This is not a drill: Noctua's best fan yet is actually coming out this June
This moment has been a long time coming. Noctua, creator of many of the best PC fans, is making some more. Specifically, the NF-A14x25 G2, which is now set to arrive sometime towards the end of June.
Noctua's 'next-gen' 140mm fan has been teetering on release for months, nay, years. Every time it seemed to be getting somewhere Noctua would give it a kicking in testing and find something wasn't quite right.
Most recently, a "slight risk of critical deformation" over extended use, which pushed back the release by around six months. Though it was already pushed back by around a year prior, to redesign the frame. It's also been in development for nearly a decade now.
The fan's extremely tight tolerances between the blades and frame make any minor movement potentially fatal.
As it turned out, switching out the frame material wasn't quite the answer Noctua was looking for. That's actually good news for PC builders, as the proposed switched to an LCP (liquid-crystal polymer) material, the same used on the fan blades and hub, would've pretty expensive had it been used everywhere.
«So we instead slightly modified the structure of the frame as such to make it a little bit more rigid. And then we have those fan clips that will put lower stress on the on the fan,» Noctua's Jakob Dellinger says.
And that means it can commit to making lots of the things.
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«We have production in full swing. Units on the ships.»
Dellinger is keen to point out it's still an estimated delivery date, but it seems pretty much a done deal.
There are slightly different dates depending on the frame you're after, however. The NF-A14x25 G2 with a round frame is coming first, in June, and it'll be followed by the more traditional square format in September. This had some separate issues around radiator mounting pressure that have been solved now, but took a little longer to sort.
The Chromax.black version
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