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

Noctua wants their fans to last for many years, spinning at 2K rpm, with heat.

Being able to produce something with lower tolerance is one thing. Making it work long term at ~10 m/s and ~200G is another thing. Have you ever been in a car that brakes really hard? You'll move. Now, multiply that force by 100 and you'll get around what the fans must sustain over time.

Expert here.

When very precision molds are made, what Noctua talks about in "multiple tuning iterations are required until the geometry, cooling, gating, and moulding parameters are perfectly stabilised" is the standard process for this type of stuff. (Gears, bottle caps, or any molds than make 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128x of the same part in one shot, require that you start with "steel safe" geometry, meaning you mold the first test parts, measure them, and then modify the mold (by cutting material AWAY, it's very hard, usually bad idea, to add steel back to a mold)).

You can do your best to determine what geometry is "steel safe", and all of this is baked upon having very good engineering understanding of what material you are molding (and using very expensive software like MoldFlow to simulate this).

Legos are made from ABS, there are decades of research and data on how ABS behaves in mold, it's relatively safe to use results from Moldflow and be pretty confident in it. Noctua is using LCP. LCP is very niche, and it sounds like they themselves are doing the research on moldability/warp/process effects. And while also being a company that produces things on timelines, the friction/side effect is that sometimes best guesses will fail and they have to start over with new molds (that's a 2 month hit usually) and months of testing. That is what they were trying so say.

I design glass-filled nylon and polycarbonate parts/assemblies with tolerances 1-5x higher than theirs. The 6-month delay they described is something I've lived through many times when we had to "cut new molds" because we couldn't salvage the first mold. (Advanced molds like these are $50k - $200k+). As a company/designer gets more experience with new materials and colorants (like their stuff with LCP), they will probably be able to hit end-goals on first try more often as they collect learnings from their failures.

I interpreted it as: with the nature of fans and the associated vibration/movement, some gap is necessary and this is the limit given the precision of injection molding.

Phrased differently: a 0.5mm gap is the minimum possible to also be able to account for the 0.1mm (or whatever) variation in injection molding.

You're right to question the wording.

Because it's spinning blades among manufacturing tolerances you also have to account for the blades expanding when rotating at high speed, and possibly working with 40-50 °C air from the components

Well, I have a bunch of lower-end black fans, some of them quite old, from before transparent cases were a thing. They're actually pretty much gray if I don't wipe them off.

Noctua's signature... brown-orange? Whatever that color is, it has the same issue. The blades are basically gray if I don't wipe them.

Haven't seen anybody start a gray craze, though. Though I have a grayish motorbike that also shows dust and dirt like nobody's business (it's a bike I use strictly on paved roads).

I have them. They get dusty at about the same rate as a pure black fan (which also shows gray/brown dust quite easily). I need to clean mine about every 6-9 months to keep them looking good enough to "show off". I generally run a Winix HEPA filter in each room of my apartment.

I don't think matte white is worse than matte black in terms of showing dust. They both do.

All white builds are common. There are a lot of white GPUs, motherboards, RAM, cases, and fans.

If you need daily dust cleaning you should invest in a room air filter.

Black cars show road dust immediately. White cars don't. I image it's similar for computer fans

Dust can actually be more visible on black than on white.

TIL: Generally all plastics exposed to UV start to photodegrade. If you google why old computers turn particularly yellow most sources point to bromine-based flame retardant agents in the plastic, but some people make a convincing case[1] that ABS just naturally turns yellow in UV light.

Not much real research into that topic, interestingly.

[1] https://medium.com/@pueojit/a-look-into-the-yellowing-and-de...

Okay. Seems like low noise is another big customer draw. So what's the difference for those measures between this difficult to manufacture fan and one with clearances that are easier to manufacture? If either is particularly significant, it's quite a bit more interesting than the measurement of the clearance.

Maybe it is just my limited production knowledge, but wouldn't it be possible to injection mold a bigger part and then mechanically shave off the last few fractions of a millimeter using any number of ways? Tooling costs too high. But in the simplest form you could essentially spin the fan against some adjustable abbrasive to shave off the final bits.

Granted, there may be other places in which the molding precision may matter, which would make this an impractical solution.

>Case fans pull what 4 watts? 5 watts?

That's really high. Like usually they are 100-150mA (so sub 2W) Lots of controllers would be 1A max.

The tolerances are for noise mostly. I'd consider the noise (and longevity) the single most important part of fans (else most fans can spin close to 3k rpm and cool)

The question is not about saving milliwatts-hours on your electricity bill, it is about where these milliwatts are going.

One is heat, heat is not great, it puts more stress on components, mechanical and electrical, reducing longevity.

Another, maybe more important is noise. The power that goes into making noise is power that is wasted, noise is inefficiency, and reducing noise is an efficiency problem.

Tighter tolerance isn't universally a good thing. It might make the fan more susceptible to damage due to mishandling or dust. They might be selling a fan that has a shorter useful life for no real benefit.

The specific fan in question has a rated max power draw of 1.8 W. In actual deployments it's going to be a lot less since ~nobody is running a noctua fan at 100% speed unconditionally

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.

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.

Yes you provide a great example of binning and market separation. Though I think in this case there's some limiting factors that make it infeasible to bin these fancy Noctua fan rotors including: 1) tooling have limited lifetime and will get sloppier and worse yields as time goes on. It's inefficient to use precious cycles of a precise tool and die on producing lower grade parts. 2) the material itself is likely more expensive than what industrial/lower grade use cases require. Why use reject Noctua when you can get regular crappy plastic for 1/500th the cost? 3) I expect Noctua stuff to be a much lower volume than lower cost/quality vendors so the volume of Noctua rejects is likely too low for a company to dedicate a product line using it. 4) brand/marketing reasons

Another obvious use case of binning is for microchips where the same die can be "wounded" to create multiple product variants that target different market segments, and also yield improvement from being able to isolate and disable an area of the die that are defective. However improving the manufacturability and yield itself is still fundamentally important

Agreed. My computing philosophy: If you aren't looking at the display, you're computing wrong.

I have a black case (some 10+ year old Fractal Design model) and an all black keyboard with no labels. Back in the pandemic, I was fortunate enough to score a videocard that happens to be light up RGB unicorn poop. I hate that part about it, so that helps remind me to keep the side panel of the case on. (I could, but I'd rather not disassemble it to unplug the LEDs.)

Actual CPU progress stopped so it's become a color and light show.

Commonly, white finishes don't age well. That's at least part of the historical reason.

So they can upsell you a white version for €30-€300 more. (Looking at you Sapphire.)

I love Noctua fans and I don't care about their colour. For all I cared they could be pink as long as they are best in class on noise and reliability.

They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible. The point of a computer to me is to be powerful while being as discrete about it as it can be (i.e. quiet and no blinking rgb lights). I don't have a glass side panel, I run an older Fractal case with aluminum sides with sound dampening instead.

I never understood "form over function", but each to their own.

At least some Apple ][ key caps from the 80's appear to have been brown.

I love the petty little fight over the blackest black and pinkest pink or whatever that whole drama is. It's hilarious.

Also

>Semple developed a pigment called the "pinkest pink" and specifically made it available to everyone except Anish Kapoor and anyone affiliated with him

Anish seems like a bit of a dick

yep, white pc component are almost always at a premium :p

I've had mine for about two weeks and I love it. It's absolutely massive inside, like a tardis. It drives like a magic carpet and it's got more than enough power for it's size. It's replacing a 2019 Hyundai Kona EV, and the ride quality and comfort is night and day. It's got a very tight turning circle so it's surprisingly nimble in tight spaces.

I have not really had the chance to properly test range, but it's not going to be amazing. It's reporting about 6.1km/kWh average at the moment, with about 50% motorway driving not really exceeding 110km/h. I'd expect no more than 350km. I rarely drive it 100%-0%, so real world (80-20) is probably 300km max. I might be underestimating the range if I do some math though! I live in Ireland, so that is an absolute massive amount of range for roadtrips. My Kona did about 6.5-7.5 depending on the season.

If you have a family, even a small one, then I reckon this is a no brainer. The price is ridiculous, and in my books it beats out an SUV in almost every category except maybe offroading.

Go test drive one!

But would it be more wasteful than shipping a parcel with broken equipment?

If the old one could still be used, they shouldn’t send a new one anyway.

Anecdotally, when my Xtrfy MZ1 mouse cable started shorting 5V to ground, they required a similar process (cutting the cable) before sending a replacement.

This was their response when I asked why: > Yes this policy was put in place because there was multiple instances of people reselling their faulty products after receiving a replacement.

> The secondhand buyers then reached out to us, let down to have received a broken product.

I'd imagine it's a similar reason for Noctua.

It’s a chilling effect on folks that buy one noctua fan and want to get another free one by claiming the first one is broken.

Nice, turbo button and all.

Huh interesting. I think the black one is super ugly with the dark wood but the white one isn't bad.

Still not something I'd buy though.

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.

When my GPU fans went bad and I didn't want to buy a new GPU (nothing wrong with my 1070, it still runs the games I care about) I bought some smaller noctua fans and 3D printed an adapter plate (in PETG). The connectors were non-standard, but the signals weren't, so I had to splice together some cables with soldering and heatshrink tubes.

I think Noctua makes GPU heatsinks now too, so you're in luck. MSI was pretty good at making almost dead silent cards once upon a time too.

Indeed.

Also, if their product ever does enshittify, the shit would truly hit the fan.

If we're going by anecdotes, my last Noctuas showing signs of failure (I had 6 of them, one was ~200rpm slower than it should be, one took a several seconds longer to start spinning from a stop) about a year after the end of warranty was partially why I retired them. Same with the set of Noctuas before them (apparently my first set was from 2010). I suppose they all technically still spun so they were still usable, just not to original performance; still, hard to be too upset about the product making it through the long warranty period without issue.

But my Arctics that was installed in the same case that ran for the same amount of time are still chugging along strong, and those are about as cheap as fans get. Different load/use case though so it's probably not a fair comparison.

These days, I really think the competition has caught up or passed Noctua.

2x more than other premium offerings that often perform noticeably better, which I'd say are usually from BeQuiet, LianLi, and Phanteks.

But yes, sometimes up to 5x more than the comparative Arctic in common size categories where it basically trades blows for most metrics that matter. Arctic is seriously unbeatable in value:performance if you just need a basic fan without other QoL or aesthetic features.

120mm is the most competitive category, and it's the most obvious category how Noctua can't keep up with the faster iterating/innovating competition.

Disclaimer: I read HWCooling like everyone serious about the subject. These reviews aren't everything, the appalling QC that results in resonances or coil whine lottery isn't mentioned.

In general, yes, Noctua is overpriced and Arctic is an incredible value, but when you want to optimize your silence/performance ratio, it's still Noctua, BeQuiet or (sometimes) Thermalright.

The Arctic fans are known to hum at certain speeds. This may, or may not matter to you, and certainly depends on how low the "noise floor" in workspace is.

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.

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.