Comment by thinkloop
1 day ago
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".