9 ms·

Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?

778 points by buildbot 5mo ago

j16sdiz 5mo ago
If you need that kind of precision, yes. But I don't think they really need that.
- vasco 5mo ago
  They want them to be really silent. There's more details here: https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/nf-a12x25-technical-backgrounds https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/nf-a12x25-technical-...
  - LiamPowell 5mo ago
    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/ https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/4/ [2]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/ https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/ [3]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/229/ https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/229/
    - techpression 5mo ago
      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.
      - adrian_b 5mo ago
        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.
    - sho_hn 5mo ago
      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.
      - kenhwang 5mo ago
        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.
- LiamPowell 5mo ago
  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.
  - Strom 5mo ago
    > 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.
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    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)_/¯
- sheiyei 5mo ago
  If you're okay with some of your fans being noisy and/or inefficient, I'm sure you can work with flimsy tolerances.
- sho_hn 5mo ago
  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 https://eikehein.com/pc/pc2.webp
  - Ekaros 5mo ago
    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.
    - sho_hn 5mo ago
      Indeed. Also, if their product ever does enshittify, the shit would truly hit the fan.
- accelbred 5mo ago
  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.
  - gblargg 5mo ago
    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.
    - VorpalWay 5mo ago
      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.
    - moffkalast 5mo ago
      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.
      - embedding-shape 5mo ago
        > 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/noctua-creates-a-monstrous-cooler-for-nvidias-gh200-grace-hopper-superchip 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.
- kenhwang 5mo ago
  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.
  - LiamPowell 5mo ago
    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.
    - kenhwang 5mo ago
      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.
    - BoingBoomTschak 5mo ago
      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.
- xboxnolifes 5mo ago
  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.
- dopa42365 5mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- amelius 5mo ago
  It's like the gold plated headphone jacks they used to sell to audiophiles.
- layer8 5mo ago
  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.
  - brookst 5mo ago
    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.
    - layer8 5mo ago
      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.
      - brookst 5mo ago
        Clearance vs tolerance is important. Clearance includes all of the things I said.
        layer8 5mo ago
        Yes, but that’s not what the article is saying.
- monster_truck 5mo ago
  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)
- lm411 5mo ago
  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.
SwellJoe 5mo ago
I like the brown ones. Everything is black, it's dumb, and I'm happy to have any contrast.
- vasco 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - csto12 5mo ago
    Booooooooooo
  - dotancohen 5mo ago
    I've heard that the black fans go to more shows, but the white fans buy more albums.
  - 0-_-0 5mo ago
    Some of my friends are beige
- petepete 5mo ago
  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.
  - wolvoleo 5mo ago
    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.
deleted 5mo ago
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ReptileMan 5mo ago
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.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo ago
  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.
- adrian_b 5mo ago
  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.
  - thot_experiment 5mo ago
    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".
- luma 5mo ago
  Noctua is awesome in a lot of ways, one of them is offering full CAD models: https://www.noctua.at/en/3d-cad-models https://www.noctua.at/en/3d-cad-models
  - kenhwang 5mo ago
    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.
jFriedensreich 5mo ago
Why would someone want a beige or brown fan? If it is that complicated why not only make black ones?
- Guvante 5mo ago
  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.
  - muppetman 5mo ago
    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.
    - Hendrikto 5mo ago
      Calling people idiots for having different taste? You truly are a muppetman.
    - Guvante 5mo ago
      Which is why they focus on getting a fan out before adding a second color
- ahoka 5mo ago
  Why do Ferraris seem to almost always made in red?
  - aabhay 5mo ago
    Because nobody wants a brown one?
    - TiredOfLife 5mo ago
      Brown is for Lamboghini https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro/lamborghini-has-restored-beautifully-brown-miura-sv-and-you-must-stare-it https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro/lamborghini-has-resto...
Havoc 5mo ago
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.
- prism56 5mo ago
  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).
  - Havoc 5mo ago
    > 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
    - prism56 5mo ago
      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.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  > 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.
- anticorporate 5mo ago
  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.
matteason 5mo ago
Anyone else getting the optical illusion of the fans spinning in your peripheral vision while reading the top paragraphs?
- nsowz 5mo ago
  Yep! Made me look a few times to make sure they weren't actually spinning.
- Hamuko 5mo ago
  Yup.
fxtentacle 5mo ago
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.
- wolvoleo 5mo ago
  Yeah it's more marketing than anything IMO.
  - Simran-B 5mo ago
    Wondering if it's just the marketing that Noctua did, and the actual mold and process engineering left to some fab in China?
    - creesch 5mo ago
      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.
Tepix 5mo ago
Blue. Make blue fans.
gblargg 5mo ago
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?
- imiric 5mo ago
  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.
  - wolvoleo 5mo ago
    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.
imiric 5mo ago
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.
wolvoleo 5mo ago
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.
- VorpalWay 5mo ago
  Just make a brown case (maybe with some walnut accents?) and the brown Noctua fans will be a perfect fit.
  - wolvoleo 5mo ago
    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.
    - VorpalWay 5mo ago
      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.
  - Hamuko 5mo ago
    Buy a Fractal North. https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/charcoal-black/ https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch... https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/chalk-white/ https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...
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mikalauskas 5mo ago
I don't buy it. It's just a plastic PC fan with some bearings which does not cost that much
- moontear 5mo ago
  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.
- toasty228 5mo ago
  Almost everything you buy "does not cost that much", that's how companyies make money.
- Strom 5mo ago
  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.
- burnt-resistor 5mo ago
  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.
SipitenoMK 5mo ago
[flagged]
thot_experiment 5mo ago
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.
- moffkalast 5mo ago
  They have many dedicated fans, both mechanical and biological.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- izacus 5mo ago
  Yeah, their products are expensive but every one of them proved high quality and reliable.
- navane 5mo ago
  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.
  - herbst 5mo ago
    I get why. But that still seems wasteful
    - layer8 5mo ago
      If the old one could still be used, they shouldn’t send a new one anyway.
      - breakingcups 5mo ago
        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.
nopurpose 5mo ago
My layman question is why plastic cant be painted? Case temperatures are not that high and there are no plastic parts rubbbing.
- Strom 5mo ago
  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.
  - amelius 5mo ago
    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.
larusso 5mo ago
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.
- Strom 5mo ago
  Overtook Lego? In what way, quality of the bricks? Because Lego is still the largest toy company in the world by revenue.
  - larusso 5mo ago
    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.
    - 10000truths 5mo ago
      I know this is an old comment, but I'm curious what manufacturer you're referring to - is it Lepin?
- dbg31415 5mo ago
  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-bricks https://brickshow.com/2018/12/problem-lego-reddish-brown-bri...
gspr 5mo ago
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.
- ewesddsds 5mo ago
  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.
mrcsharp 5mo ago
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.
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- pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
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  - pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
    Haha, maybe we can help him
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
      idk if he wants to be helped
qwertytyyuu 5mo ago
This is a delightful post, I'll be sticky with the classic colours letting them proudly display what they are
burnt-resistor 5mo ago
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.
andyjohnson0 5mo ago
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.
- nolok 5mo ago
  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)
hahhhha500012 5mo ago
[dead]
esjeon 5mo ago
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.
- archon810 5mo ago
  It's refreshing to see something without any AI slop for once. The fact that this aspect is so exciting is so sad.
randerson 5mo ago
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.
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  They do have industrial fan series
- awakeasleep 5mo ago
  https://a.co/d/0eRatANA 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.
- matsemann 5mo ago
  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.
- cheschire 5mo ago
  I’m getting tired of the grayscale colors of the 2010’s too. I could use more brown and beige in my life.
- monster_truck 5mo ago
  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
  - lostlogin 5mo ago
    I don’t think we need complete silence? Surely we can have something better?
PunchyHamster 5mo ago
I wonder why they can't just get the last half a mm of accuracy by just grinding down the tips
- sheiyei 5mo ago
  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.
- layer8 5mo ago
  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.
ninjagoo 5mo ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego?#Design [2] changed 'tolerances' to 'clearances' per note below
- sheiyei 5mo ago
  0.5mm is the clearance, not the tolerance. Tolerance must be significantly smaller than clearance.
  - ninjagoo 5mo ago
    yes, good point. fixed.
- cbondurant 5mo ago
  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.
  - Arch-TK 5mo ago
    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).
nottorp 5mo ago
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?
- vladvasiliu 5mo ago
  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.
  - nottorp 5mo ago
    Maybe, but it seems like a waste to glue the paxmate to the inside of the glass :)
- Levitating 5mo ago
  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 https://www.noctua.at/en/products/nh-d15
- SloopJon 5mo ago
  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 https://ssupd.co/products/cases-meshroom-s-v2
  - nottorp 5mo ago
ufocia 5mo ago
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.
- lyu07282 5mo ago
  They aren't actually doing any molding themselves, the manufacturing is outsourced to companies in China and Taiwan, there is the real molding expertise.
ModernMech 5mo ago
I love how we've come full circle and started wood paneling our electronics again.
cr125rider 5mo ago
Isn’t the Lego Group incredible at this? Their parts are tiny, all different colors, and their tolerances are incredible.
- alfanick 5mo ago
  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.
- kllrnohj 5mo ago
  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.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Interestingly enough, I just read about the brown Lego issues earlier today: https://blocksmag.com/brittle-bricks-the-lego-groups-biggest-failure/ https://blocksmag.com/brittle-bricks-the-lego-groups-biggest...
rconti 5mo ago
"Because we make the brown ones first"
mark-r 5mo ago
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?
cjbgkagh 5mo ago
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.
- fwipsy 5mo ago
  "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-like-chatgpt https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
  - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
    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.
- dangus 5mo ago
  I don’t agree, it seems pretty normal. I also don’t really like policing writing style when there aren’t any glaring errors.
- stronglikedan 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
    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.
binyu 5mo ago
> 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
dbg31415 5mo ago
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.
ralferoo 5mo ago
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.
anikom15 5mo ago
Their fans are expensive but work well. I am fine with the normal colored versions.
__mharrison__ 5mo ago
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?
- archon810 5mo ago
  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?
maxglute 5mo ago
Like how USSR had issues getting black bakelite components for guns.
bgnn 5mo ago
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.
jollymonATX 5mo ago
WHITE VERSIONS PLEASE
superkuh 5mo ago
Here is a mirror of the article since the "vercel"(?) anti-human wall is not letting me through, https://archive.is/y5zN1 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.
delfugal 5mo ago
WHY SWEAT IT? Your brand is a non-black fan. I'd stay with that. Why confuse people. Maybe trademark your fans colors.
ProAm 5mo ago
Just paint it black, no one will care, you'll save money and sell more units.
- 1024bits 5mo ago
  Reminds me of this story from lego: I gave the ducks just two coats of varnish, not three as we usually do! His dad made him redo the lot. Source: https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/b-the-beginning-of-the-lego-group https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/b-the-beginning-...
  - ProAm 5mo ago
    That is a pretty cool historical site for lego! Thanks for sharing it.
LoganDark 5mo ago
> 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.

778 points by buildbot 5mo ago

j16sdiz 5mo ago

If you need that kind of precision, yes. But I don't think they really need that.

vasco 5mo ago
They want them to be really silent. There's more details here: https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/nf-a12x25-technical-backgrounds https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/nf-a12x25-technical-...
- LiamPowell 5mo ago
  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/ https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/4/ [2]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/ https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/ [3]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/229/ https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/229/
  - techpression 5mo ago
    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.
    - adrian_b 5mo ago
      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.
  - sho_hn 5mo ago
    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.
    - kenhwang 5mo ago
      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.
LiamPowell 5mo ago
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.
- Strom 5mo ago
  > 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.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  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)_/¯
sheiyei 5mo ago
If you're okay with some of your fans being noisy and/or inefficient, I'm sure you can work with flimsy tolerances.
sho_hn 5mo ago
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 https://eikehein.com/pc/pc2.webp
- Ekaros 5mo ago
  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.
  - sho_hn 5mo ago
    Indeed. Also, if their product ever does enshittify, the shit would truly hit the fan.
accelbred 5mo ago
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.
- gblargg 5mo ago
  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.
  - VorpalWay 5mo ago
    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.
  - moffkalast 5mo ago
    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.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      > 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/noctua-creates-a-monstrous-cooler-for-nvidias-gh200-grace-hopper-superchip 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.
kenhwang 5mo ago
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.
- LiamPowell 5mo ago
  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.
  - kenhwang 5mo ago
    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.
  - BoingBoomTschak 5mo ago
    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.
xboxnolifes 5mo ago
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.
dopa42365 5mo ago
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.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
amelius 5mo ago
It's like the gold plated headphone jacks they used to sell to audiophiles.
layer8 5mo ago
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.
- brookst 5mo ago
  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.
  - layer8 5mo ago
    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.
    - brookst 5mo ago
      Clearance vs tolerance is important. Clearance includes all of the things I said.
      - layer8 5mo ago
        Yes, but that’s not what the article is saying.
monster_truck 5mo ago
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)
lm411 5mo ago
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.

SwellJoe 5mo ago

I like the brown ones. Everything is black, it's dumb, and I'm happy to have any contrast.

vasco 5mo ago
[flagged]
- csto12 5mo ago
  Booooooooooo
- dotancohen 5mo ago
  I've heard that the black fans go to more shows, but the white fans buy more albums.
- 0-_-0 5mo ago
  Some of my friends are beige
petepete 5mo ago
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.
- wolvoleo 5mo ago
  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.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

ReptileMan 5mo ago

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.

MagicMoonlight 5mo ago
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.
adrian_b 5mo ago
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.
- thot_experiment 5mo ago
  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".
luma 5mo ago
Noctua is awesome in a lot of ways, one of them is offering full CAD models: https://www.noctua.at/en/3d-cad-models https://www.noctua.at/en/3d-cad-models
- kenhwang 5mo ago
  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.

jFriedensreich 5mo ago

Why would someone want a beige or brown fan? If it is that complicated why not only make black ones?

Guvante 5mo ago
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.
- muppetman 5mo ago
  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.
  - Hendrikto 5mo ago
    Calling people idiots for having different taste? You truly are a muppetman.
  - Guvante 5mo ago
    Which is why they focus on getting a fan out before adding a second color
ahoka 5mo ago
Why do Ferraris seem to almost always made in red?
- aabhay 5mo ago
  Because nobody wants a brown one?
  - TiredOfLife 5mo ago
    Brown is for Lamboghini https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro/lamborghini-has-restored-beautifully-brown-miura-sv-and-you-must-stare-it https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro/lamborghini-has-resto...

Havoc 5mo ago

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.

prism56 5mo ago
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).
- Havoc 5mo ago
  > 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
  - prism56 5mo ago
    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.
embedding-shape 5mo ago
> 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.
anticorporate 5mo ago
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.

matteason 5mo ago

Anyone else getting the optical illusion of the fans spinning in your peripheral vision while reading the top paragraphs?

nsowz 5mo ago
Yep! Made me look a few times to make sure they weren't actually spinning.
Hamuko 5mo ago
Yup.

fxtentacle 5mo ago

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.

wolvoleo 5mo ago
Yeah it's more marketing than anything IMO.
- Simran-B 5mo ago
  Wondering if it's just the marketing that Noctua did, and the actual mold and process engineering left to some fab in China?
  - creesch 5mo ago
    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.

Tepix 5mo ago

Blue. Make blue fans.

gblargg 5mo ago

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?

imiric 5mo ago
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.
- wolvoleo 5mo ago
  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.

imiric 5mo ago

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.

wolvoleo 5mo ago

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.

VorpalWay 5mo ago
Just make a brown case (maybe with some walnut accents?) and the brown Noctua fans will be a perfect fit.
- wolvoleo 5mo ago
  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.
  - VorpalWay 5mo ago
    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.
- Hamuko 5mo ago
  Buy a Fractal North. https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/charcoal-black/ https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch... https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/chalk-white/ https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

mikalauskas 5mo ago

I don't buy it. It's just a plastic PC fan with some bearings which does not cost that much

moontear 5mo ago
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.
toasty228 5mo ago
Almost everything you buy "does not cost that much", that's how companyies make money.
Strom 5mo ago
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.
burnt-resistor 5mo ago
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.

SipitenoMK 5mo ago

[flagged]

thot_experiment 5mo ago

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.

moffkalast 5mo ago
They have many dedicated fans, both mechanical and biological.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
izacus 5mo ago
Yeah, their products are expensive but every one of them proved high quality and reliable.
navane 5mo ago
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.
- herbst 5mo ago
  I get why. But that still seems wasteful
  - layer8 5mo ago
    If the old one could still be used, they shouldn’t send a new one anyway.
    - breakingcups 5mo ago
      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.

nopurpose 5mo ago

My layman question is why plastic cant be painted? Case temperatures are not that high and there are no plastic parts rubbbing.

Strom 5mo ago
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.
- amelius 5mo ago
  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.

larusso 5mo ago

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.

Strom 5mo ago
Overtook Lego? In what way, quality of the bricks? Because Lego is still the largest toy company in the world by revenue.
- larusso 5mo ago
  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.
  - 10000truths 5mo ago
    I know this is an old comment, but I'm curious what manufacturer you're referring to - is it Lepin?
dbg31415 5mo ago
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-bricks https://brickshow.com/2018/12/problem-lego-reddish-brown-bri...

gspr 5mo ago

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.

ewesddsds 5mo ago
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.

mrcsharp 5mo ago

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.

pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago

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pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
damn... you should change password...
- pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
  Haha, maybe we can help him
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
    idk if he wants to be helped

qwertytyyuu 5mo ago

This is a delightful post, I'll be sticky with the classic colours letting them proudly display what they are

burnt-resistor 5mo ago

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.

andyjohnson0 5mo ago

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.

nolok 5mo ago
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)

hahhhha500012 5mo ago

[dead]

esjeon 5mo ago

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.

archon810 5mo ago
It's refreshing to see something without any AI slop for once. The fact that this aspect is so exciting is so sad.

randerson 5mo ago

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.

PunchyHamster 5mo ago
They do have industrial fan series
awakeasleep 5mo ago
https://a.co/d/0eRatANA 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.
matsemann 5mo ago
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.
cheschire 5mo ago
I’m getting tired of the grayscale colors of the 2010’s too. I could use more brown and beige in my life.
monster_truck 5mo ago
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
- lostlogin 5mo ago
  I don’t think we need complete silence? Surely we can have something better?

PunchyHamster 5mo ago

I wonder why they can't just get the last half a mm of accuracy by just grinding down the tips

sheiyei 5mo ago
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.
layer8 5mo ago
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.

ninjagoo 5mo ago

> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego?#Design [2] changed 'tolerances' to 'clearances' per note below

sheiyei 5mo ago
0.5mm is the clearance, not the tolerance. Tolerance must be significantly smaller than clearance.
- ninjagoo 5mo ago
  yes, good point. fixed.
cbondurant 5mo ago
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.
- Arch-TK 5mo ago
  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).

nottorp 5mo ago

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?

vladvasiliu 5mo ago
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.
- nottorp 5mo ago
  Maybe, but it seems like a waste to glue the paxmate to the inside of the glass :)
Levitating 5mo ago
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 https://www.noctua.at/en/products/nh-d15
SloopJon 5mo ago
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 https://ssupd.co/products/cases-meshroom-s-v2
- nottorp 5mo ago

ufocia 5mo ago

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.

lyu07282 5mo ago
They aren't actually doing any molding themselves, the manufacturing is outsourced to companies in China and Taiwan, there is the real molding expertise.

ModernMech 5mo ago

I love how we've come full circle and started wood paneling our electronics again.

cr125rider 5mo ago

Isn’t the Lego Group incredible at this? Their parts are tiny, all different colors, and their tolerances are incredible.

alfanick 5mo ago
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.
kllrnohj 5mo ago
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.
dgellow 5mo ago
Interestingly enough, I just read about the brown Lego issues earlier today: https://blocksmag.com/brittle-bricks-the-lego-groups-biggest-failure/ https://blocksmag.com/brittle-bricks-the-lego-groups-biggest...

rconti 5mo ago

"Because we make the brown ones first"

mark-r 5mo ago

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?

cjbgkagh 5mo ago

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.

fwipsy 5mo ago
"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-like-chatgpt https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
- cjbgkagh 5mo ago
  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.
dangus 5mo ago
I don’t agree, it seems pretty normal. I also don’t really like policing writing style when there aren’t any glaring errors.
stronglikedan 5mo ago
> 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.
- cjbgkagh 5mo ago
  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.

binyu 5mo ago

> 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

dbg31415 5mo ago

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.

ralferoo 5mo ago

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.

anikom15 5mo ago

Their fans are expensive but work well. I am fine with the normal colored versions.

__mharrison__ 5mo ago

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?

archon810 5mo ago
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?

maxglute 5mo ago

Like how USSR had issues getting black bakelite components for guns.

bgnn 5mo ago

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.

jollymonATX 5mo ago

WHITE VERSIONS PLEASE

superkuh 5mo ago

Here is a mirror of the article since the "vercel"(?) anti-human wall is not letting me through, https://archive.is/y5zN1 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.

delfugal 5mo ago

WHY SWEAT IT? Your brand is a non-black fan. I'd stay with that. Why confuse people. Maybe trademark your fans colors.

ProAm 5mo ago

Just paint it black, no one will care, you'll save money and sell more units.

1024bits 5mo ago
Reminds me of this story from lego: I gave the ducks just two coats of varnish, not three as we usually do! His dad made him redo the lot. Source: https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/b-the-beginning-of-the-lego-group https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/b-the-beginning-...
- ProAm 5mo ago
  That is a pretty cool historical site for lego! Thanks for sharing it.

LoganDark 5mo ago

> 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.