without other QoL or aesthetic features.
120mm is the most competitive category, and it's the most obvious category how Noctua can't keep up with the faster iterating/innovating competition.
Disclaimer: I read HWCooling like everyone serious about the subject. These reviews aren't everything, the appalling QC that results in resonances or coil whine lottery isn't mentioned.
In general, yes, Noctua is overpriced and Arctic is an incredible value, but when you want to optimize your silence/performance ratio, it's still Noctua, BeQuiet or (sometimes) Thermalright.
I got a cheap CPU cooler and swapped the fan out for a Noctua. For half the cost of a complete Noctua CPU cooler I got good temperatures and no noise.
If they didn't go to these length, they wouldn't be the brand that they are. They would just be one of any other random fan manufacturer.
To be fair, half a millimeter isn’t even that much precision, generally speaking. You wouldn’t be anywhere close to manufacturing a working ball pen at that precision. Or even an acceptable keyboard, if we stay with plastic. With fans blades, the difficulty is probably the precision relative to the fan diameter.
If you're okay with some of your fans being noisy and/or inefficient, I'm sure you can work with flimsy tolerances.
Thermalright etc. have definitely shown that a slab of metal and some generic fans can be rather quiet and easily compete with Noctua at a fraction of the cost.
It's par for the course in the premium PC parts industry. It's overkill in a way that does not impact performance at all because gamers will pay for that.
I do not play often on my PCs. I just like well engineered devices and do have more than enough money to buy a more expensive fan every five years or so. I like the item, it works well, is silent, I’m satisfied ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> does not impact performance at all
Noctua fans are still the top #1 performers in the world. You can argue that it's diminishing returns and you can get a fan with 90% of the performance for 50% of the money, but that doesn't change Noctua's position at the top.
They want them to be really silent. There's more details here: https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/nf-a12x25-technical-...
Last I checked they weren't really any quieter than their competitors at the same airflow and pressure (which is a little subjective because your curve will never match perfectly). They do have a really low number on their specs because they have a really low max RPM, but that's not really relevant when you can just lower the speed of other fans.
They're still really good fans, but a lot of this is just marketing.
At max power the Noctua NF-A12x25 has 56 CFM and 2.3 mmAq for 31dBA [1]. At 70% the Artic A12 Pro is 56 CFM, 4.3 mmAq, and 31dBA [2]. At 60% the Asus ProArt PF120 is 61 CFM, 2.6 mmAq, and 30 dBA [3].
Note that the ProArt is a bit thicker (25 vs 30 mm) and all these dBA numbers are almost certainly unobstructed airflow. The Noctua is certainly good, but it's literally over 5× the price of the Artic.
[1]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/4/
[2]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/
[3]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/229/
On the other hand, if I recall right the internet is rife with customer reports of the Arctic fans having noose spikes / unpleasant hums or resonances at certain RPMs. Lots of people using config tuning to avoid it.
I ended up buying Pure Wings as mentioned. Also much cheaper than Noctua and seemingly not having those issues.
It's funny because I replaced my NF-A14 and NF-F12 because they had hums at certain rpms when used on radiators, and neither the Arctics before them, nor the BeQuiets that replaced them, had that issue.
Noctua is working at the last five percentages of performance AND lifespan. They want their fans to perform (and sound) identical ten years later with daily use. Most people change fans far earlier than that.
It’s kind of refreshing to see really.
Indeed, the main reason why I choose Noctua fans from those that are silent enough and efficient enough is because I trust their reliability.
I still have computers from 2017, with Kaby Lake CPUs, which have been used as servers and in which the Noctua fans work as well as in the first day. Prior to that I had some computers with Noctua fans that had been used for more than a decade without fan problems, and which were upgraded or replaced for reasons unrelated to fans.
Thus the good experience that I had with the reliability of Noctua fans, coupled with some bad experiences with cheaper fans, which had to be replaced prematurely, make me reluctant to experiment now with other brands, which might have the same performance when new, but I could learn about their reliability only after a few years.
It's like the gold plated headphone jacks they used to sell to audiophiles.
This is a really nice write up. The reason itself — why the delay — is totally within my own speculation, but the sheer quality of the writing dragged me through the whole article. That is something.
I think this shows how Noctua value their customers, including myself. I really love how they are nice to their customers — both their products and services — especially because experience like this is getting more and more scarce. I really appreciate their work.
Explains why LEGO had a leg up for multiple years. You can’t just change the color pigments and hope the parts fit in the same way. Of course these times are over and other brick manufacturers caught up or overtook Lego.
Overtook Lego? In what way, quality of the bricks? Because Lego is still the largest toy company in the world by revenue.
I recently built a home server and used Noctua fans for the first time. I absolutely love how quiet they are. If I didn't know the room had my server in it and was running, I wouldn't even notice the very quiet sound of the fans.
I am running them at about 800rpm and the CPU is usually between 33~37 degrees.
When I rebuild my main PC, I will surely go with them again.
Why would someone want a beige or brown fan? If it is that complicated why not only make black ones?
Branding, you're never in doubt when some YouTuber is building a PC using Noctua fans. There's probably some weird psychology in the colour as well. Why would anyone want a fan in such an ugly colour, unless it's really good. The weird beige and brown is highly recognizable, and even if you already don't know about Noctua you're likely to ask questions about the fan solely based on the colour.
The black fans are really only needed by those who build show piece in those cases with glass panels, but they might equally well need white fans, which Noctua doesn't make. Personally I don't really care about the colour of my fans, you can't see them anyway.
They are enthusiast targeted brand and majority of enthusiast (heck even entry level cases) have windows in it.
Enthusiasts care about the details - airflow, cable management and of course aesthetics. Noctua doesn't. I respect their engineering/no bullshit approach, the price bump is worth it but they lost my money on multiple builds by sticking to their 'brand color'.
They're the Soylent of the fan world - everything you need but spark zero joy.
I'd be interested in seeing sales figures for same fans in their brand and other colors.
Im an enthusiast, Noctua color scheme sparks joy for me and are esthetically pleasing. Just saying…
Noctua fans have a distinct look, you could say the same about black, if you want to black them out just get a case that hides them since that would look the same.
Who's looking at a damn fan? My lord. This is like caring what colour the filters in my air conditioner are.
Idiots will have anything marketed to them.
Calling people idiots for having different taste? You truly are a muppetman.
Because I like the brown/beige colors?
Why do Ferraris seem to almost always made in red?
Because nobody wants a brown one?
Brown is for Lamboghini
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro/lamborghini-has-resto...
Indeed.
https://silodrome.com/lamborghini-1r-tractor/
It's called Resale Red for a reason.
I wonder why they can't just get the last half a mm of accuracy by just grinding down the tips
Grinding down plastic doesn’t leave a smooth surface, which is why this generally isn’t done, and would especially impact the air flow on a fan.
I think tips are one of the more crucial parts of a blade, so if you care about how that blade works you probably don't want the shape to deviate there.
This is a delightful post, I'll be sticky with the classic colours letting them proudly display what they are
My layman question is why plastic cant be painted? Case temperatures are not that high and there are no plastic parts rubbbing.
This is answered in the first paragraph of the article. Painting requires re-calculating the weight, strength and aerodynamics. Paint does not weigh zero, it changes the flexibility of the plastic, and the texture which changes flow.
But the article didn't give any ballpark numbers, so the interesting bit is missing, and we still know basically nothing.
It can very well be like the snake oil which makes you feel better maybe for the three seconds after you bought it. Or those gold plated audio jacks which are 0.0001% improvement in quality.
Hi there! I want to talk to you about ducts. Do your ducts seem old-fashioned, out of date? Central Services' new duct designs are now available in hundreds of different colours, to suit your individual taste. Hurry now, while stocks last, to your nearest Central Services showroom! Designer colours to suit your demanding taste.
damn... you should change password...
Haha, maybe we can help him
idk if he wants to be helped
I don't buy it. It's just a plastic PC fan with some bearings which does not cost that much
Well as someone who does buy PC fans, let me tell you that Noctua is clearly superior. It may be just a plastic fan with some bearings, but it doesn't seem to be easily replicable because nobody has managed to do it.
And it’s quieter than many of its counterparts from other vendors. And it actually doesn’t cost that much - more expensive than cheap-o versions for sure, but then again significantly quieter, that’s their whole premise.
Almost everything you buy "does not cost that much", that's how companyies make money.
The devil is in the details. Noise, static pressure efficiency, reliability, bearing quality, motor quality. Yes, there's a huge brand premium too. For critical uses, using a crap fan is an absolutely stupid decision especially where damage or malfunction is likely.
In zie olden PC days™, there weren't many options for quality fans except maybe whatever random fans Delta made that generally weren't optimized for low noise or low power consumption. Ancient, no name sleeve bearing fans would almost always go out within 1-2 years at 24/7 100% duty cycle.
I love how we've come full circle and started wood paneling our electronics again.
I always expected that black was the easiest color, since you just add enough pigment to wipe out any colors from other materials. Are they implying that that brown color is the natural look of the materials they used, so the simplest to engineer?
From what I understood, any color and material involved in high precision manufacturing requires careful design and thorough testing. They likely prioritize the brown color and material due to branding, so changing this to anything else requires redoing large parts of the pipeline.
Large parts is kinda exaggerated.
You have to redo injection moulds anyway as they have a limited life. And you can do a lot with materials too, some materials simply shrink more than others as they cool down.
I sometimes wonder whether they have an culture that overengineers tbh.
The thoroughness & mindset is certainly appreciated, but you can also overdo it - engineer it beyond what the consumers use case requires.
Where do you draw the line though? They have an amazing reputation for quality fan products, they clearly feel it needs a new injection mould which aren't cheap investments.
I've got a Noctua NHD14 in my current build that I bought in 2011 and it performs perfectly still (including 2 free socket upgrades from Noctua).
> Where do you draw the line though?
When the additional engineering adds no extra end user value. e.g. You need the blades to be strong enough to not shatter or flex, but beyond some level of strength it adds no additional utility
> engineer it beyond what the consumers use case requires
This mindset I think is why companies tend to favor releasing slightly broken and shit stuff, instead of waiting until they feel like they made something the best it could.
While I don't think they do, I think this is a valid thing to ponder and I'm sorry it's getting downvoted.
Generally, I think it's not overengineering that's the issue, it's how the consumer need for that particular level of quality/performance is marketed to the wrong audience. Cars are the classic example. Most people who drive a car that was precision engineered for speed or offroading capability rarely if ever need that functionality.
That said, in a world of consumer good racing to the bottom and physical enshittification, I'll generally pick the item that's obviously well designed, even if beyond the capabilities I need. The alternative is often a slew of indistinguishable crap.
I hope they're keeping all that data to be able to feed to ML and improve their FEA models, and to perhaps advance molding tech for everyone.
I think I have 20 or so Noctua fans from 80 to 200 mm from 1-8 years old, haven't had a bearing or motor failure yet. Cross fingers.
Blue. Make blue fans.
Interesting.
I'm glad companies like Noctua exist that put so much thought and care into their products. I don't even mind being advertisted to when that's the case.
Reading about this, just makes me wish I has good 3d scan of their impellers to see how a simple 3d printer will deal with such mythical precision.
Noctua is awesome in a lot of ways, one of them is offering full CAD models: https://www.noctua.at/en/3d-cad-models
One of the first things mentioned on that page is:
> To protect our intellectual property, certain features – such as fan impeller geometries – have been slightly modified while remaining visually very close to the actual product.
So you do have to 3d scan them yourself if you're trying to print a copy.
Depending on what printers you have available I'll put in the work to get you a ~0.02mm deviation scan of a blade off a 120mm noctua fan I broke. I expect it to under-perform notably due to the surface texture and the lack of rigidity under load causing contact with the shroud walls at high RPMs, but I wouldn't bet my lunch on it, would be fun to find out.
The texture has substantial chance to actually help. Check golf balls.
The materials that you could use in a 3d printer are not rigid enough.
The blades of the fans are fiber-reinforced, in order to have sufficient rigidity, even when very thin.
Only a 3D printer for metals could print something rigid enough, but such a metallic fan would be too heavy for a computer fan.
Obviously better if you print slow enough. But the fans will be weaker and you won’t be able to pump out thousands every day.
Somewhat unrelated anecdotal praise of Noctua: due to various life factors, I hadn't built a PC since maybe 2010 or thereabouts - something I did relatively often before then and had quite a bit of experience with. Then a few months ago I finally did it again. Forgetting about the absurdity of the RAM situation, I gotta say my biggest surprise was cooling. I wanted a quiet media center machine. The internet and friends kept recommending Noctua. While researching, I got a bit of a cult vibe, and their prices seemed a bit stiff. But I went for it, with some hesitation.
Goddamn was I wrong! Their CPU coolers are the most well-designed, thoughtfully planned, amazingly performing consumer product I've seen in a while. 10/10, highly recommend! I'll use them for all PC cooling needs going forward.
I agree! For case fans there are cheaper, good enough alternatives for most use cases, but their coolers definitely are worth the premium. The design, manuals and specifications online are just so good compared to competitors, plus they give away free upgrade kits when new CPU sockets come available, so you could probably use same cooler for decades as you upgrade the system.
"Because we make the brown ones first"