Posted by buildbot 6 hours ago
Have you tried Vornado’s alchemy line? I splurged on it due to similar feelings and have been quite pleased. I use the petit as a desk fan.
> Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce
For folks thinking about Lego tolerances [1] that are an order of magnitude tighter at 10 microns or 0.01 mm, it turns out that the largest Lego moving parts are a turntable at 50mm or so, and rotate at an rpm an order of magnitude slower (100 or so rpm vs 1200 rpm), so these tight tolerances are quite tricky to achieve, and more importantly, maintain over the life of the product, apparently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego?utm_source=chatgpt.com#De...
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.
I'm a dev and for the last year I've been working for a company that manufactures pretty complex and advanced machines. I work with proper engineers - electronic, electrical, control, mechanical - and actual scientists. One of the things I've come to appreciate from this is the hidden depts of detail and complexity in so many aspects of the objects that surround us. People work hard on small details that hide in the background but are vital to making things work. And there's often code in everything, all the way down.
And now I can add plastic injection moulding to that. The rabbit hole goes very deep.
Edit to add:
My dad worked forty-plus years as an engineering pattern maker. He made, by hand, the high-tolerance "negatives" that were used to form moulds made from sand and resin. The moulds were used to cast parts for industrial valves: molten brass and gunmetal was poured into them, in a foundry, and left to cool. I think he would have deeply appreciated what this article was saying about craft and engineering and patience.
Also known as "why did China who already owned world manufacturing insisted and struggled on making ballpoint pen until 2017", "why are car manufacturers not making random cheap cars that have the curbs of beloved sports cars", "why are barely 5-6 countries able to make decent jet engines" and all that.
Manufacturing is hard. It's built upon layers and layers of deep knowledge and abilities. And when don't have it or you lose it, just knowing how to make the last layer is not enough, you need to rebuild the entire stack.
Which in this case becomes "painting something black is easy, making a fan black is easy, making a high quality high precision fan black from the starting point of the same fan in another color is an industrial challenge".
(I did a couple months of industrial engineering in university and while it wasn't for me, I loved what I learned about the field)
I also lament the demise of color coded connectors at the back. I knew to plug my speakers into the green 3.5mm jack. Now everything is black, so I need to look at the manual again to see which of the 5 connectors is the right one.
I always figured white would look better for RGB-lit computers. I don't know why white is so rare.
Back then: I would have loved black-on-black, labelled-in-black, with black cables and and black highlights on a black background. The accessories would be black, too: Black keyboard, black featureless keycaps, black mouse, with a black mousepad, on a black desk, in a black room with black walls and black windows.
Black.
I couldn't get black back then, of course. Computers were beige. The necessary floppy and optical drives were beige. Cables were beige. Keyboards were beige. Motherboards were some moral equivalent to beige. It might be possible to get one or two components in black at some points, but the rest were going to be beige so therefore the whole thing might as well just be resolutely beige.
That really annoyed me.
But I'm not a kid anymore; I'm old. I just want stuff that works well, and that is expandable enough to do some fun and unusual computing stuff with, and that I can see so that when I'm futzing around with it then my job is easier than it would otherwise be.
I don't want RGB or a tempered glass aquarium that shatters when part of it touches a tile floor the wrong way. I don't care about having multiple choices for the color of the anodizing on the heatsinks for the RAM. I don't want water cooling when a big slow-moving fan and some heat pipes does the job very quietly, with improved simplicity therefore longevity. I'm not trying to win a cooling benchmark; I'm just trying to keep the CPU within its specified thermal range while it does work for long periods at its maximum speed. I don't care what color the fans are as long as I can't hear them.
If I want to play with RGB by making or buying some party lights, then I know how to do that. Party lights for the room (or the whole house!), not the guts of the PC. :)
Otherwise: The computer is on the floor under the desk and the USB hub is on top of the desk, and that's all I need to deal with. It is purposeful and functional. There's no style points here, but I just don't care about that anymore.
(I'll be outside yelling at clouds if anyone needs me for anything.)
I have a couple of their screwdrivers too. I'm with with brown.
But whether you love or hate (as I do) the brown Noctua colours, the one thing is that they are kinda polarising. They're not a "clean fit" in any build unless you really wanna show that you use Noctua and use them as a centrepiece. Which I guess is the point of their marketing. They want to make it seem their fans are so good people are willing to put up with the colour.
They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible. The point of a computer to me is to be powerful while being as discrete about it as it can be (i.e. quiet and no blinking rgb lights). I don't have a glass side panel, I run an older Fractal case with aluminum sides with sound dampening instead.
I never understood "form over function", but each to their own.
Speak for yourself :) My computer is pretty open, the fans are visible through the front and through the side panel.
I don't run RGB either though but I do like to style it.
And of course the "form over function" is part of that market niche that really pays a lot for something like a fan. Noctua aren't that special, as others have mentioned there are much cheaper brands with the same performance including sound level. You do pay a lot for just the branding.
I have some Noctua fans still going strong after a decade. Are there other brands that can also do that? Probably, I have some BeQuiet fans now too in a tower CPU cooler (couldn't get hold of a Noctua cooler during the pandemic), it will be interesting to see what happens in another 6 years or so with them.
And no, I don't change my computer every 3 years or so any more, so longevity does matter to me.
Just this morning I purchased these car mats for my black, korean-spec-tinted people carrier electric van:
https://carmats.ie/products/kia-pv5-passenger-2026-van-mats?...
I think there might also be export restrictions, but I'm not sure.
I think this shows how Noctua value their customers, including myself. I really love how they are nice to their customers — both their products and services — especially because experience like this is getting more and more scarce. I really appreciate their work.
White doesn't really look bad in any case (except perhaps a full black one). The brown is very identifiable but that's only really a point if you desire to flaunt your expensive fans. Because it will stand out too much in almost any build. I honestly don't care about that, and for a fan this price I shouldn't have to put up with hidden advertising.
But I have BeQuiet Silent Wings and they're not bad. Quietness isn't something I'm optimising for anyway as I only use my desktop for gaming and when I do I wear headphones anyway. I do want to optimise more for pressure (as I have air filters) but these fans are no worse than Noctua.
I like wood but only light wood, not the dark kind. That reminds me way too much of my grandparents' furniture.
That said, I don't want RGB bleed, nor do i want a case where I see the insides. The computer is there to be powerful and discreet (both when it comes to noise and looks).
But sure, you could skip the walnut. I think Noctua should also go well with lighter woods. Oak perhaps but probably not all the way to birch.
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...
https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...
Still not something I'd buy though.