Noctua's fan 8 years in the making could be the last you'll ever need
pcgamer.comNoctua makes a mean fan. The Austrian company's NF-S12B redux-1200 has dominated the top of our best PC fans guide for years and I'm yet to see anything come close to knocking it off its perch. What might take the top spot is Noctua's newest creation, its next-generation 140mm fan, which has been in the works for a whopping eight years.
A lot of R&D has gone into this to make it perfect.
You'd hope this fan would be unbeatable after cooking in the oven for so long, and Noctua has already posted impressive improvements in static pressure and pure airflow performance. That's all well and good, but if it's not in my machine it's no benefit to me. So I've also been over to visit Noctua at Computex and (politely) inquired when this fan might actually see the light of day.
«We're looking at Q1 next year,» Noctua's Dan Carter tells me. «Hopefully by the end of the year we'll be able to start production and then early next year we'll be able to launch. That's the current plan.»
«We're still waiting on these final steps again, you'd never know for sure, of course, but at the moment it is looking very promising.»
That would make a fan that's been in development for loosely nine years or so by the time anyone can buy one. So what's been happening all those years?
«Basically, the first five years from 2015 to 2020, we're basically trying out different designs, searching for one which is really going to give us the performance that we want.
»The development phase two, all the way to 2022, we actually came up with this impeller that we were really happy with. And so it then actually wasn't until almost the end of 2021 that we could enter that tooling phase and start gearing up."
From there, it was until around 2022 when it started to
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