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.
Normally I love this kind of article too because I consider it engineering, not marketing, the product name dropping at the end just reinforces the message. But either I'm missing some details that could have been spelled our more clearly, or the engineers were taking a break when the marketers were writing some parts. I'd love to stand corrected if someone more informed has details.
> advanced polymers such as Sterrox® LCP
> we have implemented a tip clearance of only 0.5mm (120mm models) or 0.7mm (140mm models)
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce.
Typical tolerances for injection moulding are 0.1mm, or 0.03 for high precision, or even better. LEGO was said to be in the 0.01-0.03mm. So on the face of it the last statement is patently false or at least too generic, injection moulding can consistently do much better than 0.5mm. With standard injection moulding precision (0.1mm) the worst case scenario for the two parts (fan and shroud) mating would still stay comfortably below 0.5mm.
So the question to the experts, is Sterrox® LCP that much harder to work with and the marketing team just didn't understand the importance of being clear about this? Is it a decimal point typo and the numbers should be 0.05 and 0.07?
When very precision molds are made, what Noctua talks about in "multiple tuning iterations are required until the geometry, cooling, gating, and moulding parameters are perfectly stabilised" is the standard process for this type of stuff. (Gears, bottle caps, or any molds than make 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128x of the same part in one shot, require that you start with "steel safe" geometry, meaning you mold the first test parts, measure them, and then modify the mold (by cutting material AWAY, it's very hard, usually bad idea, to add steel back to a mold)).
You can do your best to determine what geometry is "steel safe", and all of this is baked upon having very good engineering understanding of what material you are molding (and using very expensive software like MoldFlow to simulate this).
Legos are made from ABS, there are decades of research and data on how ABS behaves in mold, it's relatively safe to use results from Moldflow and be pretty confident in it. Noctua is using LCP. LCP is very niche, and it sounds like they themselves are doing the research on moldability/warp/process effects. And while also being a company that produces things on timelines, the friction/side effect is that sometimes best guesses will fail and they have to start over with new molds (that's a 2 month hit usually) and months of testing. That is what they were trying so say.
I design glass-filled nylon and polycarbonate parts/assemblies with tolerances 1-5x higher than theirs. The 6-month delay they described is something I've lived through many times when we had to "cut new molds" because we couldn't salvage the first mold. (Advanced molds like these are $50k - $200k+). As a company/designer gets more experience with new materials and colorants (like their stuff with LCP), they will probably be able to hit end-goals on first try more often as they collect learnings from their failures.
Noob here. If you dont mind ive got some questions for you!
Ive recently started messing with the idea of making my own model car kits as a hobby. I understand a lot of the basics, but have never done anything like this before.
Im obviously not going to make kits in mass, but, i plan on doing injection molding using polystyrene. I do not currently have a cnc, but have been eyeing a SainSmart, though they say "can do metal under certain circumstances", but doesnt cover any of those circumstances. I also was looking at various injection machines and the price for entry is insane to me - $1000 for something that would probably burn your house down.
Anyway, to my questions..
1. Suggestions for a hobby cnc that can work aluminum? Id be willing to go as far as $2kUSD, unless theres something more that you think would serve me significantly better
2. Suggestions for a hobby injection machine that can do ~60-100g shots, that wont try to burn my house down, and doesnt cost a ton?
3. Any tips or thoughts for someone diving in to this?
4. Things i should purchase for QoL with cnc or injection molding?
5. Where does one buy materials (in hobby quantity) like aluminum block stock and polystyrene pellets?
Those are all things I've spend some time in, I'm not sure what to say. Learning curves for each one of those things are pretty dang steep. With AI you can probably speed up learning curves, but I think you will still go on many dead ends.
On the small CNC that will work with aluminum... There is a whole tradespace around how small of a feature you are trying to mill vs spindle speed vs machine stiffness & spindle runout. If you were to get something like a HASS you can sorta do it all, but when you get into the hobby stuff, you need to be very certain about what smaller set of machining limitations you will be dealing with and if they will still get you where you need to go. You need to work backwards from what actual tolerances you need to hold for the downstream thing to be able to work. (For instance, if you are making an aluminum mold, when you machine it, you will most likely be repositioning the work piece... if your machine isn't square enough so that when you flip the part on it's side or upside down, then do your next op, the part may not have been square to begin with, so now you have something that won't match the other thing you are trying to mate to.)
I build a 2'x5' 3 axis with ATC, starting from a CNCdepot concept and did my own control. I probably spend as much money on precision straight edges, levels, 90deg blocks, lapping tools, etc that were required to build a machine that could hold tolerances to 0.001", which is probably where you need to be landing to have molds that work.
I guess I am just trying to say it's a very big and ugly can of worms you are opening up.
Before buying anything, you might just want to try using firstcut/protolabs. They will machine the aluminum molds and mold the parts for you. Price per part is not going to be pretty, but it's going to be way less than spending thousands on machines that will never get you to where you want to go.
As for "desktop" molding, there is some startup now pushing their kludged together machine, maybe that is the one you are referencing. I'd stay far away from that thing. I think they were charging a couple $k for it, I feel like you need to be at 5x-10x that for anything reasonable. But at that point, the amount of power and infrastructure you need is well outside anything you'd want to put in your house or even garage. Don't really have a good answer for you here.
One thing to look at, if you are doing those model kits where like 20 parts are all in one flat sheet and you twist them to remove them, people are starting to make these on FDM 3D printers, which might be worth looking at. Now you can prototype and do production on the same machine, which at your stage, is the right place to be.
Thanks for the expert point of view. It was between "difficult polymer" and "marketing blurb". Glad it's the first and I hope anyone from Noctua reads HN and adds this small clarification.
I knew the technology itself can have tight enough tolerances that are not a concern from an engineering perspective when talking about a 0.5-0.7mm clearance, but no details about the challenges of this LCP.
Noctua wants their fans to last for many years, spinning at 2K rpm, with heat.
Being able to produce something with lower tolerance is one thing. Making it work long term at ~10 m/s and ~200G is another thing. Have you ever been in a car that brakes really hard? You'll move. Now, multiply that force by 100 and you'll get around what the fans must sustain over time.
But that's literally not what the article says. You are talking about the design - Noctua puts 0.5mm because any more and airflow is affected and performance drops. They also use a super duper polymer that mitigates everything you mentioned. The article talks about manufacturing tolerances.
> Their influence on the dimensional precision and stability of the fan blade may be minute, but if the tolerance is only a few tenths of a millimetre, being off by a tenth or two suddenly becomes a problem.
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce.
I'm not questioning their engineering but the wording of whoever wrote this article. For anything with a clearance in the tenths of a millimeter, injection moulding doesn't even sweat, let alone be at the limit. Anything better than bog standard injection moulds get you better precision than "a tenth or two" millimeters.
Let me put it another way, if achieving a 0.7mm gap is "at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce", what would you say consistently achieving 2-10um (microns) gap is? Magic? Fairy tale? Because LEGO as I said earlier is said to have 2um tolerances [1] over their decades of producing the bricks. Even a more conventional 10-20um (order of magnitude higher) still works.
> The article talks about manufacturing tolerances.
As shown by your quotes, the article clearly mentions tip clearance, and not manufacturing tolerances, which you are infering. The article doesn't characterize the thermal expansion the "super polymer" is expected to undergo under normal operating conditions[1]: something Lego doesn't contend with.
All this to say: Lego's manufacturing tolerances alone can't falsify Noctua's claims because they ultimately are different metrics.
1. I imagine the expansion rate of the fan blade radius doesn't correlate linearly with that of the shroud, so the tip clearance changes with temperature. With this constraint, not even Lego could make its manufacturing tolerances equal the fan clearance, which has to be larger if you want the fan to predictably work without jamming over a 40-degree temperature range.
I interpreted it as: with the nature of fans and the associated vibration/movement, some gap is necessary and this is the limit given the precision of injection molding.
Phrased differently: a 0.5mm gap is the minimum possible to also be able to account for the 0.1mm (or whatever) variation in injection molding.
> a 0.5mm gap is the minimum possible to also be able to account for the 0.1mm (or whatever) variation in injection molding.
The Noctua engineers definitely designed the clearances to perfection and accounted for the variation in the manufacturing process, I don't doubt that.
The article says "being off by a tenth or two suddenly becomes a problem", the 0.1mm you also thought of. But that's the point of contention, 0.1mm is the tolerance from bog standard, cheap injection moulding. The limit of consistent precision is in the single digit microns. Noctua doesn't need anything near that.
Unless working with that polymer is difficult and comes with higher tolerances, this is probably just a case of the article's author trying to pump up stats. To bring it more to the techie world, it's something along the lines of "130nm transistors are at the absolute limit of what EUV lithography can consistently achieve".
Because it's spinning blades among manufacturing tolerances you also have to account for the blades expanding when rotating at high speed, and possibly working with 40-50 °C air from the components
I don't think that's it. You're referring to tolerances specified in the design. The article talks about the tolerances the manufacturing technique allows, and this process is an order of magnitude better than this article says. The material used and the design of the part influence how much it deforms in practice far more than the injection moulding process itself.
In their own description of Sterrox® LCP they say it has "extreme tensile strength, exceptionally low thermal expansion coefficient, high environmental inertia and excellent dimensional stability". With such an advanced polymer any deformation in operation has to be a rounding error compared to the manufacturing tolerances.
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.
Why do you think they don't optimize for things like performance when they often win performance competitions against other vendors for both sound mitigation and airflow?
Do you know they have a specific high efficiency line?
Have you ever had a noctua fan fail where you think another vendor fan would not have?
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.
It seems that common means something very different to you and I. Less than 5% of something is common? To me that sounds like the definition of uncommon!
Because it's a fan and I don't want to see it, and if I must see it, I don't want it to have any color of it's own since chances are very low that whatever color it is just happens to be the perfect addition to all my other posessions next to it.
I don't understand why anyone would think this is an obsession with black.
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.
I've had a few experiences with retrobrighting and having it come out really nicely, then after being stored away in a box for a couple of years it's somehow yellow again. It's probably different with different plastics but it doesn't seem so clear cut that it's always the UV light causing it.
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.
In the uncommon event that something in your computer catches fire, the flame retardant keeps the fire from igniting the otherwise flammable plastic and potentially burning your house down.
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.
I always thought the grey Noctua Redux fans were their nicest looking offerring, despite being their lower end. I don't understand how they settled on that.
Maybe it is just my limited production knowledge, but wouldn't it be possible to injection mold a bigger part and then mechanically shave off the last few fractions of a millimeter using any number of ways? Tooling costs too high. But in the simplest form you could essentially spin the fan against some adjustable abbrasive to shave off the final bits.
Granted, there may be other places in which the molding precision may matter, which would make this an impractical solution.
The fan blades deform & vibrate under rotation & airflow. Controlling that deformation is the point of the use of materials like Noctua's Sterrox LCP or other flglass-fiber reinforced LCP materials in other premium fans. So lower clearance isn't just a matter of manufacturing tolerance
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)
Transcoding multiple video streams, running a VM and running various other tasks, mine rarely passes 10, and is currently sitting at 7 (only 2 transcodes at this time).
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.
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.
For the same reason a winglet is used on an airplane, or a ducted fan is more efficient than a propeller: there is a large pressure difference on the end of a wing or propeller, and the high pressure side will jump around to the low pressure side and cause a tip vortex. This causes an induced drag, which moves the lift vector backwards (as drag, but not skin friction drag). Higher aspect (think wind turbine blades or glider wings) minimise this, as do winglets or ducting.
You are talking about velocities 100x faster than the air in your chassis is moving. You might be right about the effect, but it seems so tiny in this application.
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.
which is why you went with Delta and not Nocturna I would think? Deltas are fine in an otherwise noisy environment but they’re misery in say a bedroom at night.
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 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 want the quitest fans and whether they are 10 or 20 bucks is irrelevant. We are talking about tiny amounts of money here for something thats gonna run for 5y+
> except for things like server systems that run 24/7 in my bedroom where noise and durability are top priority
... which is why I only have a few of them, rather than replacing the fans in everything I own. But for the things that need them, there's just nothing else as good.
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.
Exactly this. Most of the time you get poorly researched articles (or nowadays, AI slop) about some topics only very remotely related to what the company actually does.
Here, the article is about something interesting that the company has expertise in (and even "insider info"), shows off that they do serious engineering, and is interesting to the target audience.
If I'm buying a 12V or 5V fan, it'll almost certainly be a Noctua. I don't know if they're the best, but they certainly seem to be among the better brands, and at something like $25 for a fan, they are certainly not overpriced enough to justify the effort of researching something better.
So whoever you are at Noctua, congratulations! This + the 3d model release are likely really paying off.
Noctua are pricey but they also provide service that is in my experience unmatched.
We have a few hundred of their coolers in use and I have never had an issue getting warranty replacements from them with fans. The process is simple and they ship out a new fan ( I have warrantied probably 10 - 15 of the fans)
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.
The other thing to consider is that while China is known for making cheap items for the American market (because that is what Americans want) they have become experts in the tool and die needed to make those cheap items.
If you want top class injection molding tooling / machines or process you are probably going to contract a Chinese company to do it.
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.
Yes you provide a great example of binning and market separation. Though I think in this case there's some limiting factors that make it infeasible to bin these fancy Noctua fan rotors including: 1) tooling have limited lifetime and will get sloppier and worse yields as time goes on. It's inefficient to use precious cycles of a precise tool and die on producing lower grade parts. 2) the material itself is likely more expensive than what industrial/lower grade use cases require. Why use reject Noctua when you can get regular crappy plastic for 1/500th the cost? 3) I expect Noctua stuff to be a much lower volume than lower cost/quality vendors so the volume of Noctua rejects is likely too low for a company to dedicate a product line using it. 4) brand/marketing reasons
Another obvious use case of binning is for microchips where the same die can be "wounded" to create multiple product variants that target different market segments, and also yield improvement from being able to isolate and disable an area of the die that are defective. However improving the manufacturability and yield itself is still fundamentally important
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.
As far as air purifiers are concerned, there are well-regarded designs you can buy that use PC fans (you can order without fans and put in your choice of fans) and furnace filters. I just got a North Box Polaris: https://aidankepo.wixsite.com/northboxsystems. Luggable supplies an equivalent for Americans.
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.
> 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.
Anecdotally, when my Xtrfy MZ1 mouse cable started shorting 5V to ground, they required a similar process (cutting the cable) before sending a replacement.
This was their response when I asked why:
> Yes this policy was put in place because there was multiple instances of people reselling their faulty products after receiving a replacement.
> The secondhand buyers then reached out to us, let down to have received a broken product.
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.
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.
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.
Nah I mean like they partner up to design that part for specific models, it would be hard to make a generic one-size-fits-all given how much PCBs differ, though now that I've looked into it it seems that they currently just have the 5080 available which is odd.
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.
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.
This was a fun revelation when I got into watercooling. You might not hear coil whine over a gpus fans. But remove the fans and put it under load and whoo boy.
So this confuses social media discussions on the topic by mixing together everyone's reports, regardless of their level of acoustic masking. "My card has no whine!" says the guy with three 2000 rpm fans going etc.
Gpu waterblocks seem to be shifting towards fully enclosed "tomb" style and I can't help but wonder if coil whine contributed to that decision.
But on topic, I had seven a12x25 in my last build, two a12 and four a20 in my current build. They are exceptional. A computer is as quiet as it's loudest part. If your care about noise, why would you ever skimp on the moving parts.
I think GPU waterblocks are becoming fully enclosed because there are so many hot components on the back of the GPU now. They were designed to rely on random case air turbulence to passively cool, but there typically isn't much airflow over the back of the card when the stock cooler is replaced with a waterblock.
Problem becomes worse when the cards are driven harder because there's more cooling capacity from the watercooling in the front, but the passive cooling capacity on the back is still the same.
I used to stick a giant fin block on the back of the card to keep temps there reasonable. I'd love it if actively cooled backplates become the norm for watercooling.
The Arctic fans are known to hum at certain speeds. This may, or may not matter to you, and certainly depends on how low the "noise floor" in workspace is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
The quality difference between various fans is absolutely huge.
I can put in a few Noctua fans and be confident they are going to last 5+ years of running 24x7. Or I can put in 25% cheaper fans and be pretty much guaranteed one or more is going to fail within the first couple years.
In my opinion, fans are never a place to cheap out when building a PC - server or desktop, whatever.
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.
The difficulty is clearance between two moving parts, with blades that deform slightly due to air pressure (at different amounts for different speeds) and with thermal expansion.
That’s not what the article says, they relate it to reproducibility of the manufacturing process: “Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce”. Though maybe they misphrased that, as for example Lego pieces have significantly smaller tolerances and are also manufactured using injection molding.
Not in the gaming scene at all, but my thoughts were, "Why isn't black the first product developed?" Isn't that a standard, and probably has more consumer interest?
And I don't understand why they can't just mold all the colors in parallel. If brown is in production, why can't they experiment with black at the same time?
> These surface vibrations are so minute that they are not critical from a mechanical point of view (unlike e.g. vibrations due to imbalance), but they can cause serious acoustic problems. The reason for this is that when the fan is running, there is a pressure difference between the intake and the outlet side of the fan (lower pressure on the upside of the blades, higher pressure on the downside of the blades). From an aero-acoustic point of view, this situation is similar to a stereo speaker where there is higher pressure inside the chassis and lower pressure outside the chassis. In both cases, the pressure difference leads to an efficient acoustic coupling, so the surface vibration of either the blades of the fan or the membrane of the speaker is transferred to the air.
I love rotary woofers :) I hope to get one some day.
Wow this is a nice read. I never thought injection moulding precision, relative to the dimensions of the object, to be in the same ballpark of what you can achieve with photolithography in chip manufacturing. This of course makes sense because we are at the end limited by the same principles of mechanical inaccuracy.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
I'd prefer no glass, but nevertheless just bought two glass cases because no alternatives that met my requirements were available:
* Fractal Design Torrent Compact - Best cooling available for a GPU-free, air-cooled CPU system. There exists a non-glass version, but it's unavailable in North America.
* Thermaltake The Tower 300 - Smallest form-factor case that will fit a 420mm AIO cooler. Only available with glass sides.
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'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.
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.
Yes quality. I forgot the Chinese manufacturer that resells their bricks to pantasia or moldking. But the quality especially for metal or translucent bricks is on par and in a lot of cases better than the Lego offerings.
And calling Lego a toy company is a stretch. Their main demographic is 30-50 year olds with disposable income.
Just want to mention I have no beef or issue with Lego. I say that you get great offerings from other brands as well now.
This is an interesting article, but why don’t they just start with black fans? Marketing? Feels like we know their brand now, they can lose the hideous brown and just build black fans to start with.
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.
> 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
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.
False, if you're printing PLA or something sure, but you can print all sorts of exotic fiber reinforced materials, and maybe if you're clever enough you can even use the anisotropy of the print to give you extra strength in the relevant directions. I'm not claiming that it's possible to 3D print noctua quality fans, especially on consumer FDM machines, but I think "inability to find a rigid enough material" is not going to be the failure mode, at least not on it's own. I could believe "inability to find a rigid enough material that can also get the required surface quality".
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.
It really does not have any chance to help. Golf ball dimples don't like magically make the thing better at air, if they did don't you think you'd see these sorts of features on fans or other airfoils to begin with?
You want dimples to create turbulent air that stays attached for longer, this INCREASES skin friction but since the golf ball is a bluff body it's friction losses are dominated by form drag, not skin friction. Putting dimples on a wing will drastically lower it's lift to drag ratio (which could in some cases be desirable, but it will absolutely not make the wing more efficient).
Of course all of this is moot anyway because the dimples need to be tuned to the Reynolds number you're expecting to operate at. Random surface imperfection wouldn't help even if it could help, which it can't.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yes. In marketing it’s called observability, and it’s why even high end designers are writing their brand names in huge letters on goods (well also to improve IP protection)
Apple’s white earphone cables are a classic example. Back in the iPod days everyone could tell who had an iPod versus off brands (many of whom, of course, existed long before iPod).
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.
A large part of their business is also industrial applications. I doubt industrial customers care much about the colour and more and volume discounts and ability to provide custom solutions.
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.
It's surprising that there's enough of a market for a fan in any alternative color that it's worthwhile to spend this amount of development time on it. There are enough marginal fan purchasers who don't buy the original colored ones and will buy the black one?
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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
Yes and no. At a holistic level yes but for the product Noctua produces they've designed in a specific tip clearance which they want to maintain with the different pigments for their efficiency/acoustic targets.
> 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.
They aren't actually doing any molding themselves, the manufacturing is outsourced to companies in China and Taiwan, there is the real molding expertise.
I mean the point the article makes - black plastic has different characteristics to brown and beige plastics, so they need to be developed separately - seems reasonable on the surface, but that doesn't explain why they do the "novelty" colours first. Especially from the way it's worded, it sound like they might have to redo the moulds going brown -> black but potentially not the other way round. So overall, it just seems like the whole article is just PR spin.
Here is a mirror of the article since the "vercel"(?) anti-human wall is not letting me through, https://archive.is/y5zN1
>Why does it take so long to release black fan versions? 30/04/2026
>People often wonder why the chromax.black versions of our fans take longer to launch after the classic colours. In a nutshell, the reason is that this is less like painting a wooden fence, 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.
>Before we dive in, we need to understand how PC fans are injection moulded and produced. At its simplest, injection moulding involves melting plastic and forcing it into a steel mould, also called “tooling”, to cool down and harden into a specific shape.
>However, for high-precision engineering, this is less like making ice cubes and more like baking a complex soufflé where every degree of temperature and milligram of ingredients matters. The flow rate, cooling time, and pressure must be perfectly balanced to ensure the plastic crystallises, cools correctly, and holds its structural integrity and dimensional precision. When you introduce a new variable, like colouring pigments, that delicate balance is disrupted.
>While this is generally much less of a problem for fan designs that utilise relatively large tolerances and standard engineering plastics such as fibreglass reinforced PBT or PA, it becomes highly critical when building fans with tighter tolerances using more advanced polymers such as Sterrox® LCP. With our NF-A12x25, NF-A12x25 G2 and NF-A14x25 G2 fans that feature impellers made of this material, 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. At this extreme tolerance level, even minor process variations and material-related factors, such as the addition of colour pigments, become highly relevant. Their influence on the dimensional precision and stability of the fan blade may be minute, but if the tolerance is only a few tenths of a millimetre, being off by a tenth or two suddenly becomes a problem.
>Colour pigments impact the injection moulding of these high-precision fans because the pigment particles behave like tiny solid fillers inside the melt. Their size, surface area, and thermal behaviour directly influence how the polymer flows into the mould, as well as how it cools and solidifies. Black pigments, which are typically carbon black, behave very differently from the beige or brown metal-oxide pigments used in our standard fans. Carbon black particles are much smaller and have a significantly higher total surface area, resulting in stronger interactions with the polymer melt. While beige and brown metal-oxide pigments are larger and have a weaker effect, carbon black alters the melt viscosity, heat absorption, and crystallisation behaviour more significantly.
>When crafting the very first mould for a new high-performance fan, multiple tuning iterations are required until the geometry, cooling, gating, and moulding parameters are perfectly stabilised. In case we run into severe issues, this may even require starting from scratch. Regardless of whether it’s regular tuning iterations or complete redesigns, these hard-earned lessons feed directly into the design of the new mould for the black version, even though it always has to be further adjusted to account for the different moulding behaviour. Since these tuning iterations and, even more so, the worst case situation where the tooling has to be changed so significantly that it has to be redone from scratch, are time-consuming and costly, creating the toolings for the black versions at the same time as those for the regular versions would introduce significant extra cost and risk. To avoid this, we only initiate the production of the toolings for black versions after the mass production of the beige and brown parts is already running smoothly and stably.
>On top of the complex process of creating and tuning the moulds, our approval and validation process for new fans includes a rigorous, long-term high-temperature test. This ensures that our fans will deliver top-tier performance far beyond their 6-year warranty, but the test alone requires several months to run, with additional time needed for preparation and evaluation. Since this validation process must be repeated for the black versions, it introduces a minimum delay of around 6 months between the release of the brown and beige fans and their chromax.black counterparts. As soon as we have to go through some iterations of mould tuning, the delay will be longer, and if we have to re-run the validation tests, we’re already looking at a minimum delay of 12 months.
>At the time of writing, we’re just about to release the chromax.black version of the NF-A12x25 G2 – around 10 months after the release of the regular beige and brown version. Hopefully, the insights we’ve shared in this post help to explain that this is actually pretty close to as fast as possible.
>PS: We’ve only covered delays that are caused by the tooling creation and validation process in this blog post. However, there is a wide range of other factors such as the availability of other components, production capacity restrictions or logistical issues that can play a role as well. For example, during the three-year gap that we had between the regular and black version of the first-generation NF-A12x25, we were in the midst of the global pandemic and dealing with a highly challenging combination of strong demand, disrupted supply chains and logistical havoc, which caused delays that went far beyond tooling-related issues.
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.
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 don't know whether it's a sign of it being AI or not but I did find it a bit weird that within the first 3 sentences there were 2 different "less like X and more like Y" statements:
> the reason is that this is less like painting a wooden fence, 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.
and
> this is less like making ice cubes and more like baking a complex soufflé where every degree of temperature and milligram of ingredients matters.
Not a problem, but it felt odd enough that I noticed it, so maybe that's what got them thinking it was AI written/assisted?
I consider it very well written, perhaps too well written, I think we are departing the AI slop era. I’m not decrying it as slop not worth reading, I just think it’s an interesting development.
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.
Normally I love this kind of article too because I consider it engineering, not marketing, the product name dropping at the end just reinforces the message. But either I'm missing some details that could have been spelled our more clearly, or the engineers were taking a break when the marketers were writing some parts. I'd love to stand corrected if someone more informed has details.
> advanced polymers such as Sterrox® LCP
> we have implemented a tip clearance of only 0.5mm (120mm models) or 0.7mm (140mm models)
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce.
Typical tolerances for injection moulding are 0.1mm, or 0.03 for high precision, or even better. LEGO was said to be in the 0.01-0.03mm. So on the face of it the last statement is patently false or at least too generic, injection moulding can consistently do much better than 0.5mm. With standard injection moulding precision (0.1mm) the worst case scenario for the two parts (fan and shroud) mating would still stay comfortably below 0.5mm.
So the question to the experts, is Sterrox® LCP that much harder to work with and the marketing team just didn't understand the importance of being clear about this? Is it a decimal point typo and the numbers should be 0.05 and 0.07?
Expert here.
When very precision molds are made, what Noctua talks about in "multiple tuning iterations are required until the geometry, cooling, gating, and moulding parameters are perfectly stabilised" is the standard process for this type of stuff. (Gears, bottle caps, or any molds than make 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128x of the same part in one shot, require that you start with "steel safe" geometry, meaning you mold the first test parts, measure them, and then modify the mold (by cutting material AWAY, it's very hard, usually bad idea, to add steel back to a mold)).
You can do your best to determine what geometry is "steel safe", and all of this is baked upon having very good engineering understanding of what material you are molding (and using very expensive software like MoldFlow to simulate this).
Legos are made from ABS, there are decades of research and data on how ABS behaves in mold, it's relatively safe to use results from Moldflow and be pretty confident in it. Noctua is using LCP. LCP is very niche, and it sounds like they themselves are doing the research on moldability/warp/process effects. And while also being a company that produces things on timelines, the friction/side effect is that sometimes best guesses will fail and they have to start over with new molds (that's a 2 month hit usually) and months of testing. That is what they were trying so say.
I design glass-filled nylon and polycarbonate parts/assemblies with tolerances 1-5x higher than theirs. The 6-month delay they described is something I've lived through many times when we had to "cut new molds" because we couldn't salvage the first mold. (Advanced molds like these are $50k - $200k+). As a company/designer gets more experience with new materials and colorants (like their stuff with LCP), they will probably be able to hit end-goals on first try more often as they collect learnings from their failures.
Noob here. If you dont mind ive got some questions for you!
Ive recently started messing with the idea of making my own model car kits as a hobby. I understand a lot of the basics, but have never done anything like this before.
Im obviously not going to make kits in mass, but, i plan on doing injection molding using polystyrene. I do not currently have a cnc, but have been eyeing a SainSmart, though they say "can do metal under certain circumstances", but doesnt cover any of those circumstances. I also was looking at various injection machines and the price for entry is insane to me - $1000 for something that would probably burn your house down.
Anyway, to my questions..
1. Suggestions for a hobby cnc that can work aluminum? Id be willing to go as far as $2kUSD, unless theres something more that you think would serve me significantly better 2. Suggestions for a hobby injection machine that can do ~60-100g shots, that wont try to burn my house down, and doesnt cost a ton? 3. Any tips or thoughts for someone diving in to this? 4. Things i should purchase for QoL with cnc or injection molding? 5. Where does one buy materials (in hobby quantity) like aluminum block stock and polystyrene pellets?
Those are all things I've spend some time in, I'm not sure what to say. Learning curves for each one of those things are pretty dang steep. With AI you can probably speed up learning curves, but I think you will still go on many dead ends.
On the small CNC that will work with aluminum... There is a whole tradespace around how small of a feature you are trying to mill vs spindle speed vs machine stiffness & spindle runout. If you were to get something like a HASS you can sorta do it all, but when you get into the hobby stuff, you need to be very certain about what smaller set of machining limitations you will be dealing with and if they will still get you where you need to go. You need to work backwards from what actual tolerances you need to hold for the downstream thing to be able to work. (For instance, if you are making an aluminum mold, when you machine it, you will most likely be repositioning the work piece... if your machine isn't square enough so that when you flip the part on it's side or upside down, then do your next op, the part may not have been square to begin with, so now you have something that won't match the other thing you are trying to mate to.)
I build a 2'x5' 3 axis with ATC, starting from a CNCdepot concept and did my own control. I probably spend as much money on precision straight edges, levels, 90deg blocks, lapping tools, etc that were required to build a machine that could hold tolerances to 0.001", which is probably where you need to be landing to have molds that work.
I guess I am just trying to say it's a very big and ugly can of worms you are opening up.
Before buying anything, you might just want to try using firstcut/protolabs. They will machine the aluminum molds and mold the parts for you. Price per part is not going to be pretty, but it's going to be way less than spending thousands on machines that will never get you to where you want to go.
As for "desktop" molding, there is some startup now pushing their kludged together machine, maybe that is the one you are referencing. I'd stay far away from that thing. I think they were charging a couple $k for it, I feel like you need to be at 5x-10x that for anything reasonable. But at that point, the amount of power and infrastructure you need is well outside anything you'd want to put in your house or even garage. Don't really have a good answer for you here.
One thing to look at, if you are doing those model kits where like 20 parts are all in one flat sheet and you twist them to remove them, people are starting to make these on FDM 3D printers, which might be worth looking at. Now you can prototype and do production on the same machine, which at your stage, is the right place to be.
Thanks for the expert point of view. It was between "difficult polymer" and "marketing blurb". Glad it's the first and I hope anyone from Noctua reads HN and adds this small clarification.
I knew the technology itself can have tight enough tolerances that are not a concern from an engineering perspective when talking about a 0.5-0.7mm clearance, but no details about the challenges of this LCP.
Noctua wants their fans to last for many years, spinning at 2K rpm, with heat.
Being able to produce something with lower tolerance is one thing. Making it work long term at ~10 m/s and ~200G is another thing. Have you ever been in a car that brakes really hard? You'll move. Now, multiply that force by 100 and you'll get around what the fans must sustain over time.
But that's literally not what the article says. You are talking about the design - Noctua puts 0.5mm because any more and airflow is affected and performance drops. They also use a super duper polymer that mitigates everything you mentioned. The article talks about manufacturing tolerances.
> Their influence on the dimensional precision and stability of the fan blade may be minute, but if the tolerance is only a few tenths of a millimetre, being off by a tenth or two suddenly becomes a problem.
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce.
I'm not questioning their engineering but the wording of whoever wrote this article. For anything with a clearance in the tenths of a millimeter, injection moulding doesn't even sweat, let alone be at the limit. Anything better than bog standard injection moulds get you better precision than "a tenth or two" millimeters.
Let me put it another way, if achieving a 0.7mm gap is "at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce", what would you say consistently achieving 2-10um (microns) gap is? Magic? Fairy tale? Because LEGO as I said earlier is said to have 2um tolerances [1] over their decades of producing the bricks. Even a more conventional 10-20um (order of magnitude higher) still works.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47335237
> The article talks about manufacturing tolerances.
As shown by your quotes, the article clearly mentions tip clearance, and not manufacturing tolerances, which you are infering. The article doesn't characterize the thermal expansion the "super polymer" is expected to undergo under normal operating conditions[1]: something Lego doesn't contend with.
All this to say: Lego's manufacturing tolerances alone can't falsify Noctua's claims because they ultimately are different metrics.
1. I imagine the expansion rate of the fan blade radius doesn't correlate linearly with that of the shroud, so the tip clearance changes with temperature. With this constraint, not even Lego could make its manufacturing tolerances equal the fan clearance, which has to be larger if you want the fan to predictably work without jamming over a 40-degree temperature range.
I interpreted it as: with the nature of fans and the associated vibration/movement, some gap is necessary and this is the limit given the precision of injection molding.
Phrased differently: a 0.5mm gap is the minimum possible to also be able to account for the 0.1mm (or whatever) variation in injection molding.
You're right to question the wording.
> a 0.5mm gap is the minimum possible to also be able to account for the 0.1mm (or whatever) variation in injection molding.
The Noctua engineers definitely designed the clearances to perfection and accounted for the variation in the manufacturing process, I don't doubt that.
The article says "being off by a tenth or two suddenly becomes a problem", the 0.1mm you also thought of. But that's the point of contention, 0.1mm is the tolerance from bog standard, cheap injection moulding. The limit of consistent precision is in the single digit microns. Noctua doesn't need anything near that.
Unless working with that polymer is difficult and comes with higher tolerances, this is probably just a case of the article's author trying to pump up stats. To bring it more to the techie world, it's something along the lines of "130nm transistors are at the absolute limit of what EUV lithography can consistently achieve".
Because it's spinning blades among manufacturing tolerances you also have to account for the blades expanding when rotating at high speed, and possibly working with 40-50 °C air from the components
I don't think that's it. You're referring to tolerances specified in the design. The article talks about the tolerances the manufacturing technique allows, and this process is an order of magnitude better than this article says. The material used and the design of the part influence how much it deforms in practice far more than the injection moulding process itself.
In their own description of Sterrox® LCP they say it has "extreme tensile strength, exceptionally low thermal expansion coefficient, high environmental inertia and excellent dimensional stability". With such an advanced polymer any deformation in operation has to be a rounding error compared to the manufacturing tolerances.
If all advertising was this interesting maybe I wouldn't hate it
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.
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.
Noctua also makes silver fans
They have matte grey, but silver metallic on cars is pretty different. Think of the brushed appearance of a Tesla Cybertruck or a DeLorean.
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.
Okay, I'll bite.
What is it you think they're doing wrong?
Does another vendor satisfy your criticisms?
Why do you think they don't optimize for things like performance when they often win performance competitions against other vendors for both sound mitigation and airflow?
Do you know they have a specific high efficiency line?
Have you ever had a noctua fan fail where you think another vendor fan would not have?
What makes you think they don't?
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.
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.
Common? Less than 5% of the market. Is that common?
They typically don't require any custom one-off parts to be made, just mass-produced off-the-shelf stuff, so they're common enough.
It seems that common means something very different to you and I. Less than 5% of something is common? To me that sounds like the definition of uncommon!
Black cars show road dust immediately. White cars don't. I image it's similar for computer fans
White cars get filthy just as readily.
Dust can actually be more visible on black than on white.
Because it's a fan and I don't want to see it, and if I must see it, I don't want it to have any color of it's own since chances are very low that whatever color it is just happens to be the perfect addition to all my other posessions next to it.
I don't understand why anyone would think this is an obsession with black.
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...
I've had a few experiences with retrobrighting and having it come out really nicely, then after being stored away in a box for a couple of years it's somehow yellow again. It's probably different with different plastics but it doesn't seem so clear cut that it's always the UV light causing it.
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.
In the uncommon event that something in your computer catches fire, the flame retardant keeps the fire from igniting the otherwise flammable plastic and potentially burning your house down.
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.
I always thought the grey Noctua Redux fans were their nicest looking offerring, despite being their lower end. I don't understand how they settled on that.
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
Maybe it is just my limited production knowledge, but wouldn't it be possible to injection mold a bigger part and then mechanically shave off the last few fractions of a millimeter using any number of ways? Tooling costs too high. But in the simplest form you could essentially spin the fan against some adjustable abbrasive to shave off the final bits.
Granted, there may be other places in which the molding precision may matter, which would make this an impractical solution.
The fan blades deform & vibrate under rotation & airflow. Controlling that deformation is the point of the use of materials like Noctua's Sterrox LCP or other flglass-fiber reinforced LCP materials in other premium fans. So lower clearance isn't just a matter of manufacturing tolerance
Noctua talks about it on this page: https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/sterroxr-liquid-crys...
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.
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
Yup, but it rarely does that.
Transcoding multiple video streams, running a VM and running various other tasks, mine rarely passes 10, and is currently sitting at 7 (only 2 transcodes at this time).
It’s 30 day average is 5.
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.
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.
I take it you've never dealt with Noctua for warranty issues (or any issues).
They go above and beyond.
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.
For the same reason a winglet is used on an airplane, or a ducted fan is more efficient than a propeller: there is a large pressure difference on the end of a wing or propeller, and the high pressure side will jump around to the low pressure side and cause a tip vortex. This causes an induced drag, which moves the lift vector backwards (as drag, but not skin friction drag). Higher aspect (think wind turbine blades or glider wings) minimise this, as do winglets or ducting.
You are talking about velocities 100x faster than the air in your chassis is moving. You might be right about the effect, but it seems so tiny in this application.
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.
which is why you went with Delta and not Nocturna I would think? Deltas are fine in an otherwise noisy environment but they’re misery in say a bedroom at night.
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 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 want the quitest fans and whether they are 10 or 20 bucks is irrelevant. We are talking about tiny amounts of money here for something thats gonna run for 5y+
> except for things like server systems that run 24/7 in my bedroom where noise and durability are top priority
... which is why I only have a few of them, rather than replacing the fans in everything I own. But for the things that need them, there's just nothing else as good.
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.
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.
Exactly this. Most of the time you get poorly researched articles (or nowadays, AI slop) about some topics only very remotely related to what the company actually does.
Here, the article is about something interesting that the company has expertise in (and even "insider info"), shows off that they do serious engineering, and is interesting to the target audience.
If I'm buying a 12V or 5V fan, it'll almost certainly be a Noctua. I don't know if they're the best, but they certainly seem to be among the better brands, and at something like $25 for a fan, they are certainly not overpriced enough to justify the effort of researching something better.
So whoever you are at Noctua, congratulations! This + the 3d model release are likely really paying off.
Noctua are pricey but they also provide service that is in my experience unmatched.
We have a few hundred of their coolers in use and I have never had an issue getting warranty replacements from them with fans. The process is simple and they ship out a new fan ( I have warrantied probably 10 - 15 of the fans)
Agreed, this should really be the standard for marketing materials, no flashy promises, just cool technical and curious details.
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.
The other thing to consider is that while China is known for making cheap items for the American market (because that is what Americans want) they have become experts in the tool and die needed to make those cheap items.
If you want top class injection molding tooling / machines or process you are probably going to contract a Chinese company to do it.
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.
Yes you provide a great example of binning and market separation. Though I think in this case there's some limiting factors that make it infeasible to bin these fancy Noctua fan rotors including: 1) tooling have limited lifetime and will get sloppier and worse yields as time goes on. It's inefficient to use precious cycles of a precise tool and die on producing lower grade parts. 2) the material itself is likely more expensive than what industrial/lower grade use cases require. Why use reject Noctua when you can get regular crappy plastic for 1/500th the cost? 3) I expect Noctua stuff to be a much lower volume than lower cost/quality vendors so the volume of Noctua rejects is likely too low for a company to dedicate a product line using it. 4) brand/marketing reasons
Another obvious use case of binning is for microchips where the same die can be "wounded" to create multiple product variants that target different market segments, and also yield improvement from being able to isolate and disable an area of the die that are defective. However improving the manufacturability and yield itself is still fundamentally important
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.
As far as air purifiers are concerned, there are well-regarded designs you can buy that use PC fans (you can order without fans and put in your choice of fans) and furnace filters. I just got a North Box Polaris: https://aidankepo.wixsite.com/northboxsystems. Luggable supplies an equivalent for Americans.
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.
They do have industrial fan series
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 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
Any examples for these cheaper brands with same performance?
BeQuiet for example. Also others have mentioned Arctic which is even cheaper but I have no experience with them. BeQuiet I do, I have 7 of their fans.
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.
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.
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
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
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”
[flagged]
Some of my friends are beige
I've heard that the black fans go to more shows, but the white fans buy more albums.
Booooooooooo
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?
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.
Anecdotally, when my Xtrfy MZ1 mouse cable started shorting 5V to ground, they required a similar process (cutting the cable) before sending a replacement.
This was their response when I asked why: > Yes this policy was put in place because there was multiple instances of people reselling their faulty products after receiving a replacement.
> The secondhand buyers then reached out to us, let down to have received a broken product.
I'd imagine it's a similar reason for Noctua.
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.
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?
Yup.
Yep! Made me look a few times to make sure they weren't actually spinning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's refreshing to see something without any AI slop for once. The fact that this aspect is so exciting is so sad.
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.
Nah I mean like they partner up to design that part for specific models, it would be hard to make a generic one-size-fits-all given how much PCBs differ, though now that I've looked into it it seems that they currently just have the 5080 available which is odd.
https://www.noctua.at/en/products/asus-geforce-rtx-5080-noct...
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.
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.
> coil whine lottery
This was a fun revelation when I got into watercooling. You might not hear coil whine over a gpus fans. But remove the fans and put it under load and whoo boy.
So this confuses social media discussions on the topic by mixing together everyone's reports, regardless of their level of acoustic masking. "My card has no whine!" says the guy with three 2000 rpm fans going etc.
Gpu waterblocks seem to be shifting towards fully enclosed "tomb" style and I can't help but wonder if coil whine contributed to that decision.
But on topic, I had seven a12x25 in my last build, two a12 and four a20 in my current build. They are exceptional. A computer is as quiet as it's loudest part. If your care about noise, why would you ever skimp on the moving parts.
I think GPU waterblocks are becoming fully enclosed because there are so many hot components on the back of the GPU now. They were designed to rely on random case air turbulence to passively cool, but there typically isn't much airflow over the back of the card when the stock cooler is replaced with a waterblock.
Problem becomes worse when the cards are driven harder because there's more cooling capacity from the watercooling in the front, but the passive cooling capacity on the back is still the same.
I used to stick a giant fin block on the back of the card to keep temps there reasonable. I'd love it if actively cooled backplates become the norm for watercooling.
The Arctic fans are known to hum at certain speeds. This may, or may not matter to you, and certainly depends on how low the "noise floor" in workspace is.
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.
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)
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/
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.
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.
If you're okay with some of your fans being noisy and/or inefficient, I'm sure you can work with flimsy tolerances.
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.
> 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.
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)_/¯
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.
The quality difference between various fans is absolutely huge.
I can put in a few Noctua fans and be confident they are going to last 5+ years of running 24x7. Or I can put in 25% cheaper fans and be pretty much guaranteed one or more is going to fail within the first couple years.
In my opinion, fans are never a place to cheap out when building a PC - server or desktop, whatever.
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.
The difficulty is clearance between two moving parts, with blades that deform slightly due to air pressure (at different amounts for different speeds) and with thermal expansion.
That’s not what the article says, they relate it to reproducibility of the manufacturing process: “Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce”. Though maybe they misphrased that, as for example Lego pieces have significantly smaller tolerances and are also manufactured using injection molding.
Clearance vs tolerance is important. Clearance includes all of the things I said.
Yes, but that’s not what the article is saying.
It's like the gold plated headphone jacks they used to sell to audiophiles.
Not in the gaming scene at all, but my thoughts were, "Why isn't black the first product developed?" Isn't that a standard, and probably has more consumer interest?
And I don't understand why they can't just mold all the colors in parallel. If brown is in production, why can't they experiment with black at the same time?
> These surface vibrations are so minute that they are not critical from a mechanical point of view (unlike e.g. vibrations due to imbalance), but they can cause serious acoustic problems. The reason for this is that when the fan is running, there is a pressure difference between the intake and the outlet side of the fan (lower pressure on the upside of the blades, higher pressure on the downside of the blades). From an aero-acoustic point of view, this situation is similar to a stereo speaker where there is higher pressure inside the chassis and lower pressure outside the chassis. In both cases, the pressure difference leads to an efficient acoustic coupling, so the surface vibration of either the blades of the fan or the membrane of the speaker is transferred to the air.
I love rotary woofers :) I hope to get one some day.
Wow this is a nice read. I never thought injection moulding precision, relative to the dimensions of the object, to be in the same ballpark of what you can achieve with photolithography in chip manufacturing. This of course makes sense because we are at the end limited by the same principles of mechanical inaccuracy.
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.
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 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
> 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.
I'd prefer no glass, but nevertheless just bought two glass cases because no alternatives that met my requirements were available:
* Fractal Design Torrent Compact - Best cooling available for a GPU-free, air-cooled CPU system. There exists a non-glass version, but it's unavailable in North America.
* Thermaltake The Tower 300 - Smallest form-factor case that will fit a 420mm AIO cooler. Only available with glass sides.
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 had once a mesh case, i forgot by who, but it wasn't the cheapest. Too noisy if you ask me.
The one you linked is all mesh so it doesn't capture noise anywhere. It's great if you like it, but I'd never consider it.
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 :)
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.
Yes quality. I forgot the Chinese manufacturer that resells their bricks to pantasia or moldking. But the quality especially for metal or translucent bricks is on par and in a lot of cases better than the Lego offerings. And calling Lego a toy company is a stretch. Their main demographic is 30-50 year olds with disposable income.
Just want to mention I have no beef or issue with Lego. I say that you get great offerings from other brands as well now.
Brittle Brown!
LEGO issued an official apology and you can get replacements for your brown bricks made before 2018. (=
https://brickshow.com/2018/12/problem-lego-reddish-brown-bri...
This is an interesting article, but why don’t they just start with black fans? Marketing? Feels like we know their brand now, they can lose the hideous brown and just build black fans to start with.
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.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
WHY SWEAT IT? Your brand is a non-black fan. I'd stay with that. Why confuse people. Maybe trademark your fans colors.
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.
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.
False, if you're printing PLA or something sure, but you can print all sorts of exotic fiber reinforced materials, and maybe if you're clever enough you can even use the anisotropy of the print to give you extra strength in the relevant directions. I'm not claiming that it's possible to 3D print noctua quality fans, especially on consumer FDM machines, but I think "inability to find a rigid enough material" is not going to be the failure mode, at least not on it's own. I could believe "inability to find a rigid enough material that can also get the required surface quality".
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.
It really does not have any chance to help. Golf ball dimples don't like magically make the thing better at air, if they did don't you think you'd see these sorts of features on fans or other airfoils to begin with?
You want dimples to create turbulent air that stays attached for longer, this INCREASES skin friction but since the golf ball is a bluff body it's friction losses are dominated by form drag, not skin friction. Putting dimples on a wing will drastically lower it's lift to drag ratio (which could in some cases be desirable, but it will absolutely not make the wing more efficient).
Of course all of this is moot anyway because the dimples need to be tuned to the Reynolds number you're expecting to operate at. Random surface imperfection wouldn't help even if it could help, which it can't.
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.
Isn’t the Lego Group incredible at this? Their parts are tiny, all different colors, and their tolerances are incredible.
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.
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.
Interestingly enough, I just read about the brown Lego issues earlier today: https://blocksmag.com/brittle-bricks-the-lego-groups-biggest...
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.
This is a delightful post, I'll be sticky with the classic colours letting them proudly display what they are
Just paint it black, no one will care, you'll save money and sell more units.
Reminds me of this story from lego:
His dad made him redo the lot.Source: https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/b-the-beginning-...
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.
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.
Yes. In marketing it’s called observability, and it’s why even high end designers are writing their brand names in huge letters on goods (well also to improve IP protection)
Apple’s white earphone cables are a classic example. Back in the iPod days everyone could tell who had an iPod versus off brands (many of whom, of course, existed long before iPod).
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.
A large part of their business is also industrial applications. I doubt industrial customers care much about the colour and more and volume discounts and ability to provide custom solutions.
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.
Which is why they focus on getting a fan out before adding a second color
Calling people idiots for having different taste? You truly are a muppetman.
It's surprising that there's enough of a market for a fan in any alternative color that it's worthwhile to spend this amount of development time on it. There are enough marginal fan purchasers who don't buy the original colored ones and will buy the black one?
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.
Because I like the brown/beige colors?
Their fans are expensive but work well. I am fine with the normal colored versions.
I love how we've come full circle and started wood paneling our electronics again.
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
Like how USSR had issues getting black bakelite components for guns.
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
Yes and no. At a holistic level yes but for the product Noctua produces they've designed in a specific tip clearance which they want to maintain with the different pigments for their efficiency/acoustic targets.
> 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.
They aren't actually doing any molding themselves, the manufacturing is outsourced to companies in China and Taiwan, there is the real molding expertise.
I mean the point the article makes - black plastic has different characteristics to brown and beige plastics, so they need to be developed separately - seems reasonable on the surface, but that doesn't explain why they do the "novelty" colours first. Especially from the way it's worded, it sound like they might have to redo the moulds going brown -> black but potentially not the other way round. So overall, it just seems like the whole article is just PR spin.
WHITE VERSIONS PLEASE
Blue. Make blue fans.
Here is a mirror of the article since the "vercel"(?) anti-human wall is not letting me through, https://archive.is/y5zN1
>Why does it take so long to release black fan versions? 30/04/2026
>People often wonder why the chromax.black versions of our fans take longer to launch after the classic colours. In a nutshell, the reason is that this is less like painting a wooden fence, 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.
>Before we dive in, we need to understand how PC fans are injection moulded and produced. At its simplest, injection moulding involves melting plastic and forcing it into a steel mould, also called “tooling”, to cool down and harden into a specific shape.
>However, for high-precision engineering, this is less like making ice cubes and more like baking a complex soufflé where every degree of temperature and milligram of ingredients matters. The flow rate, cooling time, and pressure must be perfectly balanced to ensure the plastic crystallises, cools correctly, and holds its structural integrity and dimensional precision. When you introduce a new variable, like colouring pigments, that delicate balance is disrupted.
>While this is generally much less of a problem for fan designs that utilise relatively large tolerances and standard engineering plastics such as fibreglass reinforced PBT or PA, it becomes highly critical when building fans with tighter tolerances using more advanced polymers such as Sterrox® LCP. With our NF-A12x25, NF-A12x25 G2 and NF-A14x25 G2 fans that feature impellers made of this material, 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. At this extreme tolerance level, even minor process variations and material-related factors, such as the addition of colour pigments, become highly relevant. Their influence on the dimensional precision and stability of the fan blade may be minute, but if the tolerance is only a few tenths of a millimetre, being off by a tenth or two suddenly becomes a problem.
>Colour pigments impact the injection moulding of these high-precision fans because the pigment particles behave like tiny solid fillers inside the melt. Their size, surface area, and thermal behaviour directly influence how the polymer flows into the mould, as well as how it cools and solidifies. Black pigments, which are typically carbon black, behave very differently from the beige or brown metal-oxide pigments used in our standard fans. Carbon black particles are much smaller and have a significantly higher total surface area, resulting in stronger interactions with the polymer melt. While beige and brown metal-oxide pigments are larger and have a weaker effect, carbon black alters the melt viscosity, heat absorption, and crystallisation behaviour more significantly.
>When crafting the very first mould for a new high-performance fan, multiple tuning iterations are required until the geometry, cooling, gating, and moulding parameters are perfectly stabilised. In case we run into severe issues, this may even require starting from scratch. Regardless of whether it’s regular tuning iterations or complete redesigns, these hard-earned lessons feed directly into the design of the new mould for the black version, even though it always has to be further adjusted to account for the different moulding behaviour. Since these tuning iterations and, even more so, the worst case situation where the tooling has to be changed so significantly that it has to be redone from scratch, are time-consuming and costly, creating the toolings for the black versions at the same time as those for the regular versions would introduce significant extra cost and risk. To avoid this, we only initiate the production of the toolings for black versions after the mass production of the beige and brown parts is already running smoothly and stably.
>On top of the complex process of creating and tuning the moulds, our approval and validation process for new fans includes a rigorous, long-term high-temperature test. This ensures that our fans will deliver top-tier performance far beyond their 6-year warranty, but the test alone requires several months to run, with additional time needed for preparation and evaluation. Since this validation process must be repeated for the black versions, it introduces a minimum delay of around 6 months between the release of the brown and beige fans and their chromax.black counterparts. As soon as we have to go through some iterations of mould tuning, the delay will be longer, and if we have to re-run the validation tests, we’re already looking at a minimum delay of 12 months.
>At the time of writing, we’re just about to release the chromax.black version of the NF-A12x25 G2 – around 10 months after the release of the regular beige and brown version. Hopefully, the insights we’ve shared in this post help to explain that this is actually pretty close to as fast as possible.
>PS: We’ve only covered delays that are caused by the tooling creation and validation process in this blog post. However, there is a wide range of other factors such as the availability of other components, production capacity restrictions or logistical issues that can play a role as well. For example, during the three-year gap that we had between the regular and black version of the first-generation NF-A12x25, we were in the midst of the global pandemic and dealing with a highly challenging combination of strong demand, disrupted supply chains and logistical havoc, which caused delays that went far beyond tooling-related issues.
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"Because we make the brown ones first"
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.
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.
Almost everything you buy "does not cost that much", that's how companyies make money.
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.
I don’t agree, it seems pretty normal.
I also don’t really like policing writing style when there aren’t any glaring errors.
> 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 know whether it's a sign of it being AI or not but I did find it a bit weird that within the first 3 sentences there were 2 different "less like X and more like Y" statements:
> the reason is that this is less like painting a wooden fence, 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.
and
> this is less like making ice cubes and more like baking a complex soufflé where every degree of temperature and milligram of ingredients matters.
Not a problem, but it felt odd enough that I noticed it, so maybe that's what got them thinking it was AI written/assisted?
I consider it very well written, perhaps too well written, I think we are departing the AI slop era. I’m not decrying it as slop not worth reading, I just think it’s an interesting development.