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?
Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
271–280 of 311 posts
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 jus…
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.
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.
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#273This 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.
> This seems to be AI written, or co-written, hard to tell though. I didn't get that at all. Calling out AI for the sake of it is the new virtue signal, unfortunately.
I don't know whether it's a sign of it being AI or not but I did find it a bit weird that within the first 3 sentences there were 2 different "less like X and more like Y" statements:
> the reason is that this is less like painting a wooden fence, which is easy, and more like changing the colour of a carbon-fibre Formula 1 part, which requires re-calculating the weight, strength and aerodynamics.
and
> this is less like making ice cubes and more like baking a complex soufflé where every degree of temperature and milligram of ingredients matters.
Not a problem, but it felt odd enough that I noticed it, so maybe that's what got them thinking it was AI written/assisted?
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Normally I love this kind of article too because I consider it engineering, not marketing, the product name dropping at the end just reinforces the message. But either I'm missing some details that could have been spelled our more clearly, or the engineers were taking a break when the marketers were writing some parts. I'd love to stand corrected if someone more informed has details. > advanced polymers such as Sterr…
I interpreted it as: with the nature of fans and the associated vibration/movement, some gap is necessary and this is the limit given the precision of injection molding. Phrased differently: a 0.5mm gap is the minimum possible to also be able to account for the 0.1mm (or whatever) variation in injection molding. You're right to question the wording.
> a 0.5mm gap is the minimum possible to also be able to account for the 0.1mm (or whatever) variation in injection molding.
The Noctua engineers definitely designed the clearances to perfection and accounted for the variation in the manufacturing process, I don't doubt that.
The article says "being off by a tenth or two suddenly becomes a problem", the 0.1mm you also thought of. But that's the point of contention, 0.1mm is the tolerance from bog standard, cheap injection moulding. The limit of consistent precision is in the single digit microns. Noctua doesn't need anything near that.
Unless working with that polymer is difficult and comes with higher tolerances, this is probably just a case of the article's author trying to pump up stats. To bring it more to the techie world, it's something along the lines of "130nm transistors are at the absolute limit of what EUV lithography can consistently achieve".
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very high. A Mac mini averages about 6w all up. Though with that fan it would sure run cool.
A mac mini uses a lot more than 6w under load. 2024 M4 base mac mini has a rated max of 65W[1] and the M4 more than doubles that number to 140w 1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253
Yup, but it rarely does that.
Transcoding multiple video streams, running a VM and running various other tasks, mine rarely passes 10, and is currently sitting at 7 (only 2 transcodes at this time).
It’s 30 day average is 5.
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Noctua makes GPU heatsinks now too, so you're in luck. MSI was pretty good at making almost dead silent cards once upon a time too.
> I think Noctua makes GPU heatsinks now too I got really excited for a while, been struggling to find a 3rd party heatsink for a noisy GPU that won't make it even more noisier. But, seems what you're talking about is this? https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/air-cooling/noctu... , which seems to have been just for the GH200 and seems to be more like a "super-cooler", as it's cooling both the CPU and the GPU.…
Nah I mean like they partner up to design that part for specific models, it would be hard to make a generic one-size-fits-all given how much PCBs differ, though now that I've looked into it it seems that they currently just have the 5080 available which is odd.
https://www.noctua.at/en/products/asus-geforce-rtx-5080-noct...
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#277Like how USSR had issues getting black bakelite components for guns.
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I enjoyed reading it. Informative and showing of their processes and giving some intricate details. And yes, the end goal is to sell products which is fine by me. I take this over any generic non-saying marketing-blurb any time.
Normally I love this kind of article too because I consider it engineering, not marketing, the product name dropping at the end just reinforces the message. But either I'm missing some details that could have been spelled our more clearly, or the engineers were taking a break when the marketers were writing some parts. I'd love to stand corrected if someone more informed has details. > advanced polymers such as Sterr…
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.
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#279Reading about this, just makes me wish I has good 3d scan of their impellers to see how a simple 3d printer will deal with such mythical precision.
The materials that you could use in a 3d printer are not rigid enough. The blades of the fans are fiber-reinforced, in order to have sufficient rigidity, even when very thin. Only a 3D printer for metals could print something rigid enough, but such a metallic fan would be too heavy for a computer fan.
False, if you're printing PLA or something sure, but you can print all sorts of exotic fiber reinforced materials, and maybe if you're clever enough you can even use the anisotropy of the print to give you extra strength in the relevant directions. I'm not claiming that it's possible to 3D print noctua quality fans, especially on consumer FDM machines, but I think "inability to find a rigid enough material" is not going to be the failure mode, at least not on it's own. I could believe "inability to find a rigid enough material that can also get the required surface quality".
Re: Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
#280Wow 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.