Comment by fxtentacle
1 day 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.
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 Sterrox® LCP
> we have implemented a tip clearance of only 0.5mm (120mm models) or 0.7mm (140mm models)
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce.
Typical tolerances for injection moulding are 0.1mm, or 0.03 for high precision, or even better. LEGO was said to be in the 0.01-0.03mm. So on the face of it the last statement is patently false or at least too generic, injection moulding can consistently do much better than 0.5mm. With standard injection moulding precision (0.1mm) the worst case scenario for the two parts (fan and shroud) mating would still stay comfortably below 0.5mm.
So the question to the experts, is Sterrox® LCP that much harder to work with and the marketing team just didn't understand the importance of being clear about this? Is it a decimal point typo and the numbers should be 0.05 and 0.07?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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If all advertising was this interesting maybe I wouldn't hate it
I'd love more white, personally. I also don't understand the obsession with black. For me, black objects are very difficult to observe in detail, and that irks me.
I imagine a white PC fan would look terrible if not cleaned daily or used in a room with very filtered air.
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).
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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.
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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.
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Black cars show road dust immediately. White cars don't. I image it's similar for computer fans
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Dust can actually be more visible on black than on white.
Have we solved the yellowing? I guess many of us have memories of old and ugly yellow computers.
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...
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Totally. I used to favor black a long time ago when most computers were still gray and the idea of having everything in black was really cool, but since realizing that details and controls are harder to discern on black, I’m all in on white and silver. It’s also less prone to showing fingerprints.
I always thought the grey Noctua Redux fans were their nicest looking offerring, despite being their lower end. I don't understand how they settled on that.
Because it's a fan and I don't want to see it, and if I must see it, I don't want it to have any color of it's own since chances are very low that whatever color it is just happens to be the perfect addition to all my other posessions next to it.
I don't understand why anyone would think this is an obsession with black.
Seems a little revealing that they tout the clearance and not the difference in efficiency.
Noctua’s fans are known for their class-leading efficiency, with a few exceptions.
The people demanding black versions of their fans for their color matched builds already know they’re the best fans in their class.
Fan tip clearance is the main driver of fan efficiency at the price bracket this fan is competing at
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.
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Does it? Not everything is a sign of deception.
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
>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)
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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.
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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
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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.
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Exactly this. Most of the time you get poorly researched articles (or nowadays, AI slop) about some topics only very remotely related to what the company actually does.
Here, the article is about something interesting that the company has expertise in (and even "insider info"), shows off that they do serious engineering, and is interesting to the target audience.
If I'm buying a 12V or 5V fan, it'll almost certainly be a Noctua. I don't know if they're the best, but they certainly seem to be among the better brands, and at something like $25 for a fan, they are certainly not overpriced enough to justify the effort of researching something better.
So whoever you are at Noctua, congratulations! This + the 3d model release are likely really paying off.
Noctua are pricey but they also provide service that is in my experience unmatched.
We have a few hundred of their coolers in use and I have never had an issue getting warranty replacements from them with fans. The process is simple and they ship out a new fan ( I have warrantied probably 10 - 15 of the fans)
Agreed, this should really be the standard for marketing materials, no flashy promises, just cool technical and curious details.
Yeah it's more marketing than anything IMO.
Not all marketing is bad. Many of the beloved cartoons from decades ago were meant as marketing materials for toys and various kid items (i.e. lunch boxes). It doesn't mean it's automatically soulless.
In this case, I finally understand why they chose their most iconic colors, and appreciate the time they take on precision engineering.
Wondering if it's just the marketing that Noctua did, and the actual mold and process engineering left to some fab in China?
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.
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