This level of quality is why they have my business. We had a CI setup with rpi boards that needed fans (uart clock tied to cpu clock so heat meant slowing down and the uart dropped characters). I got tired of seeing random test failures on some board and driving up to the office to replace the fan that had failed. And they were loud and annoying. I ended up frustrated and expensing hundreds of dollars of noctua fans. Dead quiet, did a better job, and not even one ever failed on me.
A quiet PC is one reason I've always removed the GPU cards from used ones I've gotten. The crappy little fans on GPUs that constantly whir up and down drives me nuts.
When my GPU fans went bad and I didn't want to buy a new GPU (nothing wrong with my 1070, it still runs the games I care about) I bought some smaller noctua fans and 3D printed an adapter plate (in PETG). The connectors were non-standard, but the signals weren't, so I had to splice together some cables with soldering and heatshrink tubes.
Functional premium product at premium price. Cheaper mid-class does the job most of the way. But I suppose there is slightly better characteristics and probably higher reliability in design. Not a fake luxury like too many products these days.
I suppose we should be somewhat positive that some company still aims to deliver best possible products. Not just products with cheapest possible cost and some perceived luxury if even that.
I used to really like Noctua fans, for a while they were obviously the best fans by a significant margin.
But for all their tight tolerances and exotic materials and a high price to match, they generally don't outperform BeQuiet's more regular materials but use-focused fans that are half the price. Nor are they significantly better than Arctic's general purpose fans at a quarter the price.
It'd make more sense to just buy the fan optimized for the specific common purpose (airflow or radiator) than pay double for the Noctua for a more generalized fan, but is not the best at either common use case.
Seems like these days their target audience is those who believe their marketing materials about them being the best, instead of believing the benchmark performance data.
I have used Noctua fans in computers where they worked for a decade or so, even 24x7, until an upgrade or replacement of the computer was required by other reasons than because of the fans.
I have also had many problems caused by cheaper fans.
So now I always prefer to use rather expensive fans and power supplies, from brands with which I have accumulated many years of experience, for peace of mind.
Perhaps other brands of fans that nowadays give similar results in benchmarks also have similar reliability, but I am not willing to bet on it.
If we're going by anecdotes, my last Noctuas showing signs of failure (I had 6 of them, one was ~200rpm slower than it should be, one took a several seconds longer to start spinning from a stop) about a year after the end of warranty was partially why I retired them. Same with the set of Noctuas before them (apparently my first set was from 2010). I suppose they all technically still spun so they were still usable, just not to original performance; still, hard to be too upset about the product making it through the long warranty period without issue.
But my Arctics that was installed in the same case that ran for the same amount of time are still chugging along strong, and those are about as cheap as fans get. Different load/use case though so it's probably not a fair comparison.
These days, I really think the competition has caught up or passed Noctua.
2×? Try 5× for the Noctua NF-A12x25 compared the the Arctic P12 Pro that matches or beats it in most metrics. Which isn't to say the Noctua fan is bad, it's just a luxury product for reasons other than performance.
2x more than other premium offerings that often perform noticeably better, which I'd say are usually from BeQuiet, LianLi, and Phanteks.
But yes, sometimes up to 5x more than the comparative Arctic in common size categories where it basically trades blows for most metrics that matter. Arctic is seriously unbeatable in value:performance if you just need a basic fan without other QoL or aesthetic features.
120mm is the most competitive category, and it's the most obvious category how Noctua can't keep up with the faster iterating/innovating competition.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It's par for the course in the premium PC parts industry. It's overkill in a way that does not impact performance at all because gamers will pay for that.
Noctua fans are still the top #1 performers in the world. You can argue that it's diminishing returns and you can get a fan with 90% of the performance for 50% of the money, but that doesn't change Noctua's position at the top.
I do not play often on my PCs. I just like well engineered devices and do have more than enough money to buy a more expensive fan every five years or so. I like the item, it works well, is silent, I’m satisfied ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To be fair, half a millimeter isn’t even that much precision, generally speaking. You wouldn’t be anywhere close to manufacturing a working ball pen at that precision. Or even an acceptable keyboard, if we stay with plastic. With fans blades, the difficulty is probably the precision relative to the fan diameter.
The difficulty is clearance between two moving parts, with blades that deform slightly due to air pressure (at different amounts for different speeds) and with thermal expansion.
That’s not what the article says, they relate it to reproducibility of the manufacturing process: “Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce”. Though maybe they misphrased that, as for example Lego pieces have significantly smaller tolerances and are also manufactured using injection molding.
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.
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.
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.
This level of quality is why they have my business. We had a CI setup with rpi boards that needed fans (uart clock tied to cpu clock so heat meant slowing down and the uart dropped characters). I got tired of seeing random test failures on some board and driving up to the office to replace the fan that had failed. And they were loud and annoying. I ended up frustrated and expensing hundreds of dollars of noctua fans. Dead quiet, did a better job, and not even one ever failed on me.
A quiet PC is one reason I've always removed the GPU cards from used ones I've gotten. The crappy little fans on GPUs that constantly whir up and down drives me nuts.
When my GPU fans went bad and I didn't want to buy a new GPU (nothing wrong with my 1070, it still runs the games I care about) I bought some smaller noctua fans and 3D printed an adapter plate (in PETG). The connectors were non-standard, but the signals weren't, so I had to splice together some cables with soldering and heatshrink tubes.
I think Noctua makes GPU heatsinks now too, so you're in luck. MSI was pretty good at making almost dead silent cards once upon a time too.
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It's luxury watch engineering for gamers. You do not need it, but it's kind of charming when anyone competently takes a niche to its extreme, imho.
That said, on my last PC build I ended up buying Pure Wings 3, which are quite competitively silent at similar airflow and much cheaper.
And white. Because I do like silly pretty PCs, as long as they don't have RGB on.
https://eikehein.com/pc/pc2.webp
Functional premium product at premium price. Cheaper mid-class does the job most of the way. But I suppose there is slightly better characteristics and probably higher reliability in design. Not a fake luxury like too many products these days.
I suppose we should be somewhat positive that some company still aims to deliver best possible products. Not just products with cheapest possible cost and some perceived luxury if even that.
Indeed.
Also, if their product ever does enshittify, the shit would truly hit the fan.
I used to really like Noctua fans, for a while they were obviously the best fans by a significant margin.
But for all their tight tolerances and exotic materials and a high price to match, they generally don't outperform BeQuiet's more regular materials but use-focused fans that are half the price. Nor are they significantly better than Arctic's general purpose fans at a quarter the price.
It'd make more sense to just buy the fan optimized for the specific common purpose (airflow or radiator) than pay double for the Noctua for a more generalized fan, but is not the best at either common use case.
Seems like these days their target audience is those who believe their marketing materials about them being the best, instead of believing the benchmark performance data.
The benchmarks do not tell everything.
I have used Noctua fans in computers where they worked for a decade or so, even 24x7, until an upgrade or replacement of the computer was required by other reasons than because of the fans.
I have also had many problems caused by cheaper fans.
So now I always prefer to use rather expensive fans and power supplies, from brands with which I have accumulated many years of experience, for peace of mind.
Perhaps other brands of fans that nowadays give similar results in benchmarks also have similar reliability, but I am not willing to bet on it.
If we're going by anecdotes, my last Noctuas showing signs of failure (I had 6 of them, one was ~200rpm slower than it should be, one took a several seconds longer to start spinning from a stop) about a year after the end of warranty was partially why I retired them. Same with the set of Noctuas before them (apparently my first set was from 2010). I suppose they all technically still spun so they were still usable, just not to original performance; still, hard to be too upset about the product making it through the long warranty period without issue.
But my Arctics that was installed in the same case that ran for the same amount of time are still chugging along strong, and those are about as cheap as fans get. Different load/use case though so it's probably not a fair comparison.
These days, I really think the competition has caught up or passed Noctua.
2×? Try 5× for the Noctua NF-A12x25 compared the the Arctic P12 Pro that matches or beats it in most metrics. Which isn't to say the Noctua fan is bad, it's just a luxury product for reasons other than performance.
2x more than other premium offerings that often perform noticeably better, which I'd say are usually from BeQuiet, LianLi, and Phanteks.
But yes, sometimes up to 5x more than the comparative Arctic in common size categories where it basically trades blows for most metrics that matter. Arctic is seriously unbeatable in value:performance if you just need a basic fan without other QoL or aesthetic features.
120mm is the most competitive category, and it's the most obvious category how Noctua can't keep up with the faster iterating/innovating competition.
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.
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.
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I got a cheap CPU cooler and swapped the fan out for a Noctua. For half the cost of a complete Noctua CPU cooler I got good temperatures and no noise.
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)
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.
If you're okay with some of your fans being noisy and/or inefficient, I'm sure you can work with flimsy tolerances.
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.
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.
It's par for the course in the premium PC parts industry. It's overkill in a way that does not impact performance at all because gamers will pay for that.
> does not impact performance at all
Noctua fans are still the top #1 performers in the world. You can argue that it's diminishing returns and you can get a fan with 90% of the performance for 50% of the money, but that doesn't change Noctua's position at the top.
I do not play often on my PCs. I just like well engineered devices and do have more than enough money to buy a more expensive fan every five years or so. I like the item, it works well, is silent, I’m satisfied ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To be fair, half a millimeter isn’t even that much precision, generally speaking. You wouldn’t be anywhere close to manufacturing a working ball pen at that precision. Or even an acceptable keyboard, if we stay with plastic. With fans blades, the difficulty is probably the precision relative to the fan diameter.
The difficulty is clearance between two moving parts, with blades that deform slightly due to air pressure (at different amounts for different speeds) and with thermal expansion.
That’s not what the article says, they relate it to reproducibility of the manufacturing process: “Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce”. Though maybe they misphrased that, as for example Lego pieces have significantly smaller tolerances and are also manufactured using injection molding.
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They want them to be really silent. There's more details here: https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/nf-a12x25-technical-...
Last I checked they weren't really any quieter than their competitors at the same airflow and pressure (which is a little subjective because your curve will never match perfectly). They do have a really low number on their specs because they have a really low max RPM, but that's not really relevant when you can just lower the speed of other fans.
They're still really good fans, but a lot of this is just marketing.
At max power the Noctua NF-A12x25 has 56 CFM and 2.3 mmAq for 31dBA [1]. At 70% the Artic A12 Pro is 56 CFM, 4.3 mmAq, and 31dBA [2]. At 60% the Asus ProArt PF120 is 61 CFM, 2.6 mmAq, and 30 dBA [3].
Note that the ProArt is a bit thicker (25 vs 30 mm) and all these dBA numbers are almost certainly unobstructed airflow. The Noctua is certainly good, but it's literally over 5× the price of the Artic.
[1]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/4/
[2]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/
[3]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/229/
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.
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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.
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It's like the gold plated headphone jacks they used to sell to audiophiles.