Even if it is the case, and not simple an omission to focus the narrative, does it matter? Case fans pull what 4 watts? 5 watts? Who cares if it pulls 200 milliwatts more than a competitor when it's cooling a GPU and CPU that consume more than a hundred times what it can consume
Yes, exactly. The high precision is marketing, not something needed in the product.
I don't think matte white is worse than matte black in terms of showing dust. They both do.
Not much real research into that topic, interestingly.
[1] https://medium.com/@pueojit/a-look-into-the-yellowing-and-de...
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.
Have you tried Vornado’s alchemy line? I splurged on it due to similar feelings and have been quite pleased. I use the petit as a desk fan.
I'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.
Also known as "why did China who already owned world manufacturing insisted and struggled on making ballpoint pen until 2017", "why are car manufacturers not making random cheap cars that have the curbs of beloved sports cars", "why are barely 5-6 countries able to make decent jet engines" and all that.
Manufacturing is hard. It's built upon layers and layers of deep knowledge and abilities. And when don't have it or you lose it, just knowing how to make the last layer is not enough, you need to rebuild the entire stack.
Which in this case becomes "painting something black is easy, making a fan black is easy, making a high quality high precision fan black from the starting point of the same fan in another color is an industrial challenge".
We are so used to high quality high precision manufacturing, we have a bazillion factories pumping out millions of very high tech things for random usages or tools now and we stopped noticing it ... And then someone makes a small mistake and you get a "Samsung Note 7 explodes randomly" because of a margin of error small than what our brain can easily comprehend.
(I did a couple months of industrial engineering in university and while it wasn't for me, I loved what I learned about the field)
A lot of times it's cheaper to just full send it than produce a full run at a given quality with a low rejection rate.
The "old" way of making a black fan is you just QC check them, send the good ones to Noctua, send the crappy ones to someone who DGAF because they're putting them some sort of industrial appliance that needs airflow through the box.
Everyone "wins" this way because Noctua gets their fan to spec cheaper and the people building plasma cutters or control units for chemical washers or ATMs get a fan that's "fundamentally good" if sloppily executed and the manufacturer gets less waste. Ain't no different than how the pork belly that doesn't become your bacon becomes dog food and die lubricant.
I suspect this is where a lot of the "X compatible" power tool stuff on Amazon comes from. That and/or the repurposing of "worn out" dies.
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce
For folks thinking about Lego tolerances [1] that are an order of magnitude tighter at 10 microns or 0.01 mm, it turns out that the largest Lego moving parts are a turntable at 50mm or so, and rotate at an rpm an order of magnitude slower (100 or so rpm vs 1200 rpm), so these tight clearances (not tolerances [2]) are quite tricky to achieve, and more importantly, maintain over the life of the product, apparently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego?#Design
[2] changed 'tolerances' to 'clearances' per note below
I also lament the demise of color coded connectors at the back. I knew to plug my speakers into the green 3.5mm jack. Now everything is black, so I need to look at the manual again to see which of the 5 connectors is the right one.
I always figured white would look better for RGB-lit computers. I don't know why white is so rare.
Back then: I would have loved black-on-black, labelled-in-black, with black cables and and black highlights on a black background. The accessories would be black, too: Black keyboard, black featureless keycaps, black mouse, with a black mousepad, on a black desk, in a black room with black walls and black windows.
Black.
I couldn't get black back then, of course. Computers were beige. The necessary floppy and optical drives were beige. Cables were beige. Keyboards were beige. Motherboards were some moral equivalent to beige. It might be possible to get one or two components in black at some points, but the rest were going to be beige so therefore the whole thing might as well just be resolutely beige.
That really annoyed me.
But I'm not a kid anymore; I'm old. I just want stuff that works well, and that is expandable enough to do some fun and unusual computing stuff with, and that I can see so that when I'm futzing around with it then my job is easier than it would otherwise be.
I don't want RGB or a tempered glass aquarium that shatters when part of it touches a tile floor the wrong way. I don't care about having multiple choices for the color of the anodizing on the heatsinks for the RAM. I don't want water cooling when a big slow-moving fan and some heat pipes does the job very quietly, with improved simplicity therefore longevity. I'm not trying to win a cooling benchmark; I'm just trying to keep the CPU within its specified thermal range while it does work for long periods at its maximum speed. I don't care what color the fans are as long as I can't hear them.
If I want to play with RGB by making or buying some party lights, then I know how to do that. Party lights for the room (or the whole house!), not the guts of the PC. :)
Otherwise: The computer is on the floor under the desk and the USB hub is on top of the desk, and that's all I need to deal with. It is purposeful and functional. There's no style points here, but I just don't care about that anymore.
(I'll be outside yelling at clouds if anyone needs me for anything.)
I have a couple of their screwdrivers too. I'm with with brown.
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.
They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible. The point of a computer to me is to be powerful while being as discrete about it as it can be (i.e. quiet and no blinking rgb lights). I don't have a glass side panel, I run an older Fractal case with aluminum sides with sound dampening instead.
I never understood "form over function", but each to their own.
Speak for yourself :) My computer is pretty open, the fans are visible through the front and through the side panel.
I don't run RGB either though but I do like to style it.
And of course the "form over function" is part of that market niche that really pays a lot for something like a fan. Noctua aren't that special, as others have mentioned there are much cheaper brands with the same performance including sound level. You do pay a lot for just the branding.
I have some Noctua fans still going strong after a decade. Are there other brands that can also do that? Probably, I have some BeQuiet fans now too in a tower CPU cooler (couldn't get hold of a Noctua cooler during the pandemic), it will be interesting to see what happens in another 6 years or so with them.
And no, I don't change my computer every 3 years or so any more, so longevity does matter to me.
I think there might also be export restrictions, but I'm not sure.
Just this morning I purchased these car mats for my black, korean-spec-tinted people carrier electric van:
https://carmats.ie/products/kia-pv5-passenger-2026-van-mats?...
I have not really had the chance to properly test range, but it's not going to be amazing. It's reporting about 6.1km/kWh average at the moment, with about 50% motorway driving not really exceeding 110km/h. I'd expect no more than 350km. I rarely drive it 100%-0%, so real world (80-20) is probably 300km max. I might be underestimating the range if I do some math though! I live in Ireland, so that is an absolute massive amount of range for roadtrips. My Kona did about 6.5-7.5 depending on the season.
If you have a family, even a small one, then I reckon this is a no brainer. The price is ridiculous, and in my books it beats out an SUV in almost every category except maybe offroading.
Go test drive one!
White doesn't really look bad in any case (except perhaps a full black one). The brown is very identifiable but that's only really a point if you desire to flaunt your expensive fans. Because it will stand out too much in almost any build. I honestly don't care about that, and for a fan this price I shouldn't have to put up with hidden advertising.
But I have BeQuiet Silent Wings and they're not bad. Quietness isn't something I'm optimising for anyway as I only use my desktop for gaming and when I do I wear headphones anyway. I do want to optimise more for pressure (as I have air filters) but these fans are no worse than Noctua.
I like wood but only light wood, not the dark kind. That reminds me way too much of my grandparents' furniture.
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.
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...
Still not something I'd buy though.
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.
But I don't think they really need that.
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.
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.
Also, if their product ever does enshittify, the shit would truly hit the fan.
I got really excited for a while, been struggling to find a 3rd party heatsink for a noisy GPU that won't make it even more noisier.
But, seems what you're talking about is this? https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/air-cooling/noctu..., which seems to have been just for the GH200 and seems to be more like a "super-cooler", as it's cooling both the CPU and the GPU.
Went to Noctua's website and found no GPU coolers at all, so I think it might have been limited to just showing off at Computex 2024 maybe.
But for all their tight tolerances and exotic materials and a high price to match, they generally don't outperform BeQuiet's more regular materials but use-focused fans that are half the price. Nor are they significantly better than Arctic's general purpose fans at a quarter the price.
It'd make more sense to just buy the fan optimized for the specific common purpose (airflow or radiator) than pay double for the Noctua for a more generalized fan, but is not the best at either common use case.
Seems like these days their target audience is those who believe their marketing materials about them being the best, instead of believing the benchmark performance data.
I have used Noctua fans in computers where they worked for a decade or so, even 24x7, until an upgrade or replacement of the computer was required by other reasons than because of the fans.
I have also had many problems caused by cheaper fans.
So now I always prefer to use rather expensive fans and power supplies, from brands with which I have accumulated many years of experience, for peace of mind.
Perhaps other brands of fans that nowadays give similar results in benchmarks also have similar reliability, but I am not willing to bet on it.
But my Arctics that was installed in the same case that ran for the same amount of time are still chugging along strong, and those are about as cheap as fans get. Different load/use case though so it's probably not a fair comparison.
These days, I really think the competition has caught up or passed Noctua.
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.
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.
Noctua fans are still the top #1 performers in the world. You can argue that it's diminishing returns and you can get a fan with 90% of the performance for 50% of the money, but that doesn't change Noctua's position at the top.
They'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/
I ended up buying Pure Wings as mentioned. Also much cheaper than Noctua and seemingly not having those issues.
It’s kind of refreshing to see really.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The black fans are really only needed by those who build show piece in those cases with glass panels, but they might equally well need white fans, which Noctua doesn't make. Personally I don't really care about the colour of my fans, you can't see them anyway.
Enthusiasts care about the details - airflow, cable management and of course aesthetics. Noctua doesn't. I respect their engineering/no bullshit approach, the price bump is worth it but they lost my money on multiple builds by sticking to their 'brand color'.
They're the Soylent of the fan world - everything you need but spark zero joy.
I'd be interested in seeing sales figures for same fans in their brand and other colors.
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro/lamborghini-has-resto...
You have to redo injection moulds anyway as they have a limited life. And you can do a lot with materials too, some materials simply shrink more than others as they cool down.
I'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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The thoroughness & mindset is certainly appreciated, but you can also overdo it - engineer it beyond what the consumers use case requires.
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).
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.
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.
