For a very long time, many of us have been begging Noctua to build a liquid cooler. In a time when CPUs are becoming ever more powerful, their power consumption is also rising, and air-coolers are often no longer up to the task. However, this was a problem for Noctua’s customers, as the brand has stubbornly not built a liquid cooler – at least until now. Meet the NL-LC1-36, Noctua’s first liquid cooler.

Today we’re reviewing the 360-mm variant, but it also comes in 240mm and 420mm flavors.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: At its core, this is not a liquid cooler designed 100% in-house by Noctua – it’s an Asetek cooler with some Noctua touches. This may be a bit of a let-down, especially for Noctua purists – up until now, every product that had a name in Noctua’s nomenclature, such as NL-LC1-36, or NH-D15 G2, or NF-A12x25 G2, was 100% designed and built in-house by Rascom and Kolink, the two owners of the Noctua brand.

Keen readers will note that there is a Noctua case, Noctua PSU, and Noctua GPUs, but that’s not entirely accurate. The Antec Flux Pro Noctua Edition, Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition, and Asus Noctua Edition GPUs are all, as their name implies, Noctua-Edition products, which are not strictly speaking a core part of Noctua’s own lineup, and they do not carry Noctua’s typical nomenclature.

What’s really going on here is something we’ll get into later, but for now, let’s dive into the box and see what we’ve got on the test bench.

Specifications

Product Walkthrough

The cooler comes packaged in a typical Noctua box with a matte finish and product details written on it. Noctua also sells an auxiliary fan, the NL-ACF1, which can clip onto the pump block to cool the area surrounding the CPU.

Open the box, and we’re presented with a nice appetizer – the large Noctua plaque that can later be installed onto the pump block if you’re not using the auxiliary fan.

This is a truly beautiful plaque, and quite large too – a bit unusually large for Noctua. Is Noctua trying to emphasize its own brand to distract us from Asetek?

An included accessory box contains the mounting brackets, cleaning wipe, instructions, TIM guard, and the classic Noctua Torx screwdriver. Both the AMD and intel mounting brackets come with -7mm offset holes so that the cooler is better placed over the CPU’s hotspots.

The three fans come in their own box too. Here we have three NF-A12x25 G2s, two of which are the PPA variant and one PPB, which have 50 RPM offsets to prevent harmonics from forming between them. These fans spin at such consistent speeds, that if you mount two next to each other on the same fan splitter, they can sing in harmony.

The fans all come equipped with the full rear gasket for a perfect seal on the radiator.

Moving on to the pump assembly, here we find the pièce de résistance, the NL-PNA1. PNA stands for Pump Noise Absorber, and this is a custom pump cover designed by Noctua that features multiple layers of foam, sound barriers, and silicone mounts, all to quiet down the pump.

At its heart, the NL-CL1 is based on Asetek’s Emma Gen8 V2 pump platform that, although very powerful, isn’t the quietest pump on the market. However, the combination of its power and the PNA1 cap means that Noctua is happy to stand behind the product, and we’ll see in testing whether this stance is justified.

This pump cap isn’t only engineered to absorb and deflect noise, however – it’s also a tuned mass damper. Sitting on silicone mounts, its own mass and positioning is engineered such that it dampens mechanical noise. This damping essentially shifts the higher, more annoying frequencies pumps typically produce toward deeper, more pleasant frequencies that typically bother human hearing less.

The cold plate is beautifully milled, and the exposed copper should do a great job at transferring heat.

Hidden between the two tubes is a dip-switch with three positions. They’re not marked, but it’s easy to tell whether you’re in the quiet, balanced, or unrestricted mode. These limit the pump’s RPMs to 2100 or 2600 for the quiet and balanced profiles. Within these profiles, you can use the motherboard’s PWM control to guide the pump. However, the pump’s internal coolant temperature sensor will override the PWM signal at certain duty cycles or beyond certain coolant temperatures and push to 100% duty anyway, which may lead to the pump running louder than you want. In practice, however, we haven’t found this to be a problem.

For full control, you’ll want to use the unrestricted mode, where you have the pump’s full 3700 RPM at your disposal.

What I find a bit of a let-down here, is that there is no two-pin thermal probe output. I have a lot of experience with custom water cooling, and my preferred method of managing pump and fan speeds is by using the coolant temperature as the source value. It’s great that this AIO’s pump will manage itself and I’m stoked to see this feature finally coming to numerous AIOs, but I’d like access to the coolant temperature so that the fans can be controlled by this too.

The AIO’s radiator is a relatively standard aluminum type, but it’s 30mm thick which is an improvement over thinner 25mm radiators on more budget-friendly coolers.

Lastly, the loop is filled with Glycol, and is not user-serviceable.

Optionally, for $20, you can add an auxiliary fan to cool the VRM and memory surrounding the CPU, but this honestly feels like an afterthought and doesn’t look very charming compared to the rest of the cooler. I don’t doubt that it works, but it’s not nearly as neatly integrated into the pump block as we’ve seen with much of Noctua’s premium competition.

Testing Part 1: Pump speed vs. dBA

To test the NL-CL1, we decided to deviate from our usual procedure. Usually, we take AIO’s as they come and pit them against each other in a real-world scenario using a closed case and standard onboard fan curves. However, with the improvements Noctua has made to the pump assembly, we wanted to really focus on the impact of this different pump on both acoustic and thermal performance.

To do this, we’re pitting the NL-CL1 against the Phanteks Glacier One M25 G2 and the Lian Li Hydroshift II LCD-C 360N – but instead of using their included fans (the Lian Li doesn’t come with any), we’re installing the three NF-A12x25 G2 fans that come with the Noctua.

The reason we’re testing this way is because I feel that the primary audience that would be interested in this AIO, is also the type that would fan-swap an existing cooler. It’s also to take the fan variable out of the equation – we know Noctua’s fans are better than any other (they sit atop our Best PC Fans list just for that reason), and what we really want to know is how much better this pump unit really is.

These two competing coolers cost about $150 each, and if you were to install three NF-A12x25 G2’s on them, that brings the total cost to about $250, which is in-line with Noctua’s pricing. So, what do you get for the same money with the old method, vs the new, official Noctua cooler?

Meanwhile, for the purists among you, we’re also adding the legendary NH-D15 G2 air cooler to the test at the end. The main reason to contemplate a Noctua AIO is to minimize pump noise – and for a few, up until today, that simply meant not using an AIO at all, rather sticking to air cooling with fewer moving parts.

Test Setup

We’re using an MSI Godlike X870E motherboard with a 9950X3D CPU and some Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6000 memory. We also have a PNY RTX 5080 installed, though it’s there only for display purposes and will be kept at its zero-RPM mode.

We’re doing these tests on an open test bench, as to expose as much of the pump as possible.

Testing Part 1: Pump speed vs. dBA

For the first series of tests, I ran the three AIO’s pumps through their RPM ranges independently, by themselves. To get the system quiet enough, we ensured the GPU’s fans were not spinning, there was no load on the CPU (and thus no whining VRMs or PSU fan), and disconnected the CPU fans – the only moving part was the pump itself – that’s all we’re trying to figure out here.

What’s clear from the results is that the Noctua pump is notably quieter at most speeds, right up until about 2300 RPM, where Phanteks’ Glacier One becomes quieter, and Noctua’s pump actually makes a big jump up in noise levels.

What’s also interesting is that up until about 1900 RPM, the pump on Noctua’s cooler is almost indistinguishable from the noise floor of the room. That’s very impressive if you consider that the dB meter was placed at a mere 20cm from the pump, at night, in a room treated for acoustics.

I debated testing with dB-C weighting, as this is more sensitive to low frequencies, but decided against this. C-weighting spans across a wider range of frequencies, which technically speaking, would offer results more representative of the entire sound spectrum.

However, dB-A weighting is geared more toward the sensitivities of human hearing – and Noctua specifically engineered the pump cover to shift the pump’s sound profile towards lower frequencies, where they would be less bothersome.

With that in mind, I do want to mention that the dB reading alone really doesn’t tell the whole story. As mentioned, the Noctua pump ends up louder than the Phanteks, at least as far as decibels are concerned.

As I was testing, I saw these numbers, and I thought: that’s not right. How can that be? The Noctua sounded much quieter to my ears.

So, I went back, re-installed the Phanteks, and lo-and-behold, it put out the exact same figure it did before – quieter than the Noctua on the dB meter, but my ears told a different story.

Using dB(A) weighting should have compensated for that difference, but it didn’t. So, perhaps my dB meter is wrong, or Noctua knows more about human hearing than dB(A) weighting accounts for.

However, what may also play a role is the differences in pump assembly and how they impact flow rate. If, for example, the Phanteks pushes more fluid per rotation than the Noctua, then it’d be only logical that it’s louder too – but I doubt it does.

Either way, we’ll be going back and testing with subjective noise levels in addition to these objective figures for a complete picture.

Testing Phase 2: AIO Objective Noise-Normalized, + Min and Max

In order to account for the pump’s engineering, I’ll be running a noise-normalized test that has the NF-A12x25 G2 fans spinning at the same 1200 RPM speed on each cooler, on every test. I’ll be running the three pumps at speeds that have matching noise levels, which we’ve figured out in the previous testing phase with the dB meter.

This is not a test meant to simulate real-life performance -- we run the fans at a fixed speed of 1200 RPM, and keep the CPU at stock settings to limit power draw to exactly a hair under 200 watts under all scenarios, so that all coolers make it through the test and to remove any variables. The only factors influencing the thermal results are the pump, its mounting offset, the flow resistance, and the radiator – all factors over which we ultimately have no influence.

This is where things started to get very interesting. Let us start with the minimums and maximums – you’ll note that at the minimum pump speed, the Noctua has the CPU running much hotter than the other two coolers. I’d like to clarify that the minimum and maximum tests are not noise-normalized, but have the pump running at their minimum and maximum speeds. Noctua’s LC1 has an extremely wide RPM range to work with, which the other two coolers don’t. And running a 200W workload with a pump running at just 750 RPM isn’t going to do great things for thermals. It does, though, mean that in low-load situations, the pump can run completely quietly.

However, in the noise-normalized test between 29 dB(A) pump noise and 32 dB(A) pump noise, we saw some shocking results. Noctua’s cooler, even when it has its pump running at a barely perceptible noise level of just 29 dB(A), still runs significantly cooler than both the Glacier One and the Hydroshift with their pumps running at full speed.

Of course, it must be noted that there are more factors at play here than just the pump – the LC1 offers a 7mm offset mount for Ryzen systems which we used, a different cold plate design, and a radiator that’s slightly thicker than its competition.

Testing Phase 3: Subjective Noise-Normalized

As mentioned earlier, according to my ears, some of the pump’s acoustics don’t match up with what my dB meter shows. For this reason, I’m repeating the previous batch of tests, but instead of looking at the dB meter, I’m trusting my ears to guide me in picking an RPM setpoint for each pump that I deem fits the description. If you see a result missing, it’s because the criteria weren’t met. The RPMs of the pumps are in the chart below.

To determine the RPM levels, I first ran the pump at the highest speed at which it was still completely inaudible. I then figured out a middle point where I was happy to tolerate the noise level under load. And finally, I pushed the pump speed up further, and found the lowest value at which its noise started to annoy me.

To give some additional context, I’d like to emphasize that I have highly sensitive hearing, and I’m someone that likes to run their gear as close to inaudible as possible. This is also a very subjective test – you may hear something where I didn’t – but on the flipside, what annoys me, you may be just fine with, so do take these findings with a grain of salt.

Then, with those numbers, I ran the thermal tests again, all with the fans at 1200 RPM to remove any other variables.

Here, the Noctua started to really stand out from the crowd. Even pushing the Glacier one to annoying noise levels couldn’t make it keep up with the thermals produced by Noctua pump running inaudibly. That’s honestly quite staggering.

I contemplated for a moment whether to adjust the fan speeds in this test to match the annoyance factor, but this would make comparison difficult, and I really am trying to focus on the difference the pump makes here, and nothing else.

What’s really important to note here, though, is that from my experience, I can truly say that the dBA figure means almost nothing in practice. The subjective noise profile of the pump matters way more than the dBA, and whereas the Noctua might, strictly speaking, be louder than the Phanteks at higher speeds, it’s also far smoother. Whatever they did with the PNA1, it’s working.

Meanwhile, though, from the results it’s also clear that there is no need to run the Noctua at these higher pump speeds, as there is very little additional benefit.

And that’s not to even mention the Lian Li pump, which is always audible. Consequently, I had to omit it from the inaudible category entirely, and I can tell you from experience, there are many AIOs that are unable to run their pumps at inaudible levels. This is not an isolated case.

Testing Phase 4: Air vs Water (Noise-Normalized)

As mentioned, we also added the NH-D15 G2 to the mix, as it is Noctua’s most powerful air cooler and the most surefire way to avoid pump noise entirely, and I’m sure many of you who want nothing except Noctua, actually want to know how the new liquid cooler compares to Noctua’s finest air cooler – not a bunch of AIO’s you wouldn’t buy anyway.

TheD15 air cooler has – as its name implies – much larger 150mm fans. Consequently, to test fairly against the NH-D15, we decided to set two noise targets, based on the AIO’s internal pump limiters selected with the switch on quiet and balanced.

The test we’re performing here is more representative of real-world performance than the previous bunch. For the quiet and balanced pump profiles, I set the AIO’s fans to a speed that I felt matched up nicely, where the fan and pump noise blended smoothly. I measured the total dB(A) produced, then figured out which fan speed the NH-D15 G2 had to run at to produce the same overall noise level.

For the maximum speed test, dB(A) figures were ignored – all gear was run at full speed.

The results speak for themselves. Noctua’s NL-LC1-36 offers vastly superior performance to the NH-D15. Even with the NH-D15 G2 air cooler running at full tilt, producing a highly annoying 43.9 dB(A), it still runs 6 degrees hotter than the LC1 running in the quietest profile with the fans barely even trying at just 1000 RPM, producing only 29.6 dB(A).

Noctua has been defeated. Long live Noctua.

When I first heard that Noctua’s first liquid cooler would be an Asetek unit with some Noctua sprinkles added to it, I had some major doubts about its efficacy and, quite frankly, Noctua’s business decisions.

I grew up knowing Noctua as a company that prides itself on its standards, and designing its products entirely in-house. With that in mind, the Noctua NL-LC1 is a bit… unlike the classic Noctua that we know and love – at its core, it’s not a Noctua cooler in any way we’ve seen before.

However, if you look at the history of companies that have tried to build their own AIO’s, you’ll be met with a very long list of fallen soldiers -- whether that’s due to being unable to build a reliable pump, or because of litigation from Asetek when their patent was still valid. If history has taught us anything, it’s that it’s surprisingly difficult to build a good AIO with no liquid cooling experience.

In that sense, I somewhat doubt whether the LC1 is the liquid cooler Noctua actually wanted to build. The company is also still working hard on its pumpless Thermosiphon cooler. But in the meantime, the market still wants what the market wants.

With CPUs becoming ever-more powerful, and consumer demands increasing, Noctua either had to find a way to give the people what they wanted, or get left behind in the CPU cooling space – a space they once dominated.

With all this in mind, I believe that the LC1 is the result of Noctua making a compromise – they won’t design the cooler entirely in-house, but instead work with Asetek for the pump and radiator, but adding their own pump cover, mounting bracket, and fans to bring the total package to a new industry standard.

However, this compromise is proving to pave the way to greatness. From my brief testing, I can safely say that this is an absolutely fantastic AIO – and I’m glad to finally see somebody making a liquid cooler that focusses on what really matters: noise and performance.

Priced at $220 to $280, it’s not the cheapest AIO, but certainly isn’t the most expensive either. So, despite the fact that it’s not 100% Noctua, this one comes highly recommended to anybody looking for a high-quality AIO with fantastic performance and a stellar 6-year warranty.

So, as much as I may not feel like this AIO appeals to me as a Noctua purist, as a hardware enthusiast, I really quite like it, and it’ll certainly be finding its way into a personal system.

Noctua’s highly anticipated AIO cooler is finally available, and PC builders can get it in three sizes — 240mm, 360mm, and 420mm. These all-in-one water-cooling solutions start at $219.95 on Amazon for the smallest 240mm two-fan solution. The larger 360mm version costs $249.95, and is slightly more affordable than the converted European price of US$289.95 (based on the current conversion rate for EUR 250), while the largest 420mm, equipped with three 140mm fans, is priced at $279.95.

• Get the Noctua NL-LC1-24 240mm Quiet All-in-One Water Cooler on Amazon
• Get the Noctua NL-LC1-36 360mm Quiet All-in-One Water Cooler on Amazon
• Get the Noctua NL-LC1-42 420mm Quiet All-in-One Water Cooler on Amazon

Given that this is a Noctua cooling solution, you can expect it to stay silent while still offering performance. It achieves this with the NL-PNA1 pump noise absorber — a mass damper that sits on top of the pump and water block featuring multiple layers of acoustic foam, a dense sound barrier, floating silicone mounts, and an outer shell with a metal faceplate. The pump itself also has three available speed profiles; it’s set by default to quiet mode, ensuring that it remains inaudible during operation. You can set it to balanced mode if you want additional performance headroom at the cost of some noise, while veteran users can switch to manual mode for full control over the AIO.

You can also purchase the optional NL-ACF1 80mm auxiliary cooling fan that mounts directly on the water block. This small add-on can make a big difference to other components, as we saw in Noctua’s booth at Computex 2026. It claims a VRM temperature reduction of nearly 40%, allowing your case fans to run at a slower RPM and further reduce noise. You can check out the Noctua video below if you want to see the company’s deep dive into its first AIO cooling solution.

Aside from these new innovations, the company also includes its legendary A-series fans with the AIO coolers. The 240mm comes with two NF-A12x25 G2 PWM 120mm fans, while the 360mm model boasts three of these fans, which are also found in our best PC case fans of 2026. The larger 420mm AIO trades in the 120mm fans for three NF-A14x25 G2 PWM 140mm fans. All three AIO models are equipped with the SecuFirm2+ mounting system, allowing you to use them on the latest and current-gen sockets on the market, including AM4, AM5, LGA 1700, and LGA 1851. This also means that you can easily swap a Noctua air cooler with this AIO solution if you already use a brown and beige air cooler like the Noctua NH-D15 G2.

The Noctua NL-LC1 series of AIO coolers is admittedly quite expensive, with its starting price of $219.95 on Amazon. This is especially true as there are numerous more affordable options out there, with the best AIO coolers starting at around $120. But if you’re either going for an all-Noctua PC build or want to have a silent PC at all costs, then the Noctua NL-LC1 AIO is your best bet for achieving that.

Tom's Hardware got a chance to visit Noctua's booth at Computex 2026, and we went deep on two key products for the company. The first is the NL-LC1 all-in-one liquid cooler, which we've already covered separately. The second regarded the company's ongoing efforts to develop a passively circulated thermosiphon liquid cooling solution.

A thermosiphon CPU heatsink works on a simple principle: a working fluid in a closed loop is exposed to a heat source, changes phase to a gaseous state, enters a condenser, sheds its heat by changing back into a liquid phase, and then naturally falls back toward the low point in the loop.

This simple principle encounters all sorts of challenges on the way toward use in a practical CPU heatsink. And Noctua is both characterizing and combating those problems with its typical thoroughness.

Noctua's problem-solving to this point has included developing a finned evaporator surface that helps ensure that the fluid flow in the evaporator is not turbulent, which causes warm vapor to mix with the colder fluid further from the evaporator surface, reducing the effectiveness of the system.

Noctua showed off how it's further improved the performance of its evaporator by applying a thin layer of sintered copper to its surface. Because of the high surface area created by this rough, porous wicking layer, capillary action draws more cool liquid towards the evaporator surface as the fluid already nearest the surface vaporizes.

This sintered layer avoids the formation of insulating bubbles or films over hot spots, as might happen on a smoother surface, which would negatively affect both the thermal performance of the heatsink and the convection of the working fluid through the system.

Noctua demonstrated the performance of this most recent thermosiphon prototype by putting it side-by-side with a 360mm version of its NL-LC1 AIO, both cooling an identical Ryzen 9 9950X3D test system running at a PPT of 230W. Accounting for some variance in the workload, both test systems showed a CPU temperature of just over 80 °C, suggesting that the passively circulating thermosiphon is able to deliver cooling performance similar to that of an AIO with an active pump.

Beyond the sintered evaporator coating, the inlet and outlet hoses of the cooler now sit on the same side of the evaporator, much like those of an active AIO pump, for better motherboard clearance and compatibility. The tubes on this prototype also feature a new material that reduces permeation, seals better at the connectors, and achieves full regulatory compliance.

Overall, the unit now looks much like a typical AIO and much closer to a retail-ready product versus the somewhat rough-and-ready prototypes of years past.

Between the internal and external refinements evident in this latest version of the thermosiphon, Noctua is confident enough in the performance and manufacturability of the product that it has set a potential launch window for the unit, and it tentatively expects a retail version to arrive sometime in Q3 2027. While that's still a ways away, it's typical of the company's dogged pursuit of near-perfection, and it seems safe to say that we should expect an even further refined version of this product at next year's Computex.

Noctua originally announced and showed off its first liquid cooler last year, promising to bring the same performance and aesthetics of its iconic air coolers to AIOs. Today at Computex 2026, the company has officially unveiled the NL-LC1, putting a name on the lineup that features 240mm, 360mm, and 420mm variants. The NL-LC1 will hit store shelves two weeks later, on June 16, starting at 220 Euros (around $250).

This AIO was originally intended to launch in Q1 2026 but was delayed to Q2 late last year. Hence, we already know most of the details about this product, including the available sizes, mounting, pump solution, fan setup, and more. Most importantly, the NL-LC1 uses Asetek's Emma V2 platform for its pump rather than an in-house solution, but Noctua has developed a custom noise-suppression system around it.

There are three layers of insulation meant to ensure quiet operation, and an integrated mass damper called the "NL-PNA1" (Pump Noise Absorber) to reduce vibrations. Noctua is not only limiting the amount of noise but also ensuring the pitch isn't annoying, even for what little you might be able to hear. The company's own charts show a notable difference with and without the top cover that provides this soundproofing.

The cooler comes with Noctua's legendary NF-A12x25 G2 (120mm) fans for the 240mm and 360mm models, while the 420mm features the NF-A14x25 G2 (140mm) fans instead. Similar to Silverstone's IceMyst Pro coolers we reviewed a couple of months ago, there's also an option for an additional auxiliary fan that can channel airflow to motherboard VRMs, RAM, or M.2 SSDs. It's called the "NL-ACF1" and costs 20 EUR ($23).

Noctua has equipped the NL-LC1 with its SecuFirm2+ mounting system, which supports all current-gen and recent CPUs on the market — AM4, AM5, LGA 1700, and LGA 1851. If you're already using a brown and beige air cooler, it should be a simple swap for you without needing to replace the mounting bracket. Lastly, there are three pump profiles corresponding to different fan speeds and noise levels.

By default, the pump runs at a minimum of 750 RPM, but it can be dialed up to 3,400 RPM manually, using the "Manual" profile. The "Quiet" profile limits the speed to 2,100 RPM, while the "Balanced" profile lets it reach 2,600 RPM. The moment the liquid temperature exceeds 30°C, the Balanced profile will dynamically increase the pump speed up to 3,400 RPM at 45°C to maintain a balance between cooling and noise.

Available from June 16, the NL-CL1 will cost 220 EUR for the 240mm version, 250 EUR for the 360mm version, and 280 EUR for the top-end 420mm version. Converted to USD, that's a ~$250 starting point. Today, you can get high-quality Thermalright AIOs for $50, and spending a bit more will get you their fancy LCD options, too. The 420mm variant comes out to $325 — Arctic's Liquid Freezer III Pro 420 costs around $100, and we gave it a positive review earlier this year.

Even if reviews paint the NL-LC1 in a glowing light, that pricing is a tough pill to swallow for anyone but hardcore Noctua fans. Moreover, it's important to mention that this is different from the pumpless AIO that the company has been showing off. That's still in the prototype stage and not intended for mainstream markets, though the company did say that in the "Quiet" profile, the NL-LC1 is beaten by the pumpless model.

Noctua is making its debut in the thermal pad market through a new partnership with experienced manufacturer Carbice. Noctua has announced it will be the exclusive distributor of Carbice pads for the retail market, starting with the NT-CP1 AM5/4 Carbice carbon nanotube thermal pad. Noctua will be presenting the NT-CP1 at Computex starting tomorrow and will launch the product in September.

As the name suggests, the new Noctua-branded thermal pad is optimized specifically for AM5 and AM4 AMD Ryzen CPUs, featuring a surface area that perfectly matches the IHS of CPUs that fit in both sockets.

The pad is made from carbon nanotubes that are designed to improve thermal conductivity over “hundreds and thousands of thermal cycles”. The carbon nanotubes achieve this by slowly conforming to the microscopic crevices of a CPU’s IHS. The pad is reinforced with an aluminum backbone that is sandwiched between the carbon nanotubes and protected on the surface with a nanoscale polymer coating.

Similar to outgoing thermal pads, the NT-CP1 is a maintenance-free solution that will last the lifetime of the CPU it is cooling. This is optimal for PC builders who want a permanent solution, unlike thermal paste, which typically needs to be replaced every three to five years. Thermal paste loses performance as it ages because repeated thermal cycles causes the paste to dry up.

The NT-CP1 represents the first thermal pad that Carbice is bringing to the DIY market. The company actively makes thermal pads for satellites, aerospace, and pre-built PCs (through a partnership with CyberPowerPC). It also recently announced a partnership with AMD, and is supplying its Ice Thermal Pad with the re-released Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Dr. Baratunde Cola, CEO of Carbice, notes that the company chose Noctua specifically to partner with due to the company’s widespread trust in the DIY community. Noctua will also assist Carbice in developing future thermal pads, suggesting that we could see an Intel version of the NT-CP1 in the future.

It is day three of Computex here in Taipei! With most of the big-name keynotes out of the way, we're traversing the show floor non-stop to bring you the latest, greatest, and weirdest from all your favorite hardware vendors.

Computex 2026: Headlines so far

• Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra weilds Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip with 128GB of RAM
• Nvidia lays out RTX Spark roadmap for laptops and desktop PCs at Computex 2026
• Nvidia unveils RTX Spark Superchip for laptops and desktop PCs at Computex 2026
• Intel details long-awaited Crescent Island AI GPU at Computex, boasts up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X
• Intel Xeon 7 ‘Diamond Rapids’ CPUs officially launching in 2027 on Intel 18A-P
• Intel Xeon 6+ ‘Clearwater Forest’ puts 18A in the data center with up to 288 cores
• AMD’s formerly China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE goes global for $549 on June 2
• AMD confirms AM5 support through 2029
• AMD brings back Ryzen 7 5800X3D, launches Ryzen 7 7700X3D
• Dell XPS 13 targets MacBook Neo with Intel's Wildcat Lake
• Alienware debuts 39, 34-inch OLED gaming monitors

Computex 2026: Live updates

Well, good morning, and a very (very) warm (and humid) welcome to our Computex 2026 live blog. Stephen from the UK here to see you through the first few hours of Monday. As mentioned, it has already been a jam-packed first day!

There's really nothing like Taipei during Computex:

Nvidia enters the laptop and desktop market

If you're just joining us, then welcome. It is evening in Taiwan and there's a lot happening. Headlines from the first day of Computex include Nvidia's incursion into the desktop PC and laptop market by way of its new RTX Spark Superchip. RTX Spark is a Windows on Arm platform for laptops, which Nvidia claims is the most efficient every built. Top-spec chips offer 20 Arm CPU cores, a Blackwell GPU with 6144 CUDA cores, 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and up to 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

• Nvidia unveils RTX Spark Superchip for laptops and desktop PCs at Computex 2026

Surface Laptop Ultra

One of the first companies to get behind Nvidia's new RTX Spark, understandably, is Microsoft. The company has unveiled a new Surface Laptop Ultra, effectively its own version of the MacBook Pro. It features a 20-core CPU, Blackwell GPU, 128GB of unified RAM, and more. That's housed in a 15-inch chassis with a mini-LED display, replete with HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, and an SD card reader.

• Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra weilds Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip with 128GB of RAM, 20 Arm CPU cores, and a Blackwell GPU

Intel Crescent Island

Somewhat overshadowed by Nvidia, Intel has unveiled its new Crescent Island AI GPU, featuring up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory. The data center GPU is "built for agentic AI," is built on Intel's Xe3P architecture, but details about raw specs are scant at this stage.

• Intel details long-awaited Crescent Island AI GPU at Computex, boasts up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X to combat memory shortages

Radeon RX 9070 GRE

AMD's China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE is going global, with a $549 price tag when it launches on June 2. This GPU sits right between the 9060 XT and the RX 9070, and you'll be able to catch benchmarks on Tom's Hardware very soon.

• AMD’s formerly China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE goes global for $549 on June 2

Jake is hungry!

"You ever get to the end of the day and realize you haven't eaten a thing." A quick look behind the scenes at Tom's Hardware, where CPU analyst Jake Roach has just realised that he hasn't eaten anything today. It's 8pm.

AM5 lives on

After previously only committing to supporting its AM5 platform through 2027, the company this week confirmed that it is actually going to support AM5 through 2029, with both Zen 4 and Zen 5 likely to see two further generations of CPU release. It's unclear if this is 2029 will mark the end of the line for AM5.

• AMD confirms AM5 support through 2029

The return of a legend

AMD has announced it will bring back its legendary Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and is also launching a Ryzen 7 7700X3D to fight the rising price of PC building. The latter is a downclocked version of the 7800X3D for AM5 platforms, but the real headline is the 5800X3D, which supports DDR4 RAM and, in theory, should give users a more affordable way to build a potent gaming PC on AM4.

• AMD brings back Ryzen 7 5800X3D, launches Ryzen 7 7700X3D to combat rising component prices

Dell comes after the MacBook Neo

This $699 XPS 13 laptop built around Intel's Wildcat Lake platform is the company's answer to the popular MacBook Neo. Featuring between 8-32GB of RAM, a 13.4-inch display, and up to 1TB of storage, it comes with either the Intel Core 5 320 or an upcoming Intel Core Ultra 7 355 variant.

• Dell XPS 13 targets MacBook Neo with Intel's Wildcat Lake — $699 starting price, $599 for students

DLSS 4.5

Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, an advanced denoiser for better ray-tracing and path-tracing image quality when it releases later this year. Nvidia says it can process 35% more input data and uses 20% more paramaters using the same compute budget as the previous-generation.

• DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction update arrives in August for better ray tracing visuals — broader training data set and second-gen transformer architecture combine for improved image quality

Qualcomm hands on

Qualcomm's new $300 and up ARM laptops come with a mystery eight-core CPU and active cooling. Rocking the new Snapdragon C chip, our very own Paul Alcorn made a discovery that perplexed even the Qualcomm representative on the floor...

• We went hands-on with Qualcomm's new '$300 and up' ARM laptop platform with mystery eight-core CPU — active-cooled Snapdragon C laptop surfaces in Acer Aspire Go 15

A big EXPO boost

AMD is launching a new automatic memory overclocking feature. EXPO Ultra Low Latency promises a 13% uplift in performance compared to standard DDR5 JEDEC speeds, and a 4% uplift over existing EXPO.

• AMD promises 13% uplift with new EXPO ‘Ultra Low Latency’ overclocking on DDR5 DIMMs — automatic memory overclocking delivers 4% improvement over standard EXPO, says AMD

Intel not resting on its laurels

Speaking to Tom's Hardware in response to news about Nvidia's RTX Spark, Intel says it treats all such developments with "a healthy does of paranoia," but touted the virtues of x86, warning of compatibility, DRM, and other issues that inevitably follow Arm CPUs entering the market.

• Intel warns it has 'a healthy dose of paranoia' over Nvidia entrance into PC market — company says RTX Spark is 'great for the market' while touting the virtues of x86

Supermicro makes an appearance

Computex isn't all about consumer hardware, with plenty of B2B and industrial hardware on display too. We got a look at Supermicro's new Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, replete with a new type of cooling that the company says offers 1,000 times higher electrical impedance than standard.

• Supermicro shows off Vera Rubin NVL72 rack with all-new type of coolant — company claims coolant offers 1,000 times higher electrical impedance over standard cooling

A staggering 5090 from Asus

To celebrate 20 years of its ROG brand, Asus has unveiled a monster new ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Edition 20, which includes a wraparound AMOLED display. There's also a 3,000W power supply, a new NUC, a PC case, peripherals, a gaming chair, and more.

• Asus' monstrous ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Edition 20 includes expansive curved AMOLED display — also debuts 3,000W power supply and striking PC case

See what happened at the show before the show

Computex starts before the show floor opens. While it's nighttime in Taipei, you can still take a look at everything we saw early with our Day Zero Wrap Up.

You'll learn more about chips from Intel and AMD, monitors from Acer and Alienware, and, of course, learn a ton about Nvidia's RTX Spark system on a chip.

That should hold you over until the show floor doors open and we get into even more of the nitty-gritty.

Read: Computex 2026 Day Zero Wrap-Up: Nvidia launches RTX Spark Superchip assault on laptop and desktop markets, Intel readies Xeon 6+

Vincent van Gogh, on a laptop

MSI is taking its Prestige 14 Flip AI+ and putting some prestige art on it. The company says the laptops are "inspired by The Starry Night and Starry Night Over the Rhône". That language makes it unclear if they're exact duplicates of the paintings, but either way, they don't look like anything else we've seen lately.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 finally brings an OLED screen

Among the many twentieth-anniversary branded Asus ROG gadgets the brand is releasing is a new version of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X.

The ROG Xbox Ally X20 bundle includes an updated version of the handheld, with a clear shell, OLED display, TMR joysticks, and a transforming D-Pad with four and eight-way movement. It still has the same AMD Z2 Extreme processor as its predecessor.

ROG XREAL R1 Edition 20 Gaming AR Glasses, with a 171-inch, 240 Hz virtual display at 4 meters.

No pricing information is available just yet.

Who ISN'T having a milestone anniversary?

Lots of companies and brands at Computex seem to have started in years that end with 6.

• Asus ROG has a 20th anniversary product line
• MSI is celebrating 40 years, marked by the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Draco Epic laptop (pictured above).
• Gigabyte marked 40 years at the end of May, and is celebrating with its Infinity Design lanauage, including a GPU with rounded edges.

So consider this your reminder to at least get a card for your or a loved one's anniversary. Clearly everyone is celebrating.

How Intel is reacting to RTX Spark

With Nvidia's RTX Spark announced, CPU manufacturers are sizing up the field.

When we sat down with Tom’s sat down with Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management for Intel’s Client Computing Group, he told us how Intel is reacting:

“Nvidia puts out great products, right? And they know how to do gaming, they know how to do all these different things. So we always take everything with a healthy dose of paranoia, but we are also very, very confident with our products." He also pointed out Arm chips for Windows have typically had compatibility issues.

Read more: Intel warns it has 'a healthy dose of paranoia' over Nvidia entrance into PC market — company says RTX Spark is 'great for the market' while touting the virtues of x86

An 18-inch laptop for the rest of us

Usually, an 18-inch laptop is a massive workstation or gaming rig. But at Computex, Acer has an 18-inch system, the Aspire 18 AI designed for everyday use. Above, it's pictured next to a 16-inch PC.

That 18-inch screen has just a 1920 x 1200 resolution, but for people who turn up the font size to read (no shame in it!), it may still help. The refresh rate tops out at 165 Hz.

Specs include a CPU up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H, up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM, up to 2TB of SSD storage, and Wi-Fi 7 support. Acer claims 22 hours of battery life. And hey, there's room, so you get a number pad.

Like much of what we're seeing at Computex, we don't have a price. But if you've been jonesing for a big screen without a discrete GPU, it is on the way.

AMD had to reengineer the Ryzen 7 5800X3D for a rerelease

AMD's David McAfee shared the story behind the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and why it took so long to come to market. Apparently, AMD had plans to bring back the chip earlier, but the silicon bonding process TSMC had previously used was no longer available, McAfee says. That led to some additional development time in order to get the CPU into shape, which happened to line up with the 10th anniversary of the AM4 socket. - Jake Roach

Get ready for Intel's Computex keynote

Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan is set to take the stage at Computex in just under an hour, and we expect about a 45-minute keynote from the executive, followed by a Q&A session that Tom's Hardware is attending. Although we've already seen most of Intel's announcements, ranging from the G3 Extreme Range to a Diamond Rapids tease, it's possible Tan could drop some hints about next-gen Nova Lake chips during the keynote. - Jake Roach

• Watch Intel's Computex 2026 keynote here — CEO Lip-Bu Tan takes the stage in Taipei at 10:30pm PT on June 1

Intel's 3D V-Cache competitor?

Tom's Hardware attended a Q&A session with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, as well as a panel of executives, including Alex Katouzian, a Qualcomm veteran who recently joined Intel's ranks. We asked Intel about its supposed 3D V-Cache competitor, rumored to be called bLCC or Big Last Level Cache, and Katouzian shared the following:

"When I first came in and started reviewing road maps for the team, I was very pleasantly surprised. So, stay tuned, a very strong roadmap coming, and we will be gunning for that section of the market as well. And so, please stay tuned," Katouzian told Tom's Hardware.

Phison has demoed its future PCIe 6.0 SSD controller in the past, but the earlier displays last year merely showed the chip on a large development. Development of the new X3 controller has obviously moved forward well, as the company had two reference SSDs on display in its booth here at Computex.

Phison says these new SSDs deliver up to 28 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput and an incredible 6.8 million IOPS, easily beating anything available on the market. Stay tuned for our full write up.

Stephen checking in

Well a very good morning from day 2 of Computex! Stephen here to see you through the next few hours.

Timing is everything!

Computex is just like comedy, timing is very important! Coordinating a team around the globe is pretty hectic, so here's some insight into how tricky it can be. It's 10:24am in the UK, but our team on the ground in Taipei have already been at it all day, where it's currently 5:24pm. Of course, our U.S. readership and staff are just waking up. Lots of companies are still working in Eastern or even Pacific time too. A lot of plates in the air.

Snapdragon makes an appearance

We haven't heard too much from Qualcomm this week, with Nvidia dominating the headlines thanks to RTX Spark. However, this Asus Ascent QN10 is a nifty new Mini PC with Snapdragon X2 Elite, which QC claims is the world's first to deliver 80 TOPS through its NPU.

Noctua's latest cooling efforts

For those who want to squeeze every last drop of power and temperature optimization from their CPU, Noctua has announced new thermal pads for AMD chips. Made in partnership with Carbice, these pads are for AM4 and AM5 Ryzen CPUs and are made from carbon nanotubes to improve thermal conductivity.

• Noctua announces new thermal pad for AMD chips in partnership with Carbice — product will work with processors in AM5 and AM4 sockets

Gigabyte's latest and greatest monitors

Gigabyte has unveiled a new series of Aorus Elite gaming monitors. Ranging in size from 27 to 32 inches, three of them feature fourth-generation Tandem WOLED technology for improved color and brightness. The fourth is a mini-LED monitor.

• Gigabyte debuts fourth-gen Tandem WOLED and multi-mode Mini LED gaming monitors — 27 to 32 inches, up to 480 Hz, and up to 5K resolution

Asus’ ROG Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 hands on

Asus is going big to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Republic of Gamers brand. Alongside a monster RTX 5090 and a 3,000W PSU, there are new peripherals including this Asus ROG HArpe II Edition 20 gaming mouse. It features a gold logo and scroll wheel, as well as gold accents. A little garish for some tastes, it'll cost an eye-watering $259.99.

• Hands-on with Asus’ ROG Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 gaming mouse – 24K gold and a 65K sensor

Relive Intel's keynote

Intel held its Computex keynote overnight, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan taking to the stage. You can relive the keynote below!

The latest in cooling from Frore

Frore has been showing off its latest in solid-state cooling tech. Its AirJet Mini is out here cooling Intel's Wildcat Lake laptop reference design. With 15W of sustained power and just 11.3 mm in total thickness, could it give the MacBook Neo a run for its money?

• Frore System’s solid-state AirJet Mini cools Intel’s Wildcat Lake laptop reference design – 15W of sustained, fanless cooling helps MacBook Neo competitor reach a svelte 11.3 mm, remain silent

Take our quiz!

'The single most important tool of humanity'

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company wants to 'reinvent the single most important tool of humanity' with its new RTX Spark. The company unveiled its new chip for desktops and laptops at the start of this week.

• Jensen Huang says Nvidia wants to 'reinvent the single most important tool of humanity' with RTX Spark — Nvidia CEO touts support of 'literally every computer maker in the world' for its agentic AI PC platform

Favorite Computex announcement so far?

Cooler Master's MasterDimm

Unveiled ahead of Computex, this Cooler Master MasterDimm is a collaboration with G.SKILL that brings active cooling to DDR5 RAM. No word on just how big those sticks are yet...

New from Gigabyte

Gigabyte is another vendor celebrating a major anniversary at Computex, specifically 40 years in the game. There's new motherboards, GPUs, and a monster 1,600W power supply.

• Gigabyte showcases new Infinity products for its 40th anniversary — X870 Infinity Next halo motherboard boasts metal 3D-printed elements, Aero Wood goes dark, MicroATX Stealth boards, Infinity-style GPUs extend down the product stack

Phison shows off its new controller

Down at Phison, we took a look at its new PCIe 6.0 SSD controller, the X3. The company touts sequential speeds of up to 28 GB/s and 6.8 million IOPS in random read/write workloads. There were also benchmarks on display for a new DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 SSD controller. Get the details here:

• Phison shows PCIe 6.0 X3 SSD controller with 28 GB/s of bandwidth and 6.8 million IOPS, supports 2 petabytes per drive— also new power-sipping E37T SSDs for PCIe 5.0 systems consume a mere 4.5W

You don't know the HAF of it

More from Cooler Master, where we took a look at the company's new cases, fans, and coolers. The new HAF500 case supports up to E-ATX motherboards, dual-GPU setups, and plenty of cooling.

Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro Edition 20 gets decked out in black and gold

Asus just launched the ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro Edition 20, the 20th-anniversary edition of its existing ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro. The overall design of the new router is identical, but the stealth black look is now accentuated with gold trimmings. You can even see gold plating beneath the clear plastic window on top of the router, along with a 20th anniversary badge finished in gold.

While you can expect the same blazing performance as the ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro, the ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro Edition 20 also includes an exclusive Signature Edition 20 web interface for configuring the router.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ joins the growing number of handheld gaming PCs

There's a new competitor to take on the likes of the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and Legion Go 2. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is a fresh entry using a 14-core Intel Arc G3 Extreme CPU and an Arc B390 GPU. The handheld can also be decked out with up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage.

The design looks somewhat unorthodox, with the 8-inch 1080p IPS display jutting well below the flanking controllers. The display is spec'd for a 120 Hz refresh rate and maxes out at 500 nits. Rounding out the main features is an 80 WHr battery inside the 1.3-pound package.

Best Buy already has a product page for the Claw 8 EX AI+ on its website, listing the 32GB/1TB configuration at $1,699.99. However, the handheld is only shown as "coming soon" rather than being available for preorder.

Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro will be among the first Wi-Fi 8 routers on the market

If you want to be on the bleeding edge in wireless networking, you won't have to wait much longer for Wi-Fi 8 routers. The first Wi-Fi 8 router coming from Asus will be the ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro, which is a gaming router aimed at the high end of the market.

We must caution that Wi-Fi 8 routers won't result in another huge leap in theoretical performance over existing Wi-Fi 7 routers. Instead, optimizations with the standard will make it so that real world performance and range will far exceed what's possible with current hardware. We should also see even longer range for IoT devices, epecially those sitting at the far reaches of the coverage for your home router.

The ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro will also include a wide range of LAN/WAN ports, including two 10 GbE ports and four 2.5 GbE ports.

• Asus unveils its first Wi-Fi 8 router — ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro offers up to 2x real-world throughput uplift over Wi-Fi 7

We go hands-on with the Acer Predator Atlas 8 Arc G3 gaming handheld

Last week, we brought you news that Acer was working on a Predator Atlas 8 gaming handheld. Well, we got a chance to get a hands-on with the device at Computex, and it's quite impressive.

The Predator Atlas 8 uses Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme processors paired with an Arc B370 or B390 iGPU. Systems come with an 8-inch 1200p 120 Hz variable-refresh-rate display rated for up to 500 nits of brightness. An 80 WHr battery should help extend your gaming runtime, and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are included in the mix.

At 1.79 pounds, the Predator Atlas 8 slots in between the Legion Go and the Steam Deck OLED in weight.

Intel's Xeon 6+ in the flesh

We stopped by Intel's demo suite, and the company had a Xeon 6+ chip, along with a wafer, hanging on the wall. This is Intel's first time using 18A in the data center, with Xeon 6+ now sporting up to 288 Darkmont E-cores. You can learn more about it in our Xeon 6+ write-up and go behind the scenes with our Xeon 6+ interview transcript on Tom's Hardware Premium.

Day 3

Good morning and welcome to day three of Computex! I say day 3, but as we've explained before timing is tricky here. In Taiwan day three is almost over, but for our global audiences in places like the UK and U.S., it's just beginning! - Stephen Warwick

Some highlights from Acer

We dropped by Acer to see what the company has to offer at Computex this year. We saw the new Acer Swift Spin 14 AI tablet, the new Predator Atlas 8, and more!

Jensen will sign anything

Everyone knows that if you see Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Computex, chances are he'll sign something for you. How about this epic Nvidia GTX 1080Ti Founders Edition?

Noctua's AIO in all its glory

We've been hearing a lot about Noctua's entry into the AIO market for some time. The company is back at Computex 2026 and has finally revealed specs, pricing, and release date. Coming on June 16, pricing should be around $250 (It is listed at 220 euros), with more expensive 360mm and 420mm options available. The NL-LC1 features Asetek's Emma V2 pump and NF-A12/14 fans.

• Noctua's first-ever AIO features a silenced Asetek Emma V2 pump and NF-A12/14 fans — 240mm NL-LC1 starts at around $250, could cost $325 for 420mm cooler

The first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboard

Cherry's gaming branch Cherry XTRFY has unveiled the first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboard at Computex. With a 70% layout, the technology should be more reliable than 2.4GHz wireless. That means a more stable connection that is less vulnerable to interference from other wireless devices.

• Cherry XTRFY launches first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboard — featuring more compact 70-percent layout

Corsair's new mouse feat. Stream Deck

New from Corsair is this Nightsword v2 Wireless SD Stream Deck gaming mouse. Striking name aside, you can map its buttons to Stream Deck features, eight in all, so that you can control streaming functions without taking your hand off the mouse. It's a similar philisophy to the Scimitar Elite Wireless SE. However, the Nightsword also comes with a unique dedicated Stream Deck Launch button.

• Corsair shows off gaming mouse with dedicated Stream Deck launch button — wireless mouse also gets almost 50 hours of 8K battery life

New from NZXT

We stopped by NZXT to see what's news. The company showed off new RGB fans, cases, and more.

Counterfeit DRAM

Tom's Hardware spoke to G.Skill and V-Color at Computex. The latter confirmed to us that it has seen an influx of counterfeit DRAM hitting markets in China, to the extent that it is negatively impacting sales.

• Counterfeit G.Skill and V-Color DDR5 modules hit Chinese marketplaces, impacting company sales — cheap contraband memory using identical PCBs and heat spreaders almost impossible to spot

A long day for Jensen

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is one of the main attractions at Computex, and is often mobbed wherever he goes, shutting down booths or even entire floors here in Taipei. Here he is enjoying some brief respite at the Gigabyte booth with a beer and some barbecue.

Taipei drone show

The evening skies in Taipei lit up with a drone show to celebrate Computex, check it out!

Lian Li's new Edge PSUs

Take a look at Lian Li's new Edge Platinum V2 PSUs, equipped with LED dust indicator, magnetic filter, snap-on fan, and a USB header hub. There's also the trademark 90-degree power connector.

The claaaaaaw

The new MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is an 8-inch handheld that features a 120 Hz display and new ergonomic grips. Bathed in a striking 'Void Purple' finish, our immediate hands-on yielded some impressive performance.

• MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ brings Intel Arc G3 Extreme to handhelds — 8-inch, 120 Hz display and new ergonomic grips

AMD reacts to Nvidia RTX Spark

AMD is acting confident in the face of Nvidia's new RTX Spark announcements.

"I’m really excited that Nvidia has joined the game. You know, we were the only game in town for almost two years now, and the large local memory is becoming super critical in the agentic AI [workloads],” said AMD’s Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business. at Computex “I'm actually happy to see Nvidia join the race for these great products.

Comparing the specs, he suggested that "Gorgon Halo, which is coming out in Q3, is going to be a better product.”

We'll see how these platforms shake out later this year.

Read more: AMD executives react to Nvidia’s RTX Spark — ‘you’re just wrong if you don’t get a Strix Halo notebook’

Sizing up the Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Neo

Which of these systems is thicker? Trick question: both are half an inch thick. At Computex, our own Jake Roach saw the two together at Dell's booth.

The Neo's bottom is thicker, while Dell's is a bit more equal. And the XPS has a slightly rounded bottom, making it appear slightly thinner than Apple's blockier design style. But both list the exact same height, and the spec sheets are identical.

The XPS, however, is lighter than the MacBook Neo, at 2.2 pounds, compared the Apple's 2.7 pounds.

See all of the photos in the gallery above.

MSI adds an internal SSD slot to its flagship Wi-Fi 7 router

Wi-Fi 8 is just around the corner, but there’s still plenty of life left in the Wi-Fi 7 standard. MSI is proving that with a new flagship Wi-Fi 7 router called the RadiX BE19000. At first glance, the RadiX BE19000 looks like any other high-end gaming router, complete with eight antennas that give it an arachnid-like appearance.

However, the RadiX BE19000 hides a secret within — it features a PCIe SSD slot, making the router what MSI calls “NAS Lite.” You can add your own M.2 SSD to enable PC backups or simply to share files across your network.

You still get all the usual trimmings, like tri-band Wi-Fi, dual 10 GbE ports, and four 2.5 GbE ports. In addition, MSI says that the RadiX BE19000 is compatible with its proprietary mesh standard, allowing you to expand your network with compatible routers and access points.

Read more: MSI unveils latest set of WiFi 7 gaming routers touting ultra-fast speeds — flagship RadiX BE19000 model comes with a built-in SSD slot for 'NAS Lite' experience and wireless speeds up to 19 Gbps

Do your science homework

We talked a bit about Noctua's new AIO cooler in this live blog, but one thing we didn't mention: just how much homework they show. The company is ready to defend its doctoral thesis.

If you're ever at Computex, need to rest and do some not-so-light reading to explain what a thermosiphon or a flooded condenser is, Noctua has your back. You can see some of it in the gallery above, and believe me, that is just some of it.

Here ends Computex

Good morning folks, Stephen here to announce that we are signing off our Computex coverage for 2026. At least, our live correspondence from the floor. There's still plenty of news and insight to come from our conversations, but we'll be winding up this live blog soon. It'll remain on the site so you can look back and trawl through any announcements you may have missed, but thank you for joining us for another great year!

3D-printin' folks and hobbyists of various stripes can rejoice. The highly-regarded folks at Noctua have released pitch-perfect CAD models of many of the company's fans, including the NF-A12x25 G2, which currently ranks at the top of our best PC fans roundup.

Noctua revealed the news in a simple blog post, pointing interested techies to the downloads section of its website. The Austrian beige-and-brown firm says that the files in question accurately match the mounting dimensions and external dimensions of its fans, a boon for enthusiasts everywhere who may have had previous trouble with inaccurate official models. This bit of news dovetails nicely with the availability of the official Noctua-colored filament from Prusa, announced last December.

Some folks may find it concerning that Noctua would be freely offering their proverbial golden goose, but the CAD files don't include the internal frame structure, and the fan impeller geometries have been slightly tweaked, as forms of IP protection.

It bears remarking that high-precision manufacturing and tight tolerances are one key reason why Noctua's fans are so effective (and pricey, too), and that's a feature that is exceedingly hard to simulate in a home laboratory and, we'd wager, most factories. If nothing else, you'll be able to replace some parts of an existing fan, or use Noctua's files as a basis for creating your own system fans.

Noctua naturally notes that users are free to do as they with with the files, but that they cannot be used for selling or manufacturing the depicted products — assuming one would be able to reproduce the entire product accurately to begin with.

Response from the community was immediate and joyous. The tweet announcing the files had a bevy of happy replies, with one commenter noting that "every model [they] used online for 120mm mounting specs so far has ALWAYS been just the slightest bit off." While most enthusiasts are sensibly enthused, the availability of the bespoke filament and Noctua's cooperation with the maker community has already given way to some truly cursed designs.

If you're interested in downloading the CAD files and starting on your own creations, check out our roundup of the best 3D printers for recommendations. We've seen a rapid increase in quality and decrease in price across 3D printers over the last couple of years.

A TechTuber has constructed a bulbous 15x fan PC case side panel as a cooling experiment. If you think the mind-boggling design of the ‘Superdome’ is familiar, that’s probably because the fevered imagination of Major Hardware was also behind the custom domed 15x fans in the ‘Fanhattan Project’ we wrote about last month. How well does it scale to PC side panel use? Let’s see.

Major Hardware explains at the start of his new video that the Superdome was inspired by user comments on the prior project, suggesting the use of multiple standard NF-A12x25 120mm fans instead of tiny fans replacing a single unit. Thankfully, as the Noctua fans are $40 a piece, the cooling firm provided all the fans the project required — saving $600 for the maker. As a cherry on top, Noctua also generously provided spools of matching 3D printer filament.

The freebie Noctua fans arrived before the TechTuber had drafted the Superdome in 3D, but the idea was made to work with five fans around one on top of the dome, and nine surrounding them at the base of the dome, near the PC. Cabling routing was yet to be decided.

Next, we see Major Hardware 3D print the structure of the Superdome, and luckily, the Bambu Labs H2D and H2S build volume was just enough to prevent more design splitting than would be ideal. Still, it took days to output all the pieces.

The finished work looks great from the outside, but Major Hardware is the first to admit cable management is “a little bit of a disaster.” But it was “honestly pretty quiet,” as long as none of the cables swung into the fan blades. All the fans were configured to be intakes, so we guess that when attached to the PC, the build would have a soupçon of positive internal pressure.

Battlefield 6 gaming thermals test

The proof of any success from equipping the Superdome would come from an A/B Battlefield 6 gaming challenge, decided the TechTuber. With the standard glass panel equipped, he observed a top temperature of ~86°C in the Ryzen Master software. Swapping to the Superdome and playing a few more BF6 games, and Major Hardware saw that the CPU temps had dropped to approximately 67°C. “I dropped about 20°C just by putting the Superdome on the front of my PC,” noted the TechTuber. “This is pretty incredible, and it's not even loud.” However, sitting beside the PC, he felt “a constant breeze.”

Major Hardware has decided to share the 3D printing files on Thingiverse, so others with a Lian Li O11 case and a few spare fans can easily follow in his footsteps.

Noctua is known for building some of the world’s quietest and most reliable cooling fans. The brand is a partnership between the Austrian RASCOM and Taiwanese Kolink; RASCOM handles marketing, sales, and product management, whereas Kolink handles manufacturing, and together they handle product development. We delved into the interesting history of the brand late last year.

You most likely know Noctua for their signature brown and beige fans, but not everyone digs these colors – many of us prefer our fans in plain black, and although Noctua is happy to make these nowadays, their development isn’t something that happens overnight.

To manage expectations, Noctua keeps a published roadmap with the brand’s upcoming products, which is updated a few times per year. The most recent is from January 2026, and it details the products we can expect in Q1, Q2, and Q3 of this year.

Reliable Fans, Unreliable Roadmap

Now, before we dig into the details of Noctua’s roadmap, a disclaimer: The company is notoriously unreliable when it comes to sticking to its published roadmap. This is not without reason, however.

You see, there’s something you should know about Noctua: The brand prides itself on building quality products. Inevitably, this comes with unforeseen issues, and Noctua consequently finds itself delaying the launch of products to meet its own quality standards. There's more to it than just that, of course. Noctua didn't publish a roadmap until a few years ago, after facing much criticism from the public.

Q2 2026: Noctua is getting into water cooling

Noctua just released the Flux Pro Noctua Edition in partnership with Antec in March, which we’ve already built a system into. The Flux Pro case is made by Antec, and the Noctua Edition is the first case ever built to feature Noctua branding and a host of Noctua fans. But it's in Q2 where things start to get even more interesting.

Just like the brand was firmly against producing black fans for a long time, Noctua has also been firmly against liquid cooling. The reason is simple: pump noise.

Noctua has nothing against the power of liquid cooling. But when you pair the excellent NF-A12x25 G2 with a liquid cooler, under load the pump speed has to ramp up significantly, meaning its noise will stand out above the rest of the system. This is not an issue for PCs with cheaper fans (or not one most people care much about, anyway), but certainly an issue in a system designed for silence. But the market wants what the market wants. Noctua has been all about partnerships lately, and for building its very own liquid cooler, it teamed up with Asetek.

Asetek's history isn’t all too popular with the enthusiast community, but no one can deny that the company does have formidable experience making all-in-one liquid coolers. They’ll be pulling the EMMA (Gen 8) V2 platform out for optimal thermal and acoustic performance, and Noctua has made a handful of significant design choices that should make the pump significantly less obtrusive than other AIOs, among which is a tuned mass damper – similar to what the Taipei 101 skyscraper uses to keep the building upright in earthquakes, but much, much smaller.

Noctua has been talking about making its own liquid cooler for quite some time, and unlike many partnerships it has engaged in, the AIO will be a fully Noctua-branded product. With the Noctua brand always comes an industry-leading 6-year warranty. Reliability is often an issue with cheap AIOs, but with Noctua backing the product, I reckon we can be confident that Asetek’s new platform is due to stand the test of time.

The Noctua AIO will come in 240mm, 360mm, and 420mm sizes, all in the industry-standard 30mm radiator thickness. There's no specific price or release date quite yet, so keep your eyes peeled for any announcements.

Q2 2026: Finally, a Black NF-A12x25 G2

If you’ve been craving an NF-A12x25 G2, but don’t like the beige-and-brown colorway, your prayers will be answered: Noctua is unleashing the black variant of the NF-A12x25 G2 to the world in Q2 2026. Or at least, so says the roadmap.

The NF-A12x25 G2 is a fan that pushes the limits of what is physically possible in the 120mm x 120mm x 25mm form factor, and it does so by using Sterrox Liquid Crystal Polymer (LCP) for the impeller. This gives it extra tensile strength so that the blades don’t bow outwards at high duty, which is critical because the impeller is spaced at just 0.5mm from the frame.

But, the reason why it’s taken a while to come to market is that changing the color pigment in LCP has some funny ways of interacting with the molding process; you’d think, simply change the pigment, inject the substance into the same mold. Bob’s your uncle. But the reality isn’t that simple. With most fans, this wouldn’t be an issue, but due to the 0.5mm spacing, there is zero room for error.

Q2 2026: Pulsar Feinmann Noctua Edition

As a wrap for Q2, Noctua is teaming up with Pulsar for a Feinmann Noctua Edition gaming mouse. The Feinmann is a rather unique mouse — it’s built with a magnesium alloy shell that’s filled with holes to deal with sweaty hands. If you’re someone who suffers from Trypophobia, this mouse isn’t for you. But Noctua saw it and thought, “Hey, we can put a fan in there,” and so they did.

Due to the magnesium alloy shell, the Pulsar Feinmann is ultra light, weighing in at just 46 grams. The Noctua edition is probably a few grams heavier – the fan that’s due to be mounted inside weighs just under 9 grams without a cable. Even with that, less than 60 grams would still be extremely light. For context, anything under 100 grams is considered light. For comparison's sake, the Logitech MX Master 4 weighs in at 150 grams.

The sensor inside the mouse is the PixArt PAW3950, which offers a 39k DPI resolution, can cope with up to 50G acceleration, and tracks at up to 75 inches per second. With polling at 8,000 Hz, the Pulsar Feinmann is already an incredibly attractive gaming mouse as is.

Add some Noctua colorway touches, and this will be one of the most unique pointing devices to exist. Considering the original, non-Noctua edition costs $180, and adding some Noctua tax, it wouldn’t be surprising if this mouse costs north of $250.

As with other Noctua collaboration products, expect limited production of the mouse. The chances are that over time, this will gain collector value among diehard Noctua enthusiasts.

Q3 2026: A desk fans & co-branded PSUs

With all the releases slated for Q2, Q3 is set to be a little less exciting. We can expect a 140mm desk fan, a USB fan controller to pair it with, and last but not least, a Seasonic Prime PX Noctua Edition power supply.

The advent of the Seasonic Prime PX Noctua Edition is particularly interesting, as it brings a Noctua Edition power supply to a more mainstream power envelope.

Currently, Noctua is already selling a PSU in partnership with Seasonic – the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition, which, as its name implies, is a very beefy unit capable of delivering 1,600 watts nominal. That is a huge amount of power, and not everyone needs this.

The Prime PX HPD series will come in envelopes of 850 W, 1,000 W, and 1,200 W, which is much more appropriate for the masses.

To give some context to this statement, Even The Stout Owl, a fully handmade wooden PC with 100% Noctua G2 fans, which packs a Core Ultra 9 285K, 96 GB of DDR5 CUDIMM memory, 4 TB of SSD space, and a Noctua RTX 5080, only typically pulls around 500 watts under real-world loads. With synthetic loads, this figure gets pushed to 800-810 watts, meaning even that PC could make do with the smallest PSU of the lot.

But keep in mind that PSUs operate at peak efficiency around 50% load (generally speaking, this is a good rule of thumb to go by), which gives a good argument for slightly oversizing a PSU. Oversize too far, and you’ll end up with unnecessarily higher idle draw and never reach peak efficiency. For more on PSU bottlenecks and sweetspots, we've done our own testing last year with the RTX 5090.

The Prime PX series is also a short power supply, barely fitting a 120mm fan. This makes them fit in pretty much all but the smallest cases. Of course, the Noctua-Edition Prime PX’s will also come with an NF-A12x25 G2 fan installed, a brown shroud with Noctua’s signature intake-noise-reducing shape, and Noctua-themed cabling.

The Thermosiphon is still MIA, for now

One of Noctua's most anticipated products is the elusive thermosiphon cooler.

With Noctua’s take on pump noise, a thermosiphon cooler would be the perfect outcome, as it would need a pump. Instead of being filled with water, a thermosiphon cooler is filled with a phase-changing coolant, which boils when subjected to heat from the CPU, and condenses when cooled in the radiator.

Except unlike a heatpump or air-conditioner, this doesn’t happen under the mighty force of a compressor – rather, the coolant is one that’s engineered to evaporate and condense at temperatures typically seen in PCs, rising from the boil, and falling back down by gravity as a liquid – a passive, gravity-driven cycle. This is similar to the process that happens in heatpipes.

For something as complex as this, it’s no surprise we can’t find the thermosiphon cooler on the roadmap. It was first demoed at Computex in 2024, but has been in the works long before then, according to our own sources. The thermosiphon cooler is something Noctua is developing in partnership with Calyos, which has experience building computer cases that act as passive heatsinks, driven by phase-change cooling.

With the complexities of developing a product such as a phase-change cooler, Noctua has said that the thermosiphon cooler will not be listed on the roadmap until it is near completion, nor will it give a rough ETA.

The curious case of the disappearing NH-D12

Also demonstrated at Computex in 2024 was Noctua’s first full-size, dual-tower 120mm CPU cooler. Noctua has been around for 20 years, and in all that time, it has never built a dual-tower, dual-120mm-fan CPU cooler that uses standard square-frame fans.

Yes, the legendary NH-D15 and the new NH-D15 G2 are phenomenal coolers – but they’re huge, and with the round-frame fans, they look a bit incohesive, lacking clearly-defined boundaries. Of course, one of the reasons it may have disappeared off the roadmap is the limited situations in which a D12 may be needed – for space-restricted applications, Noctua already builds the D12L, a low-profile variant, and where there is enough space, the D15 will offer superior performance.

All that said, Noctua had stated that the prototype D12 offered D15-level performance in a 120mm form factor. However, being a smaller cooler, it’d have to cost less than the D15, and we don’t imagine Noctua is in the market to cannibalize its own product portfolio.

The NH-D12 was revealed in June 2024, and at the time, it had a release window of Q2 2025. It’s now a year later, and it’s nowhere to be seen on Noctua’s roadmap.

As Noctua's roadmap evolves, and we get a better understanding of what's on offer, be sure to check back on this page for updates. Who knows, we might even have the NH-D12 back on the roadmap.

Yesterday, Noctua and Antec released the Flux Pro Noctua-Edition, a case that has technically been on the market for some time. But this latest version has a few nice Noctua sprinkles added to it, including a full cadre of Noctua fans.

The release of this case marks quite a special milestone for Noctua: For each major component category that comes with a fan pre-installed from the factory, Noctua either sells one itself, or has partnered up with someone to make a “Noctua-Edition” variant of an existing product. That goes not only for this case, but also for graphics cards, a power supply, and more to come.

Noctua is the undebated industry king when it comes to quiet and effective cooling (the brand tops the list of the best PC fans we’ve tested). And now that we can build a PC packed with Noctua products (not including the motherboard, SSD, CPU, or memory, of course), we had to try out this hardware combination to see how it all works out.

For all intents and purposes, this is a ‘reference’ build, and I expect that we’ll be seeing quite a significant number of almost identical builds the coming while, albeit with slightly different component selections when it comes to the CPU and motherboard platform, memory, and storage.

Grab yourself a coffee, because there’s a lot to talk about here. This will be a longer build story than we usually feature, because let’s face it, this is essentially the endgame halo Noctua PC.

In this market, why are we building this PC at all?

As configured, this is a PC that will cost $6400 to build. It’s an outrageous amount of money for any PC, and it makes it so that very few people will be able to put together a system like this. For this reason, I want to preface this build story with a disclaimer: this is not buying advice.

This here, today, is a story, and the story I’d like to tell is what it’s like to build the Noctua-Endgame PC of 2026. This is peak PC-building luxury, and as awesome as it is, I truly cannot recommend you do this due to the cost. But what I can do, is showcase the building process, explore all the little details and easter eggs, with the best photos I can muster, so that you can live vicariously.

The Hardware Selection

For this system, I had a few options for what I could build in it. However, in the current state of the PC hardware crisis, I feel that running a monthly build with all new hardware each time at Tom’s could come across a bit gluttonous (as if this hardware selection isn’t that already).

Therefore, we decided to scale the builds back to a frequency that’s less than monthly, and thereby reduce the amount of hardware we sample for builds. We also want to re-use parts that we already have available, provided they fit the story. Of course, a few new parts would have to be used here and there – otherwise I’d just be doing the same build over and over.

Consequently, I was presented with a painful decision – not that I really had much of a choice. Now that we have a Noctua-Edition case, the final piece of the puzzle, the point is that you install as many Noctua(-Edition) components as possible, right?

The Donor PC

Recently, I built a PC I called “The Stout Owl.” This was an immense undertaking, as it involved learning a new craft, months of meticulously hand-crafting a wooden case, and housing a Noctua-themed build, which suited the wood well. To me, personally, that was absolute endgame, but not everyone is willing to spend three months building a wooden PC.

At this point, I’m quite attached to The Stout Owl. I really didn’t want to, but I took this PC apart to use its components in this current build. The job comes first, and this meant that other than the Flux Pro Noctua-Edition case, no new hardware had to be acquired for this build story.

Motherboard: Asus ProArt Z890-Creator WiFi

I decided to stick with the ProArt Z890-Creator from Asus. I’d go into tech specs, but let’s be real: Asus’ ProArt boards, with their classy black-and-gold design pair beautifully with Noctua’s colorway, so the specs aren’t the main priority here.

The whole reason Noctua exists is because the founders were growing tired of the bold and flashy ‘Gamer’ aesthetic with all the lights, and wanted something classier. This motherboard, and its AM5 counterpart, are properly-kitted high-end boards, and come with chique looks to match. (The Dutch spelling of chic is chic-er than the accepted English spelling, and I’m Dutch, so I’m using it).

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K gets a lot of flack for not being the best gaming CPU, but I actually think it’s a fantastic chip despite not offering chart-topping gaming performance.

With 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, the chip certainly is no slouch. Although it can run seriously hot and hungry when heavily burdened, it also runs incredibly cool and efficient when just idling. If you’re not a gamer, but you need a workhorse chip, the Intel Core Ultra chips are seriously worth considering, especially if you live in a place with high electricity costs and run the PC idling or just browsing for many hours. Though, at its price, the Core Ultra 7 265K or about-to-launch 270K promises very similar performance for a fraction of the cost. But Intel’s new chip isn’t quite available yet, so we’re using the 285K.

Again, this is not buying advice.

CPU Cooler: NH-D15 G2

The NH-D15 G2 is Noctua’s flagship CPU cooler, so naturally, it had to be installed in this system. Noctua doesn’t make a liquid cooler yet, and although one is slated for release later this year, this is the reference Noctua PC build, so I didn’t feel it was right to use another brand’s AIO and swap the fans.

The NH-D15 G2 comes with two round-frame NF-A15x25r fans with the Sx2-PPO speed offset, to ensure the fans never harmonize. With 8 heatpipes, the cooler is good for dissipating heat from even the hottest chips.

PSU: Seasonic x Noctua TX-1600 Prime

The Seasonic x Noctua Prime TX-1600 is currently the only Noctua-Edition power supply you can buy.

Usually, this power supply comes with a first-generation NF-A12x25 fan. However, for the aforementioned wooden PC build, I had modded the PSU to use a G2 fan. I decided to keep it this way for this build.

I do have to note, that this power supply, with its 1600-watt envelope, is grossly oversized for this build. Later this year, Seasonic aims to release the Prime PX Noctua-Edition series power supplies, which will come in 850-to-1200-watt envelopes. These would be much more suitable for most builds.

But they aren’t out yet, so we’re using this modded TX-1600.

Graphics Card: Asus x Noctua RTX 5080

For The Stout Owl (the wooden PC), Noctua loaned us the RTX 5080 Noctua-Edition, which also went to our GPU analyst for a full review. If you want to know all about the tech specs and specifics about performance, it’s a great read.

But after the review sample left my bench, I realized I had fallen in love with Noctua RTX 5080, especially in the wooden home I had crafted for it. So, knowing the review sample was a loaner destined tour media outlets in Europe before heading back to Noctua HQ, I went out and purchased my own RTX 5080 Noctua-Edition.

I put my money where my mouth is

I was doubtful whether I should share this part of story, but I feel it’s the ultimate form of praise for a product. The Asus x Noctua RTX 5080 is so horrendously expensive, especially in today’s market (I’m glad I purchased mine a few months ago) that unless you care for its looks, thermals, and acoustics, is almost certainly not worth it.

But in my case, it’s the only GPU I would want in my personal system, running long, quiet hours on my desk next to me. My entire room is padded in acoustic material, which was necessary for fan reviews, and I’ve recently come to learn why it is that I value silence in my workspace as much as I do.

I don’t game much at all. But rather, I use the GPU for photography (a hobby of mine that’s also a useful skill in work). My editing software of choice is DXO Photolab, and its AI denoising is quite something to behold. However, running the DeepPrime3 AI denoising on the CPU, even on a workhorse CPU such as the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, is dreadfully slow. It takes 15-20 seconds per image export, depending on the crop factor. And the CPU runs hot and loud even with a D15 G2, and a zoom-snippet live preview? Forget about it.

That’s where the GPU comes in. I can edit smoothly, and during export (DXO only applies the full-image denoising during export), you can quite literally hear when a photo in the queue gets handed from the CPU to the GPU – the GPU has some coil whine for a split second while it handles the denoising, and then it’s done. It then waits for the CPU to hand it the next shot, and so on. Exports are much quicker, as you’ll see later in testing.

Of course, a 5080 is total overkill for this application, but I like this graphics card. So here we are.

Memory: Team Group T-Create 48 GB (2x 24 GB) 7200-MHz CUDIMM DDR5

When building this system, the black and gold of the Team Group T-Create memory is makes it almost the de-facto choice for an all-Noctua system. I say ‘almost,’ however, because currently, this memory kit is priced at $749, which is outrageously expensive. Of course, the high price here isn’t limited just to this kit.

Storage: Two 2 TB SSDs, one from Kingston, one from Team-Group

For storage, I used a 2 TB Kingston Renegade G5 PCIe 5.0 SSD as the main system drive, with the Team Group T-Create C47 series Classic 2TB PCIe 4.0 drive for additional capacity.

Parts list

*Case not included. MSRP is $399. Grand Total then comes to $6,400.

Inspecting the ‘old’ donor hardware

After disassembling the PC, I decided to have a look at the motherboard and the installed components. The Team-Group SSD was having some performance issues, and with the GPU out of the way, I could open up the slot and see that the entire surface wasn’t quite mating properly with the thermal pad.

As such, I moved one of the thermal pads from the empty slots and added it, which resolved the performance issues I was having.

I left the CPU happily in its socket, along with the mounting bracket, but did remove the CPU cooler’s heatsink to give it a fresh dab of thermal paste later. This wasn’t really necessary, but any time spent doing this was more time saved throughout the build now that the massive NH-D15 G2 wasn’t in the way.

I also removed one of the T-Create 48 GB memory kits. 96 GB of DDR5-7200 is complete overkill for most use cases, and the last thing I wanted to do at this point was have to list a total system cost of over $7,000.

Then, I installed the motherboard in the case. Because the central standoff has a small nub at its tip, you can actually support the full weight of the motherboard, unsecured, without having to flip the case on its side.

I’m glad this is a feature included with most cases nowadays, as especially with a large case like this – it’s tiresome to flip it on its side if it can be avoided. What’s even more impressive is that this still works with this motherboard – the ProArt Z890-Creator is built with a lot of very heavy heatsinks, and it is without a doubt the heaviest ATX motherboard I’ve ever handled.

Installing the modded TX-1600 Prime Noctua-Edition

Next, I decided to install the PSU and do the cable management before installing the fans. Generally speaking, I lean more towards small cases as personal preference. But with a case this big, I suddenly had tons of freedom of movement – it really doesn’t matter what you do first, or last with the Antec Flux Pro Noctua-Edition– you can pretty much get to anything at any point. I like smaller cases, but this is nice!

The PSU we’re using is the Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua-Edition, and being a unit from the wooden PC mentioned earlier, this one is modded to feature an NF-A12x25 G2 fan, instead of the stock G1 fan that comes installed from the factory.

For the PSU install, I did run into a few issues. Naturally, the TX-1600 Noctua Edition doesn’t fit sideways, as one of the mounting options this case presents. It’s too long for that, and even if it could, the 1600-watt power envelope means it comes with a rarely-used, beefier connector to deal with the amperage – and the Flux Pro Noctua-Edition does not have a matching rerouting cable.

However, what did surprise me is that it’s also not possible to mount the PSU upside-down, with the fan facing upwards. Of course, most of us won’t do that, but the TX-1600’s manual specifically states that the semi-passive fan-mode on the PSU should only be used when the fan is facing up, so that any heat generated can leave passively by means of convection.

Normally, this isn’t something I’d complain about. In fact, I’m not really complaining. But for a Noctua power supply, in a Noctua case, this is a little bit puzzling. The only reason I can think of, other than it being a core part of the Flux Pro design and not really being up to Noctua to change, is that if the fan were to face upwards, paired with having fans installed that blow air towards the GPU – they would fight each other when the PSU is under load and cause cooling issues in the power supply – so Antec may have intentionally locked us out from such a mounting option as a precautionary measure.

However, I don’t think that this Noctua-Edition case is meant to be used in combination with this Noctua-Edition power supply, but more on that later.

First Round of Cable Management

Generally, cable management is something I take care of at the end of a build. Despite the oceans of space, I figured the fans, CPU cooler, and GPU would just get in the way, so I took the opportunity to get a large chunk of it done early.

With easy access to everything, cable management was a dream. Antec has really done wonders behind the motherboard tray, with tons of space, cable guides, Velcro straps, and a few complimentary zipties.

The cable lengths of the Prime TX-1600 Noctua-Edition are also a perfect match, and boy, is the braiding lovely.

Installing the fans

For the fans, Noctua has done something quite special: They do not come pre-installed. Instead, they arrive in their own ‘Fan Kit’ box. The primary reason for this is that the rubber fan mounts are not suitable for holding the fans in the case during transport. But it does feel quite special to open the box and witness all six fans neatly laid out.

Installing the fans is also fun. This is like that expensive Lego kit you’ve always wanted – sure, they could assemble it in the factory, but it’s more fun to do it yourself.

What’s more, even though the spec sheet says the case comes with 6 fans, there’s actually a little seventh easter egg fan hidden somewhere. I’m not going to spoil this one in writing, but can you spot it in the photos somewhere?

I installed the rubber fasteners first as per the instructions, and then popped the fans into place.

The fan kit consists solely of Sx2-PP fans, and Noctua clearly states which fan has to be placed where, and in which direction you should route the connector cable.

Do so, and the cables end up in exactly the correct location to hook up to the pre-installed cable extensions that lead to the fan hub.

The fan hub has a magnetic backing, so it’s easy to move around, not that it was necessary.

Calling it a night, for now

I work in a studio with studio lights and accent lighting, but the build was looking fabulous at this point. I wrapped up the night by cutting the ends off the rubber fan fasteners, installed the heatsink, set the scene a little, and took my last photo of the day.

I had finished working for now, but kept walking back to look at the workpiece. It was at this moment that I started to understand the appeal of this method of an ‘all-Noctua’ build.

Mounting the CPU Cooler

The day prior, I had already mounted the CPU cooler, simply because I wanted to see what the heatsink would look like in the system before calling it a night. Especially without the fans installed on it, it really looks like a work of art, even if it’s ‘just’ a heatsink.

For installation, we note which direction is longer – the cooler is asymmetrical, and whereas the bottom side leaves clearance for the GPU, a big chunk of its mass extends to the same height as the very top edge of an ATX motherboard. The rear fin stack is also thicker than the front stack.

With the tower in place, I installed the two NF-A15x25r fans, placing the faster spinning of the two at the front.

It’s a known phenomenon in the world of PC cooling (and fans in general) that an impeller becomes notably louder when installed behind an object, so the slower fan gets installed in the middle for a quieter sound profile.

Installing the Asus x Noctua RTX 5080

The Asus x Noctua RTX 5080 is a behemoth of a graphics card, yet it fits in this case just fine. It even has room to spare.

Installation of the GPU is as simple as can be: remove two expansion slot covers, install the GPU, pop the anti-sag riser in place, and connect the power cable.

Do be sure to insert the power cable fully though – these cables can be finicky, and if not inserted properly, increase the chance of melting. So, we pay extra attention and make sure the clip is in its fastened position.

Strangely, this power supply doesn’t come with cable combs for the GPU power cable, but it does come with all others. I still had some laying around though. I’m allowed to use those, right?

Final Cable Management

With the build near completion, it was time for a final round of cable management. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I really like the cable management in this case.

Build complete

With that, I popped the side panels on, and the build was complete.

A personal disclaimer

It may come as no surprise if you’ve read this far, but I really quite like Noctua. I know they say “keep yourself unbiased” in the world of journalism, but the truth is, Noctua just makes great stuff.

I also adore the Noctua colorway. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it falls precisely in my tastes – my wooden floor at home is nearly the same shade beige as the fan frames, and most of my furniture is a similar shade of brown, many with the same slight reddish hue.

Top that with the ultimate silence, refined (zero) motor noise, no shouty ‘Gamer’ looks, outstanding warranty, support, and free bracket updates for legacy coolers – I wouldn’t want to live in a world without Noctua.

With that confession out of the way, let’s carry on.

Naturally, the memory runs on the XMP-II profile so that it reaches the full 7200 MHz. Additionally, we cranked the power target of the RTX 5080 all the way up to the maximum permitted 125%, and raised the Boost Clock setting from 2700 MHz default to 3000 MHz. We could squeeze more out, but this is just fine.

The Fan Curve

For the fan curve, Noctua offers a JSON file you can import into Fan Control, available for download here with a full explanation. We decided to download this fan curve and use the quietest of the three presets, but we did make a couple changes.

By default, the curve sets up a virtual sensor that combines data from the CPU and GPU, and links this to the fan curve. However, this meant that we couldn’t quite apply the fan curve to all devices.

For the case fans, it works very well. But I also wanted to use the exact same curve on the CPU cooler and the GPU. So, I duplicated the quiet profile twice, and linked one of them to the GPU’s core temperature, and another to the CPU’s package temperature reading.

The curve has a hysteresis of 5% / 5 seconds, which ensures the fans don’t ramp up or down in speed too quickly upon brief temperature spikes. This keeps the system running calm and consistent.

It’s worth noting that when using Fan Control, you do have to disable other software that may control the fans. Because the Flux Pro has a little display for the CPU and GPU temperatures, you also need to have Antec’s iUnity installed, but it’s important to remember to turn its fan control feature off. I didn’t at first, and kept wondering why Fan Control wasn’t behaving right.

Test Results

Under light browsing, the system barely consumes more than 100 watts. In fact, when not doing anything at all, it hovers around 97, but for a fair test I measure over the course of 5 minutes doing basic desktop things like web browsing, chatting, and writing this document.

Exporting photos loads up the CPU nicely, and gives the GPU some work too. All remains incredibly quiet, barely increasing in noise level over the noise floor of the room.

3DMark Speedway and Cyberpunk 2077 are much more real-life loads that balance a burden on both the CPU and GPU. Power consumption for these two tests hovers around 500 watts, and noise levels remain whisper quiet. The fans do come in a little bit, and there is a smidgeon of coil whine from the GPU, but it’s not nearly as audible as in the open-air PC I borrowed the GPU from.

For the synthetic workload, I’ve changed to using Furmark together with its built-in CPU burner, as I found that Prime95 sometimes lead to inconsistencies when running at the same time as Furmark – it would hog too many resources, and Furmark’s built-in CPU burner seems to ensure the GPU’s workload remains unaffected.

With that tool, power consumption raises to a staggering 827 watts, which is significantly more than any real-world workload would ever place on the system. The PC was also no longer quiet at this point.

Lastly, with all the fans on full speed, the GPU runs almost 10 degrees cooler, but the noise penalty simply isn’t worth it.

I Forget I’m heating the Room

Now, what I’m about to say is going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me. When I’m writing, I can end up sitting still at my desk for hours. Gaming, in that respect, is far more active, but when writing, I get cold.

When I’m in the type of flow that has me walking around the house, I’ll just turn on the central heating that runs on gas. But gas has become quite expensive in the Netherlands, so what I’ll sometimes do is simply run Furmark to heat up only the room to save money.

With past systems, this would be a bit intrusive, but with this Noctua system, especially in the Flux Pro where I can barely hear the coil whine anymore, something quite funny has been happening: I forget Furmark is running in the background.

I’m not kidding – I’ve once had Furmark run for 17 hours straight, when I only wanted a bit of heat in the morning. I was at my desk most of the day, and at some point, late in the evening, it was getting too warm in the room. I looked at my taskbar to close all my apps for the night, and that’s when I realized, I’d left Furmark going all day, minimized – and I hadn’t noticed.

The Reference Noctua-Edition PC Building Experience

Building a PC using Noctua parts wherever possible, down to things like the case, graphics card, and power supply, is an experience to remember.

This is about the “purest” Noctua PC you can build. With Noctua’s own flagship CPU cooler, the only Noctua-Edition case that currently exists, the most recent Noctua-Edition graphics card, the only Noctua-Edition PSU currently on the market, and a matching motherboard and memory kit – this is pretty much “The Reference Noctua-Edition PC,” and you can now buy all parts off the shelf and complete the build within a day. Sure, it took me two days, but I was writing and staging photos.

No Stone Left Unturned

These were all top-notch components to begin with, and the Antec Flux Pro Noctua-Edition’s touches truly elevate the building experience to a new level. Noctua paid attention to everything, down to things like the soft-grip torx screwdriver that comes with the D15 G2, the neatly arranged fans that you get to install yourself, the all metal Noctua badge, the easter-egg seventh fan, the braided cables that come with the PSU, the beautiful walnut on the Flux Pro… I could go on.

Even the manuals are beautifully made, clear, and printed on thick, high-quality semi-gloss paper – and they’re the same kind of paper for all Noctua and Noctua-Edition products, including those from different partners. It’s an attention to detail that, while few might notice it, makes for a more cohesive, enjoyable experience.

The anti-sag pillar for the GPU too – even that little thing has a fantastic, fine-particle anodized finish, and it just so happens that its height, in the shortest setting, precisely matches up when leaning on the rubber corner of an A12x25 G2 fan in this specific case. Coincidence? I think not.

If that’s not enough, Noctua has even made a fan curve specifically for use with this system that you can download and install into Fan Control, which we used for this build.

The attention to detail in every aspect is staggering, and it’s in a moment like this that I can finally understand why Noctua has taken so long to release all these products: micro-details included in products released quite some time ago match up perfectly with releases from these new partnerships.

All that said, as noted earlier, the TX-1600 installation issues fly in the face of all this talk of detail and synergy. But that’s likely why Noctua picked Seasonic’s PX series to build the next series of Noctua-Edition power supplies.

Not all is perfect: What’s the deal with the cheap metal panels?

I’m someone that remembers Antec from the P180 series cases. These ran from 2005 to 2010 or so, and they had some fantastic acoustic features, such as triple-layer side panels with brushed aluminum outsides, airflow labyrinths for noise-reduction, and very squishy mounting mechanisms for hard drives.

Flash forward to 2026 and this thin sheet-metal panel on the Flux Pro Noctua Edition: Is that really the best Antec has to offer?

That’s not a cherry on top of the cake, but more like pouring hot tarmac over a patisserie’s red velvet.

Admittedly, because of this I had some mixed feelings about the Flux Pro Noctua-Edition when I started. Despite being a special-edition of Antec’s flagship case, it still fell for a trap that I feel should be banished from flagship, high-end cases: undampened, thin sheet metal panels.

Yes, there’s a beautiful glass panel with a light, tasteful tint. The case also has a touch of truly well-cut, tidily-lasered, sanded, and lacquered piece of fine American walnut.

But, that only makes me more upset that the other panels and meshes are made of the same thin, tinny-sounding sheet metal as we find on $60 cases. This is like making the interior of a car as luxurious as a BMW, and then giving it the body panels of a Yaris, and putting the BMW badge on it.

You’re not sneaky, Antec. I can see exactly what you’re doing.

At least slap two strips of Butyl rubber on the inside. It’s what car makers do. Sure, it won’t make it look any better, but it will feel a lot more luxurious to handle. Seriously, self-adhesive butyl rubber costs effectively nothing, adds almost zero production complexity, and fundamentally changes the way sheet metal feels. Maybe not for the standard version of the Flux Pro, but for a Noctua-Edition case, it’s the least I would expect.

Of course, anodized aluminum would take my absolute preference, but in a case this big, it would certainly double (if not triple) the price to recoup the production costs, so I do understand that this was not an option.

Once the panels come off, the magic happens

Despite this criticism on the panels, I do understand why Noctua went with Antec for the Flux Pro as the collaboration for their first-ever Noctua-Edition case.

It has been quite a long time since I built a PC in a large E-ATX case, and the inner workings of this case are incredibly well thought-out.

I’ve also never really liked the NH-D15 much. Its technical prowess is undebatable. But the way it looks – it’s too big, and the unmatching round-frame fans leave it with unclear boundaries. For how cohesive everything Noctua looks, the D15 never really made sense to me. I’ve been begging Noctua to release the mythical NH-D12 G2, but alas.

Yet, installed in the Flux Pro, and I suddenly understand its appeal. Behind the glass panel, above the Noctua graphics card, the NH-D15 G2 sits there, looking right at home. Even the big waft of empty space above it where you could mount a radiator doesn’t bother me – in fact, it makes sense: It’s breathing space.

So, Should you build this PC?

Leaving the Intel versus AMD debate out of the equation, now that Antec’s Flux Pro Noctua-Edition is on the market, this is the obvious selection of components for a top-end Noctua-themed build. However, it’s about as un-creative as you could get when picking out a PC.

I started this build series at Tom’s Hardware with the aim of “inspiring creativity.” This build is arguably the least-creative assembly I’ve done in a very long time. Possibly ever.

This build is the equivalent of buying the Lego Bugatti kit. It’s premium; all the parts come organized in tidy little bags; the manual is beautiful and tells you precisely what to do; and as long as you follow the instructions, you’ll end up with a beautiful end product. Just like that other guy who got it before you, and the next guy in line will too.

It’s classy. It’s brown, beige, and has walnut wood. It’s quiet. This case paired with the component selection make for an ocean of high quality. The system is also fast, and it’s a sublime experience to build and live with.

But creative? That, it is not. Noctua and its partners have taken care of that part for you, which makes things feel a bit generic.

Yet, at the same time, this is one of the most enjoyable builds I’ve done in a long time. The way that Noctua has cherry-picked its partners for Noctua-Edition gear has clearly been incredibly strategic, and it shows in the entire building process. The parts all came out at different times, and ship in separate boxes, but they may as well have all come together in one big box named “The Noctua PC (2026, intel)” as a DIY kit.

This is the most cohesive PC build I’ve ever put together, refined in almost every way imaginable.

If you’ve got the money to throw at this and it fits your tastes and decor, I can safely say that you’ll enjoy the build process and end product. But it’s a lot of money, and if I was presented with the decision to build either this, or something else with $6,400 to spend… well, you know my answer.

Parts list

*Case not included. MSRP is $399. Grand Total then comes to $6,400.

Austrian PC cooling expert Noctua has just shared a teaser for its upcoming PC case. While there are no concrete details, the teaser image shared on X gives a glimpse of the front I/O positioned at the top of the case. Looking at the layout, it is safe to assume that this could be the Antec Flux Pro Noctua Edition case first showcased at Computex 2025.

Based on the Antec Flux Pro chassis, the special edition case comes in Noctua’s traditional brown color scheme with a wood trim at the front. It also comes with four Noctua NF-A14x25 G2 and two NF-A12x25 G2 fans, along with the NA-FH1 fan hub for controlling fan speeds. According to the company the case has gone through extensive laboratory testing to optimize cooling performance and reduce noise levels compared to the case's standard fan setup.

The rest of the features should be identical to the standard Antec Flux Pro full tower case offering a multi-directional vent design allowing for vertical and horizontal airflow. There is a dedicated compartment for the power supply unit at the bottom with proper mesh ventilation and support for up to 180mm PSUs in length. The iSHIFT PSU mount allows you to install the power supply facing the side of the case giving easier access to the cables.

In terms of fan support, it can accommodate up to 12 fans with three 120mm or 140mm fans at the front, top, and above the power supply shroud along with additional mounting options for two 120mm or 140mm fans at the bottom and one in the rear. There’s even enough room to accommodate radiators of up to 420mm in length. For dust filtration the front and bottom panels come with a 1.2mm fine mesh and there’s even a small LED display to showcase CPU and GPU temperatures. Apart from the power and reset buttons, the front I/O comes with two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a USB Type-C 10Gbps port, a headphone/mic combo jack and a dedicated button to toggle the temperature LED display.

The Antec Flux Pro Noctua Edition was expected to launch late last year but seems that the two companies are finally ready to launch the case. Considering the original Antec Flux Pro is selling for about $180, we expect the Noctua edition to be priced at least $250 or above.

Cooling a computer isn’t terribly complicated in and of itself. But if you want to do it right, selecting the best cooling fan can be a daunting task. It’s easy to throw money at Noctua, and we wouldn’t fault you for doing so, but that strategy gets very expensive very quickly. And not everyone digs the beige-and-brown theme – and the company flat-out refuses to do RGB.

Of course, you can opt to go the other easy route and just use what’s included with the case and cooler you bought. But that’s also rarely the optimal solution, and many premium cases come with no fans or just one for exhaust. Ideally, you want a fan that’s quiet, effective at moving air, attractive, and affordable. And since you’ve landed on this page, chances are you bought one of the cases that doesn’t come with enough fans, or you’re not happy with the included fans' performance or audio profile, and are looking for something better.

Recently, we’ve picked up fan testing again, and we’re working hard to test a bunch of different models to figure out the best options in this very crowded field. Over the past several months, we’ve worked in cooperation with industry experts to flesh out a benchmarking methodology, and we expect to update this page regularly with new models we’ve tested.

Prime Day Exceptional fan deals

Here are two of the standout deals from the Prime Day event, which is currently taking place. Our list of best overall picks continues below.

Our Testing methodology is built on real-world applications, and there are a handful of scenarios a fan needs to perform well in. Naturally, we’re testing airflow in an unrestricted environment as a ‘vanilla’ test, but this is often not indicative of performance inside a PC case.

What’s also not indicative of real-world performance is static pressure testing. Yes, it’s an industry standard, but it really only measures how much pressure a fan can generate when blowing into a closed tube, or up against a wall in a more real-world scenario. It does not account for the changes in acoustics when a fan is mounted on a radiator, heatsink, or behind a mesh intake.

Instead, we’ve decided to measure a fan’s acoustic performance not only when unrestricted and suspended mid-air, but also when strapped to a radiator and again when behind a mesh intake. The results from this paint a much more nuanced, real-world picture, often with interesting outcomes.

For more information about how we test PC fans, scroll to the bottom of this page.

Quick List

Best PC fans you can buy today

Best silence optimized fans

Noctua’s NF-A12x25 G2 is game-changing, offering the quietest, most refined fan we’ve ever seen. In our testing, it delivered whisper-quiet performance and managed an impressively huge amount of airflow despite running at very low RPMs.

Managing such big airflow despite not needing to spin fast to accomplish it means it’s also not a very turbulent fan, which translates to chart-topping performance when installed on a radiator or behind an intake mesh. In fact, it’s the only fan we’ve tested thus far that ran quieter on a radiator than when suspended mid-air without any load.

In addition to pulling off airflow miracles, the NF-A12x25 also offers a seriously advanced internal hub, featuring Noctua’s refined, tried-and-tested SSO2 bearing, a new 3-phase etaPERF motor, and a new PWM controller with SupraTorque functionality. This sounds like a bunch of marketing talk, but after testing the fan, we can tell you with confidence that it has zero audible mechanical noise.

Best budget silence optimized fans

The Arctic P12 Pro is an interesting fan, because it offers performance that is, as far as the charts go, nearly neck-and-neck with Noctua’s NF-A12x25. Except, the Arctic does something Noctua doesn’t: It only costs $8.50 for one fan.

The price you pay for the Arctic fan is, in part at least, in its level of refinement. It uses a plastic ring to strengthen the impeller. And, in order to achieve its airflow, it relies on spinning up to higher speeds. Consequently, it’s a more turbulent fan than the Noctua, so it takes a bit more of a hit when mounted close to a mesh intake. It also produces a few mechanical noises, but even so, it’s a highly capable fan.

If, however, you just want a fan to move lots of air quietly, and you don’t want it to cost much, the Arctic P12 Pro is in a league of its own.

Best RGB fans

It feels a bit weird to place essentially the same Arctic fan on the Best list twice, but it truly is that good. The P12 Pro RGB is, for all intents and purposes, the exact same fan as the non-RGB variant, except with a white translucent impeller so that the RGB lighting from the hub shines through.

It performs on par with the non-RGB variant in our testing, offering wicked performance at up to 3000 RPM and a fantastic noise-to-airflow ratio. The best part: it barely costs more than the non-RGB variant.

Best High-Performance fans

The Phanteks T30 (review here) is one of the fans that somewhat copied the NF-A12x25 – it featured a similar blade shape, and also used a LCP (liquid crystal polymer) plastic for the impeller. Except, it wasn’t quite a copy, and now, even half a decade later, it’s still king of the hill in the ultra-high-performance fan space.

Why is it so good? Phanteks cheated. I wish I could say they didn’t, but they did. The industry standard for a 120mm fan is 25mm thickness. So what did Phanteks do? They made a 30mm fan. In fact, Phanteks was so proud of this fan that when they sent it out for review, they put together a wind tunnel kit for us because they wanted everybody to know Phanteks meant business and had defeated Noctua at their own game. And they did – it performed notably better than Noctua’s finest when tested for noise-to-airflow.

Moreover, the good stuff doesn’t stop at just 5mm of extra thickness. The company also built in a mode selector at the back of the hub that lets you select quiet, regular, and advanced modes. If you ask me, though, advanced should be called Final Destination mode it lets spin all the way up to 3,000 RPM. With its added thickness, high speed, and LCP material, it’ll gobble air and your fingers if you’re not careful.

Choosing the best fan for you

Fans. They spin. They move air. They make noise. Sometimes they have lights, and more recently, some have LCD screens. It may seem like a silly thing to obsess over, but picking the right, or wrong, fan can make a major difference in a PC build.

Not everybody looks for the same thing in a fan, and whereas picking the Best CPU or Best GPU is often a matter of what’s best-performing for the dollar in your allocated budget, fans don’t evolve at nearly the same pace, so picking one is much more of a subjective exercise. With that said, depending on your situation, there can be a few key considerations that can make the choice easier.

• If you’re someone who comes home from work, whips on a headset, and plays games for an hour, noise levels or MTBF (durability) figures may not matter much to you.
• Alternatively, if you’re someone who works on your PC in silence all day long, it may be worth investing in more refined fans that offer less wind and mechanical noise, with a more durable motor.
• Personal sensitivity to certain noise types and frequencies also plays a role.
• Whether the PC is placed on the desk or on the floor is another factor to consider. Fan noise can be less noticeable from the floor.
• Some fans are designed to perform better on radiators and heatsinks, whereas others perform better as case intake or exhaust. Pick accordingly.
• Fans with daisy-chaining connectors can ease installation and provide tidier cable management.
• Cases with tinted windows require fans with brighter RGB for a visual spectacle.
• Mini-ITX PCs, though fantastically small, can benefit more from a fan upgrade to quiet them down than big full-tower E-ATX machines.

More about how we test PC fans

Our PC fan testing consists of multiple phases. First, we test a fan’s vanilla acoustics by suspending it mid-air with four pieces of string so that no frames or holders interfere with the airflow. We start with a basic measurement, noting whether the fan breaks through the noise floor at its minimum speed, then we record the RPM for every whole dB between 34 and 44 dB(A). Finally, we record the maximum RPM and its associated noise level.

We then repeat these tests with a radiator mounted behind the fan, and again with a mesh intake in front of the fan. We do this because radiators and intake mesh fundamentally change a fan’s acoustics and the RPM they must spin at to achieve the desired noise targets.

After the acoustic data, we mount the fan in our wind tunnel to collect airflow data.

The windspeed is measured with an anemometer. However, although the fan’s impellers may push air, no air comes from the space behind the motor hub, and fans don’t generally push air in only one direction. In fact, the space immediately behind a motor hub usually becomes a low-pressure pocket, which is why we need a wind tunnel – to form the airstream into one cohesive, non-turbulent column of moving air.

Inside the wind tunnel (at the halfway point and near the end) are two air-straighteners, which together with the length of the tunnel at 77cm (just over 30 inches) neatly combs the airstream into something we can measure, without creating tons of backpressure that would affect the readings.

Using the RPM datapoints from the acoustic testing phase, we now set the fan to each RPM point and record the associated wind speed. We repeat this with a radiator behind the fan, and again without the radiator but with the mesh intake in front of the fan. Of course, the wind speed isn’t actually a useful measure (yet) of how much air a fan can displace, until we convert it to meters cubed per hour (m³/h).This testing yields up to 84 datapoints per fan (assuming the fan can achieve each point), which tells us enough about a fan's capabilities, quirks, and acoustics to judge whether it's one of the best PC fans you can buy.

It's safe enough to say that almost everyone in the PC building space is a fan of Noctua's wares. The Austrian company has distinguished itself from its peers by being very... well, Austrian, and obsessing about the quality of its coolers and fans — even if the price tags aren't the most inviting. Today, the firm is celebrating sending out its 500,000th CPU cooler mounting upgrade kit.

The story harkens back two decades ago, to the ancient times of 2006 and AMD's release of the AM2 socket, necessitating a mounting kit for existing coolers. Noctua opted to make the upgrade completely free since then (including shipping), by just sending out one to anyone who asked and had a valid receipt. A tradition it has kept up ever since.

Not only are the kits free, but they're always available at Noctua's website, whereas many other brands make them hard or impossible to obtain, and often at costly prices.

The result is that two decades later, Noctua is sending out upgrade kits for CPU mounting coolers that are going on 20 years old. The blog post even recounts a story about a Finnish customer asking for an AM5 kit for an NH-U12P cooler, setting the record of 17 years between purchase date and upgrade. Since buyers have reasonable assurance they'll be able to reuse their coolers, the high initial asking price can pay off for itself on every new build(s).

Noctua also points out that just creating an upgrade kit isn't just machining some new parts, as the cooler itself needs to be designed in a way that will easily accept new parts. Reviewers have consistently praised the coolers' mounting hardware, so it's fair to say the Austrians know what they're doing. Additionally, the company points out that its free upgrade program contributes to reducing e-waste.

I have personal experience with Noctua's wares and upgrade kits and can attest that it really was as simple as going to the website and requesting one; the exact parts arrived in the mail within two or three weeks. This was in sharp contrast to what happened with another brand's cooler, for which an upgrade kit technically existed but might as well be made of unobtainium.

You won't be asked for more than a purchase receipt, too. Even if you don't have one, Noctua will take invoices for CPUs and motherboards, or even a photo of your existing cooler with a piece of paper visible. If you prefer to have one shipped out faster, you can also find them at Amazon and other e-tailers for cheap.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamt of building my own PC case. Not to mass produce one and bring it to market, but to prove to myself that, as a former case reviewer, I also have what it takes to design and build a chassis myself. Except, the right opportunity never presented itself. So, when the opportunity arose to build a ‘Showstopper build’ for Tom’s Hardware Premium, I wanted to do something special.

Noctua recently also celebrated its 20th anniversary, so I thought it would be fitting to commemorate the occasion by hand-crafting a PC case made out of wood, kitted out with the best parts Noctua could offer. How hard could it be, right?

For this build, we feature an Asus Z890-Creator motherboard, Intel Core Ultra 285K processor, 96 GB of Team Group T-Create memory, and two 2 TB SSDs: one from Team Group and another from Kingston. Noctua also supplied an ample laundry list of fans and parts, including its mighty NH-D15 G2 cooler, a power supply, a handful of G2 spinners, and of course, the pièce de résistance: the Asus x Noctua GeForce RTX 5080.

Before we move forward, we've also produced a handy build video, which will cover many elements of this article, as a companion piece to the build. Follow us on our journey, including all of the trials and tribulations of undertaking such a task.

Why build a wooden PC?

Initially, I hadn’t planned on a wooden case for this build. In fact, I aimed to use all off-the-shelf parts, but I’ve been running into a bit of an issue in my quest for a case worthy of these components: It seems like the market for high-end, high-quality ATX cases has dried up a bit – everything has become thin sheet metal and oceans of glass.

Where’s the CNC’d and brushed aluminum? Where are the thought-out layers of acoustic treatment we used to find? Even the best PC cases have mostly become samey-looking boxes that end up looking a bit too anonymous. And while there are efforts to differentiate some in design, none of them spoke to me.

Now, I don’t have the resources at my disposal to build a CNC’d aluminum case (it would also be prohibitively expensive), but it just so happens that Noctua components pair up beautifully with wood, which is down to the iconic brown and beige branding. Now, I’ve been a hobby woodworker for a little while, so why not challenge myself by building a case entirely out of wood? What I found out, after months of hard work, was that it would become the ultimate test of my skills.

Designing the custom case

Over the last few years, I’ve been rocking an open-air, water-cooled PC – Blue Shift. In this time, I’ve learned that open-air PCs are nothing to be afraid of. It doesn’t seem to gather a ton of dust, it’s easy to clean, and my cats have zero interest in poking around the inside. This may be different for folks with children, but for me, an open-air case came with basically no downsides.

Most recently, I did a build in Phanteks’ Evolv X2, and it has some design elements I quite admired. Most notably, the motherboard tray is only as wide as it needs to be, and consequently, a large GPU stretches past the tray, giving it a floating appearance. The same goes for the top radiator mount of that case.

I sketched up a design, but throughout the build, many parts of it changed. For one, I found a much stronger piece of wood to use as the motherboard tray than I anticipated, so I decided to take the floating aspect a step further – notice how the support bracket on the left of the sketch is missing in the final piece?

From the start, I had a few goals in mind. It was going to follow a standard-ish ATX tower layout. It would be open-air, be 100% air-cooled, and no taller than it needs to be. Because the PSU chamber would be going around the spine holding the motherboard, it would also be somewhat wide. Quiet, short, well-set, and powerful: The Stout Owl.

Component selection

With the calm Noctua theme, I didn’t feel it was fitting to build a system aimed purely at gaming – it had to be quiet and efficient, more of a workstation. With that in mind, the basis for the system became the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, as this CPU offers fantastic multithreaded performance and extremely low idle power consumption.

This chip was placed into the Asus Z890-Creator WiFi motherboard and paired with two 48 GB kits of Team Group T-Create 7200-MHz CUDIMM memory, for a total memory pool of 96 GB, across four modules. I am aware that for performance optimization, it’s better to stick to using only two DIMMs, but visually, this doesn’t work for me – and this is a build that’s all about the aesthetics.

Disclaimer: These memory kits were acquired before the DRAM crisis. In today’s market, I would not opt for this memory configuration due to the cost.

For storage, I picked a 2 TB Kingston Renegade G5 PCIe 5.0 SSD as the main system drive, with the Team Group T-Create C47 series Classic 2TB PCIe 4.0 drive for additional capacity.

Of course, from Noctua’s lineup, we picked the Asus x Noctua RTX 5080, the mighty NH-D15 G2 as the CPU cooler, the Seasonic x Noctua Prime 1600W Power Supply, and five NF-A12x25 G2 fans, two of which as part of a Sx2-PP set for speed offsets to avoid harmonics in the top panel.

For the USB ports, incorporated a Fractal Design 10 Gbps USB C Model D cable, along with a DeLock USB 3.0 Type-A internal cable to round things out.

Parts List

Materials Selection

For the case, I decided to work with European oak, because American oak has a totally different appearance. I also live in the Netherlands, so I could not get my hands on American Oak, even if I wanted to.

I purchased a pair of 18mm thick oak panels to build many of the case’s pieces with, along with a ‘wall shelf’ that has a tree trunk edge on one side. I loved the appearance of this “live edge,” as it’s often called, and the 40mm thickness. This would give me plenty of strength to function as the spine for the PC, even with cable management channels gutted out of it.

In addition to the oak pieces, I also grabbed a strip of meranti hardwood, which would function as the splines in the joints for added strength. I wanted to avoid materials like plywood and acrylic, as I find them too soft and fragile – they would experience much harder wear and tear over time.

The tools I have at my disposal

Having completed a full DIY home renovation, I have a fair number of tools at my disposal. These include basics such as a circular saw, a jigsaw, a handful of chisels, a drill, a cheap soldering iron, and a palm sander.

I also have a miter saw, as one of my past projects was a herringbone floor, where everything had to be cut at 45-degree angles. This proved to be one of the two most valuable tools in this project.

The other key tool for this project was the router. For this project, I purchased the Makita DRT50Z. I was already invested in the LXT battery ecosystem, and it is one of my best powertool purchases to date – this build would not have been the same without it, as it let me route the cable gutters and cavities at the back of the system, cut the holes for the USB ports, the grooves for the illumination, and trim all the edges to shape. In the end, I must have spent 50+ hours using the router, and although a CNC machine would have saved me a lot of time, it’s far beyond my budget and would take away from the handmade aesthetic.

I also used a basic collapsible workbench so that I could work outside, and decided to finally invest in an orbital sander, along with a heap of little accessories like drill bits, various router bits, sandpaper, extra clamps, tin, and so much more.

While not strictly necessary, my DA polisher also came in handy during the final finishing process.

For dust collection, I used a cheap Philips household vacuum with a custom (homemade) fine particle filter. As an apartment dweller, I do not have the space for a proper shop-vac, and despite the hell I’ve put this household vacuum through over the years, it’s still somehow functional. Masks and safety glasses were used as an extra safety measure, along with hearing protection.

Building the basic shape of the PC didn’t take long. I started by putting the system’s spine on feet, with the intention of carving legs out so that the PSU chamber would appear to float.

Using the circle saw and the miter saw, I then cut up the pieces to make the PSU chamber’s box. I would have preferred to do all with the miter saw for more exact 45-degree cuts, but my saw is too small for the longer cuts along the length of the pieces, so I had to rely on the circular saw, with a guide and a steady hand.

For consistent height between the three side pieces, I cut the entire length of the board in one go, since I was using the circular saw anyway, and then used the miter saw to chop out the left, front, and right sides. As a bonus to this method, the wood grain is one continuous piece along the outside of the PSU chamber, neatly transitioning from the side to the front piece.

Once this was done, I test-fit some of the components to get a feel for what it was going to ultimately look like. At this point, I decided I didn’t like the feet – by raising them, they made the PSU chamber look far too big and drew too much attention. I wanted a more calm, subtle appearance.

Splines galore

With the PSU chamber’s frame built, it was time to add splines to the joints. For strength, dovetails would have been ideal, but I prefer the appearance of straight lines. For this step, I built a jig from some scrap plywood that I could affix onto a corner, and run the router through at 45 degrees to create slits, which I strategically placed in spots where they would not just add the necessary strength, but also add to the overall visual appeal.

I then pushed the meranti pieces into the slots with glue to ensure full coverage inside. I then sawed off the bits of wood sticking out, chiseled off the excess glue, and sanded the remainder to a level finish.

Then, I used the planing tool to even out the bottom of the chassis to stop it from wobbling, and attached it to the spine with nuts and bolts. I didn't want to use screws to make up for weak wood joinery — any screws or bolts used should be removable for disassembly of the case, and thus, the wood joints needed splines to add the necessary strength.

Part of the design was to have these bolts out in plain sight, so I went out and found the prettiest bolts money could buy. They cost between €2.50 and €4.00 a piece, excluding the washers and nuts.

Part of why they cost so much is because they’re imperial sizing, which isn’t commonly available in the Netherlands, and no metric bolts came with as nice a finish. Look at the lines on the sides of the heads – and the sheer ratio of Allen key socket size to the circumference. Of course, in stainless steel. Robust, yet refined. Worthy of being installed in plain sight in a boutique system build.

The top panel

For the top panel, I decided that a better approach would be to cut the pieces and make all the cutouts beforehand, and only then glue them together and add the splines afterward.

This approach paid off. I had a few slipups with the router, as I forgot to fasten my guide, and by the time I had a front fascia that looked good, I realized that it wouldn’t work anyway: The power button I used would collide internally with the downward-facing LED strip that illuminates the system.

It was one or the other, and I was willing to sacrifice neither. Having run out of scraps, I went out and bought a new oak plank, and cut a new strip with the circular saw and started over. You live and learn.

The top panel consists of two parts: the top and sides as one, with the vent at the top, along with illumination and USB ports on the sides. The second part you’ll see later is a shroud that slots in from below, which holds the fans and covers up the gaps around them. As I put the system together, I realized I may be able to complete the build without an additional support pillar at all.

The Vents: A Sore Point of Frustration

In the design process, I had already decided that the PSU chamber was going to have a vent on top for keeping heat from accumulating, but having decided it was going to sit flush against the desk (instead of levitating with an open bottom), it also needed an intake vent. I didn’t want the intake vent on the user side, nor did I want it at the front, so I decided to make a hole on the right side, in the space of the PSU compartment that sticks out from the spine.

Using a jigsaw, I cut out a 120mm gap for the fan to sit in, and then used the router to cut holders for the fins. The result was… disappointing to say the least. I had done a test piece elsewhere and thought it would look okay, but the router left tons of ugly blowout artifacts.

Of course, I could tidy things up with a chisel and some sanding, so I made some fins by tilting the miter saw 45° to see what it would look like – but even with the fins in place, I was displeased – the fins sticking out looked far more aggressive than the vibe I was going for.

So, once again, I grabbed the router, cleared the angled cuts into a tidy straight line, and left a small lip for the fin holders to glue up against.

To make the fin holders, I first used the router with the plunge base to flatten a chunk of an oak plank. Then, I used the router again with an angled base to cut 45-degree slits, after which I used the miter saw to cut the slab into strips.

I had decided to make an abundance of holders, as some would get lost to the miter saw inevitably chewing pieces up. And being rather thin, I figured some would break along the way.

I was very happy with these holders as an outcome, and later, when making the fins, it all came together to produce a beautiful end result. I glued the strips in and used the router with a flush trim bit to remove any excess lip I had left earlier.

Routing the cable channels

For cable management, I wanted to cut out grooves in the back of the spine of the PC, where I would use cable combs to create some stunning cable management. For the CPU’s two 8-pin EPS cables, it was a matter of cutting a straight line up and placing a hole to get to things to the motherboard on the other side.

But for the 24-pin motherboard cable, I had to make a wide turn, so I built a jig that allowed me to rotate the router along a center point, like a compass. A template would have worked too, except that I had no means of making a template to the correct circumference, and I didn’t have any shallow enough template bits with a bearing at the nearside of the router – the bits I did have would cut deeper than I wanted the groove to be.

In addition to the 24-pin motherboard cable and two 8-pin cables for the CPU, I also cut out two grooves for the cables going from the PSU compartment to the top panel, a small groove for the front I/O cables, a large cavity near the PSU area, and a small cavity at the top where the RGB controller would sit, as there was no space left in the top panel.

I hadn’t yet cut out the holes for the GPU brackets to attach, nor had I added the threaded inserts for the motherboard. I did not want to sand the gold finish off the threaded inserts during a later stage, so I only inserted these after applying the final finish. Once the motherboard was installed, I could determine the exact position of the GPU brackets.

Beveling all the edges

Throughout the process of building all the pieces, I frequently switched the router to a 45° chamfered bit to trim all the edges of the workpiece, with larger cuts on the boxy bits, and smaller cuts on the spine, along all grooves and cutouts, for a smooth and soft-looking finish.

The Fins

The fin holders I had created earlier looked tidy, but weren’t very consistent with their thickness – without storage space for a proper flattening jig, my hand-guided results were a fraction of a milimeter off across the plane, and therefore, some of the fins sat higher up than others.

Their spacing was good however, so I made new fins and simply sanded down the bits that stuck out from the top of the panel, leading to a smooth, flush finish with the top of the vents. Once sanded down, you couldn’t tell that they all have ever-so-slightly different sizes.

Finishing Touches

Finally, it was time for some finishing touches before finishing each wooden piece itself.

Initially, I hadn’t planned on doing much about the back of the PC, as well, it’s the back. Who cares? But after having sunk this much time into it, it felt a shame to leave it like this. I already trimmed things up with the miter saw to make it all flush, but decided it needed a “veneer” to cover things up.

I also removed the large bolts holding the fan shroud entirely, as I didn’t like them in this part of the PC. Instead, I used a cleat method, and countersunk the bolts at the front to sit flush, as to not distract from the components that were to be installed in the system.

Yuck. The rear of the PSU compartment also needed a veneer.

The picture above well describes the final stages of what the woodworking process felt like. I had bumped a splinter off the back of the PSU compartment while I sawed some off for the veneer, so I glued it back on. Also, one of the splines hadn’t pushed in far enough during gluing, so I cut a tiny piece off of some scrap meranti and glued that in, then sanded it flush.

On the top panel, these two splines also had burrs that broke off during sawoff. If you look carefully, you can see the difference in grain pattern on the right one, which had been fixed earlier.

Sanding and Finishing

I’ll skip the part where I talk about the sanding because… it’s boring, takes a long time, and I could write a book about all the steps I took to find the right method. Instead, I’ll let the picture below do the talking. It had reached freezing temperatures outside, so I freed up this room in my house, moved almost all the furniture to the living room, and spent three days sanding the project. Bless my neighbors.

For the final finish, I opted to use Rubio Monocoat. It’s a pricier finish, but it’s a linseed-based hardwax that bonds with the wood grain at a molecular level. This means that you cannot create overlapping lines the way a film finish would, and with all the nooks and crannies this build has, a film finish was going to be very difficult to apply properly – I really did not want to end up with a droopy mess.

Rubio, on the other hand, is fairly simple to apply. Just wipe it on, wait 5 minutes, wipe things off, and buff. Better yet, Rubio performs best when the workpiece is sanded only up to 120 grit, as higher grits close off the wood pores and stop it from taking in the pigment. This saved me a lot of time sanding, as if three days of straight sanding weren’t enough.

For good measure, I went over the pieces with my DA polisher as a final step, which led to a beautiful and even finish.

The body pieces I finished with the color “Arabica,” a rich brown with a warm reddish tint, somewhat matching Noctua’s own colorway. For the spine and fins, I opted to use Mist 5% (pictured on the left of the three samples), as this is a color that has a bit of cream white pigment in it to counter the natural darkening that an unpigmented oil (middle) would cause, keeping the spine and fin pieces almost entirely true to their original colors. Moreover, both colors fit the Noctua-themed build almost perfectly.

Bits and Pieces

With the finish applied to almost all pieces, I could install the threaded inserts, the brass standoffs, and test-fit the motherboard. With the Asus Z890-Creator in place, I determined how I was going to support the GPU and built the GPU holders.

The Asus x Noctua RTX 5080 is a thing of beauty – it’s one of the biggest graphics cards money can buy, weighing in at almost 6 pounds. But with its classy colors, I didn’t want to do it a disservice with a trashy vertical mount. Instead, I opted to build a hidden-in-plain-sight mount for the graphics card that would make it appear unsupported from the side and front profile, for a subtle, creative touch.

This GPU occupies four slots, so I could easily “hide” the L-shaped support behind the GPU without any protrusion. Because it also has to carry a decent amount of weight, I used the grain pattern in two different directions by applying a veneer to the outside of the bracket for added strength, and a tidier visual finish.

While making the GPU support bracket at the rear and the anti-sag nub, I also routed out two oval-shaped holes in the motherboard tray for their bolts to fit through, being oval by just a few millimeters, so I could adjust them up/down to get the GPU perfectly level during final installation. The extra pieces were then finished in Arabica, and the fresh cuts in the motherboard tray were tidied up.

For the motherboard, I found galvanized threaded inserts to match the gold accent color of the motherboard and RAM, with an M4 inner thread, 10mm brass standoffs with M4 outer and M4 inner thread, and brass thumbscrews with – you guessed it – M4 outer threading.

A support bracket for the power supply was also built so that no screws would be visible from the rear of the build.

And a support structure was made for the lower compartment fan to adapt it to the larger vent. Of course, I could have just grabbed a 140mm fan, but where would the fun be in that?

I also stamped each of the fins with a letter and number during sanding so that I would know which fin belonged in which position in the case – the six side fins for the intake wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out, as they’re much smaller than the rest, but the remaining 29 fins would be a nightmare to pick out without some sort of guide.

Yes – I know stamping each of the 35 fins with their intended position seems like an insane level of detail, but I’m telling you: The 15 minutes it took to do this is the kind of foresight I wish I had earlier on in the build process.

At Last, The Case is Finished!

Next, let’s install a PC into this owlet.

Illumination, and The Case of the 12V Power Button

For the illumination (I refuse to call it RGB, as you may have noticed) I used Phanteks’ Neon M1 and M5 strips, as I liked their diffuser, along with a Phanteks NexLinq V2 hub. This hub would display the correct color from the moment it receives power, which is of the utmost importance, because for some reason, even in 2025, Asus still thinks we all want to see unicorn vomit in the time between pressing the power button and typing in our password.

The only acceptable illumination colors in this build are anything between white, warm white, and amber. Anything else may as well be criminal, and I can’t be seen displaying the default strafing rainbow next to Noctua’s classy colors, even for a few seconds.

Sadly, the NexLinq hub doesn’t allow custom color nor brightness control yet, so I’m relying on Windows Dynamic Lighting to get the exact shade and brightness I’m looking for. Thankfully, the hub does default to ‘Off’ during bootup, or whatever it last remembered, depending on the mood it’s in, which is acceptable.

During installation, however, I found that one of the LED strips was broken. I tried soldering it, but ran out of tin. It was still early in the evening, but it was a Sunday, so the shops were closed, and I couldn’t obtain more. Moreover, this strip had to go in before I could move on with any other part of the build. I had hit a roadblock until dawn.

“A tragic development. How could this possibly have happened?! Everything in this project has been going entirely according to plan!” I sarcastically chanted to myself all night.

The final configuration is for the hub to drive the downward facing LED strip at full brightness in a rich amber color, which is only really visible at night – hence what’s essentially really warm white, and Windows Dynamic Lighting takes over the forward and sideways facing strips at 10% brightness for a subtle lighting accent to complement the power button, but doesn’t distract from the rest of the system or blind the user.

Speaking of the power button – this is the coolest button $6 has ever bought me. It has a clicking quality that even the best mechanical switches cannot think to compete with (you’ll have to watch the video for a demonstration). Obviously, it has an amber LED ring around it, a stainless-steel body, and it’s a 12V button.

Buying the 12V version was intentional. I could have purchased a 5V variant that I could power by the power button headers on the motherboard; however, I also bought a 12V Bosch 5-pin relay along with the button. Why? So that when the system is powered, the power LED receives 12V for full brightness, and when in sleep mode, the relay switches to the 5V power button LED output from the motherboard, so that it blinks at a lower brightness.

ATX power supplies have a common ground, so this works without a problem – I’ve done this in the past and double-checked with a multi-meter. Except, there was a problem: It turns out that this specific motherboard does not make the power button blink in sleep mode. Therefore, the entire relay circuit was redundant. So, I just connected the button up to 12V power from the PSU instead and called it a day.

What I did not see coming, though, is that the 12V rail doesn’t instantly lose power the moment the system enters sleep mode or is shut down. Instead, the power button now gradually dims over the course of a few seconds, while the fans also lose their momentum. While it was entirely unintentional, it’s also very cool.

The power button has become, in effect, a representation of the (residual) voltage on the 12V rail of the PSU. Now that’s what a power LED is supposed to act like, if you ask me. This must be one of those ‘happy accidents’ Bob Ross told us about. After the LED strip catastrophe, and what will go down in history as The Great Sunday Evening Tin Shortage, seeing the power button’s LED behave this way gave me motivation to see this build through to the end.

After many iterations and attempts to get everything working, I installed the fans in the top panel. With Noctua’s own components complementing the case I had so meticulously built, and everything working well, I knew that I was onto a pretty special-looking build.

Motherboard installation

With the top panel finally sorted, I moved on to the motherboard installation. For this, I chucked the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K into the Asus Z890-Creator, and clicked the four 24 GB DDR5-7200 modules from Team-Group into place. I also installed the two SSDs: a 2 TB Kingston Renegade G5 into the primary PCIe 5.0 capable M.2 slot as the main system drive, and a 2 TB Team-Group Classic C47 SSD into a PCIe 4.0 slot.

I also pre-installed the bracket for the Noctua NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler. The beast wouldn’t be getting installed until way later, when all the cable management was done, but as the case’s spine doesn’t have a cutout to access the back of the motherboard, I made sure the bracket was already in place for later.

Then, I installed the motherboard, and boy was I glad that I pre-installed the cooler’s bracket – getting the thumbscrews turned in, as pretty as they are, was a very difficult task. The spots I drilled out for the threaded inserts were quite accurate, but the M4 thumbscrews only just fit through the motherboard’s nine holes. Consequently, being off by only half a millimeter meant a lot of extra turning resistance – resistance I had to overcome without the aid of a screwdriver. My fingers hurt after this. I prayed to not have to remove the motherboard later.

Power Supply installation

Moving on, it was time to tackle the PSU chamber. I had already installed all the power cables, along with the custom extensions I had made into the system’s spine, albeit not in any tidy manner. I tucked the cables through the cutout in the PSU chamber, and then bolted the chamber into place.

For the power supply, because the entire system up until this point used 100% G2 fans, I decided that the G1 fan installed in the Seasonic x Noctua 1600W Prime PSU was not good enough. So, I tore it open and swapped it out for an NF-A12x25 G2 spinner. To accomplish this, I had to swap the connector on the fan.

However, what happened next was crushing. I had done the math on the cable lengths prior to cutting out the grooves, but in doing so, forgotten to account for the fact that the 24-pin cable powering the motherboard would go through two 90-degree bends in the same direction, leaving me with a cable that ended up being too short.

This was a problem. There was no way I was going to extend 27 sleeved cables (the power supply uses doubles on some pins), and I certainly didn’t have time to wait for an order of custom cables to arrive.

In fact, I was so desperate to crack on with the build, I didn’t even want to remove the motherboard, because of those pesky but pretty thumbscrews – my fingers already hurt from installing them, and removing and re-installing them would probably add another hour to the process.

So, I did the only thing one could logically do in this scenario: surgery. I covered up my patient, marked out where I had to make the incisions, clamped it down, and went for it. I’ll let the picture speak for itself. At this stage in the build, it was terrifying to bust out the tools again. With the extra gap cut out from the spine to accommodate the cable that was too short, I popped the base of the case back on and reinstalled the power supply. Order was restored, for now.

GPU Install

Installing the GPU went smoothly and easily. I used a threaded insert and one of the leftover thumbscrews to fasten the GPU to the bracket, and then installed the GPU, with the bracket attached, into the PCIe slot. While still supporting the GPU by hand, the bracket was fastened into place at the correct height.

After this, the anti-sag nub was installed at the front of the system, between the spine and the graphics card. It was also adjusted to the correct height for a perfectly level GPU.

Cable management

Because the cable management at the back of the spine is fully open and exposed, I needed to make some custom cables for powering all the devices.

The first of these is a 4-pin fan extension cable, so that the three fans at the top could be controlled by a fan header at the bottom of the motherboard. For this, I sacrificed one of the 8-pin PCIe cables from the power supply.

From that same sacrificial cable, I also used two extra wires and sleeving to make an extension for the power button. I used the brown sleeving for this one, merging the two wires into one cable at the solder point, and pulled some extra scrap sleeving over the short bit of the power cable I had pulled from the other case. The power button header sits at the very front of the motherboard, so I wanted this to be covered in sleeving, with a bit of shrink-wrap to remove any fraying.

The two wires remaining on the 8-pin PCIe cable were soldered to the power button’s LED to feed it 12 V power.

I then sacrificed another 8-pin PCIe power cable from the power supply, and used half of it to make an internal USB 2.0 cable so that the RGB controller could be plugged in and controlled. Two SATA power cables were combined into one longer cable to power the RGB controller.

Finally, all the cables were tidied up with combs, and were glued in place using 3M 468MP double-sided tape.

The PSU compartment easily went on to become the tidiest chamber I’ve ever built in, thanks to the secret cavity at the bottom of the motherboard tray, where I could easily tuck what little cable excess I had. Because of this hidden cavity, this is also the first PC I’ve ever built in where not a single ziptie was needed or used.

System complete: Behold the Stout Owl

This build measures 23.8 cm wide, stands at 51.5 cm tall, and is 46.0 cm deep. It weighs in at a staggering 20.8 kg.

I drove over 842 km, over the course of 19 trips to various stores for supplies. Five splinters were removed from my hands and, at peak, I had 14 cuts on my hands at one given moment. 17 different finishes were tested. About a dozen items have been returned. One Makita 3AH 18V LXT battery died. One wood bit, two router bits, one jigsaw blade, and both blades for the circle and miter saw were worn out. An estimated 30 pieces of sandpaper were used up. Lastly, six different neighbors came over, curiously asking what I was working on.

And on at least 18 different days, the words “I will be done tonight” were spoken, 17 of which in vain.

To test the performance of this PC, I started by changing a few system parameters. For Showstopper builds like this one, the aim is maximum performance within thermal or power limits, whichever comes first.

For starters, the memory was set to the XMP-II profile, where it takes on the voltage, frequency, and timings Team Group intends the kits to run at. It’s worth noting that despite using four modules from two identical kits, I had no problem running the XMP-II profile at 7200 MHz with CL36 timings.

This is a testament to both CUDIMM technology and Team Group’s binning for these modules. However, I must note that there was a luck factor: Running four modules at their intended frequency and timings, especially if they only come in a kit of two, even with CUDIMMs is not a guarantee, and depending on your CPUs IMC, you may not get such luck. Obtaining the memory with the intention to run it this way was a gamble, but it paid off handsomely.

From there, I set up a fan curve that suits the system. Personally, I find idle temperatures for both the GPU and CPU under 50 degrees C acceptable. Under load, I’m willing to let a CPU cook up to 5 degrees C below its thermal limit during an extended Prime95 run – real life scenarios never offer such loads anyway, but 5 degrees under the thermal cutoff under synthetic stress is a good figure to strive for given that in practice, it would never come close to that anyway.

As such, for this build specifically, I set the CPU fan up to run at 10% duty up to 50 degrees C, ramp up to 60% approaching 70 degrees, then stay at 60% until 90 degrees C is reached. From 90 to 100 degrees C, the curve ramps up to 100%. The reason for this plateau at 60% is to avoid unstable fanspeeds during extended real-world loads. And unless you’re running a synthetic test, the CPU fan should practically never exceed 60% duty.

I allowed 10-15 minutes for things to saturate, and then measured temperatures over the course of one minute. It ended up at 98 degrees C with this fan curve, hitting that sweet spot, and I did not need to lower the power limit, nor did I have to undervolt the 285K. I could have, but was happy with the result, given that real-life workloads only lead to temperatures around the mid-70s.

For the GPU, temperatures are generally much lower, as there is no integrated heatspreader at play – the cooler makes direct contact with the GPU die. The Asus x Noctua RTX 5080 has a standard power limit at 360 W, but I was able to max out the power limit to 450 W and raise the GPU clocks to a zippy 3,172 MHz under boost. Despite leaving the graphics card’s BIOS switch in quiet mode, it still kept the GPU at no more than 63 degrees C, and everything was running perfectly stable, so I was happy and left it at that.

The PSU was not run in passive mode, as the fan opening is facing downwards, which limits convection, making passive mode less than ideal.

So, why the case fans?

So, the case fans. I’ve asked myself the question why I’m using them at all numerous times. I chose not to run them passively, as I don’t want any heat accumulating in any of the cavities of the wooden chassis. The case fans were, however, all limited to a maximum 50% duty because let’s be real: It’s an open-air PC – it could probably do without the case fans altogether and just let convection handle the rest, but the aesthetics of a Noctua build would never be complete without the iconic fans.

Luckily, the fans are nearly inaudible while the system is powered on, even at 50% duty, and let’s face it: We’re pushing 800 watts through this system, and the case is made from the same stuff we throw in our fireplaces.

Besides, without the fans, I wouldn’t have had an excuse to make the gorgeous vents throughout the case. By that logic, I could also have done without the top panel altogether. And the PSU chamber too – just strap everything to a single panel with some feet to hold it upright. Right?

That would be no fun! We get case fans in an open-air case. Deal with it.

Performance testing

The tests below are run until thermals stabilize, the temperatures and power levels are recorded for 1 minute, from which their average is calculated.

In due time, as I collect data on more builds, I will make charts to compare systems to one another. But for now, we can draw some clear conclusions from the data we have about this build specifically.

It uses just 4 W in sleep mode. When browsing with a few programs, MS Word, and a few tabs open, system power hovers around 100 W, and noise levels are indistinguishable from the ambient levels in the room. Truly, the fans may look like they’re spinning, and sticking your finger in would confirm that, but your ears wouldn’t pick up a thing – or at least mine don’t.

During a 1000-shot DXO PhotoLab export, where each image has a handful of effects applied, including DeepPrime 3 AI Denoising, the system consumed an average 313 watts, and barely broke the ambient noise floor by just 0.5 dBA. DXO Photolab loads up the 285K nicely and also uses the RTX 5080. In fact, as each shot passes through the export, you can hear when it gets handed over to the GPU for the final DeepPrime3 denoising step, because of the very brief light coil whine.

3DMark Speedway put down a tidy score, and so did Cyberpunk 2077. In fact, gaming, despite drawing near 500 watts, at most raises the noise level by 1.0 dBA above the ambient noise floor – a truly astonishing feat, and without a doubt, it’s quieter than custom water cooling. The only perceivable sound is a tiny bit of wind noise and coil whine, the latter of which you can only hear because well… it’s an open-air PC.

Of course, if you load the system up with Prime95 and Furmark at the same time, things get hot, hungry, and noisy. In fact, despite all G2 fans from Noctua, this PC can make quite a ruckus – but it’s totally unnecessary, and I honestly don’t know why anyone would choose to do this other than for kicks.

This took a very, very long time

Getting the basic shape of the case built was a breeze. However, after building the PSU chamber and bolting the spine to it, I needed the motherboard on hand to route out the cable management on the back of the case’s spine. Then, the motherboard got stuck in customs, and there wasn’t much I could do in the meantime.

However, it turns out, once I got the motherboard, the adventure had only just started. Building the basic frame of the case only took about a week – half the time I had allotted to building the entire case.

It’s the details that got me. The vents took me about a week and a half, spread out across the project. The spine probably took just as long. The top panel, though not very big, contains three LED strips, a power button that’s internally very challenging to find the space for, three USB ports, an RGB controller, 21 flaps for the vents and three 120mm fans. That top panel took the better part of two weeks to figure out.

I’ve told the story in this article in a somewhat orderly fashion, but the reality is that all these pieces are interconnected somehow, and there was a ton of back-and-forth to get everything to fit together.

Even building the two GPU support brackets, though they may look like a simple L and a nub, took 10 hours to build, because I also needed to figure out how to attach them to the spine, route those holes out, bevel them, water-pop and sand them, and apply the finish to not only the two support brackets, but also the adjustments on the spine where I had cut through the finish applied earlier.

When all was said and done, I spent about a week sanding and finishing the entire project, and only then could I install the system into it.

Thankfully, the system is air-cooled, so the installation was a breeze in comparison to the rest of the project.

Reflecting on the saga

Building The Stout Owl has been an adventure. It was easy imagining how I’d build a wooden case in a week, maybe two, but in practice, this is a project that by the time I finished, I had poured somewhere between 5 and 600 hours into if you include all the planning that came in the months before the case building even started.

Of course, I could have saved myself a lot of headache by fully designing the system beforehand and handing the CAD drawings over to a company to CNC the pieces for me. It may even have been cheaper despite outsourcing, but I don’t regret not doing so. The Stout Owl is entirely handmade with nothing but a few powertools, not a single one of which cost more than $250 – this is something achievable in a small apartment, and it doesn’t require multiple-thousands of dollars worth of equipment, provided you have the time and patience.

Moreover, because I started out with only a simple sketch, the final design is something that evolved throughout the build process. Initially, I hadn’t planned on many of the complexities the final piece has – but the more time I sank into it, the more determined I became to perfect every last piece. For every skill I learned along the way, I went back to earlier parts of the project to improve on them.

Examples of these kinds of evolution are the vents, which despite their rough start turned out far more beautiful than I could have imagined – and even though almost nobody will ever see it, I love the unique touch of the letters and numbers being stamped into them to accommodate for the fact that I did an imperfect job flattening the slab I made their holders from.

In that same line of thought, the levitating GPU mount is something I would never have come up with had I not spent as much time with my hands on the workpiece and evolving the design as I went about building The Stout Owl.

Now that it’s over, I’m going to be taking a long weekend, and then I’ll get back to the “regular” builds for the inspiring creativity series.

Special Thanks

This build was made possible thanks to Noctua, Team Group, Kingston, Phanteks, Asus, and Intel, Tom’s Hardware Premium subscribers, and my partner.

Others, whose names I don’t know, also played key roles – folks I met at the hardware store, a parquet shop for the finish – people who helped me with advice along the way.

Parts List

There's probably a statistically significant intersection of 3D printing enthusiasts and Noctua cooling users. After all, both groups are into tweaking their machines and DIY in general. Both Prusa and Noctua seem to agree, as the companies have collaborated on bringing out high-end Noctua-colored filament.

The shades for the new filaments are Noctua Beige and Noctua Brown, and they've been color-matched precisely to fit the Austrian company's wares. This should make it trivial for Noctua enthusiasts to 3D-print accessories for Noctua-infused builds and trust they'll be aesthetically compatible. Given that there are already multiple Noctua-themed components out there, this move makes a lot of sense.

Prusa apparently had the idea after witnessing multiple community efforts that attempted to replicate the color scheme with varying degrees of success. Color matching plastics at an industrial level is a much harder enterprise than most would believe, as evidenced by the gasp-inducing price of a "simple" color wheel from Pantone.

The 3D printer maker reached out to Noctua, who apparently said yes right away, as the wind wranglers use Prusa printers themselves, and often employ their own fans for added silence. The outfit went as far as making an entire Noctua Edition Prusa MK4S printer in their own color scheme, thanks to the freely available files. The build is detailed over at a blog post at Noctua's website, if you're curious.

The PLA Noctua Beige and Noctua Brown filaments are available from Prusa3D.com, and they ring in at $32.99 (with import taxes included) or 32.99€, for a 1 kg spool. The price may seem steep at first, but it's the same as Prusa's other high-end filaments. As expected, Prusa says the filament has low warpage and a tight tolerance of ±0.02mm.

Noctua's color scheme tends to divide opinions, but regardless of individual taste, it's immediately recognizable. Having the ability to 3D print any accessory and make it look like it from Noctua itself is a boon for color-conscious constructors everywhere.

PC cooling specialist Noctua has introduced a Chromax variant of its latest flagship CPU cooler, the NH-D15 G2. Launched in July 2024 in its traditional brown and beige aesthetics, the cooler is now available in an all-black finish with a listed price of $189.90 in the U.S. on Amazon and €159.90 in Europe. That makes it $40 or €10 more expensive (depending on your region), unless you don’t mind the company’s traditional color scheme. Noctua has also introduced Chromax versions of the NF-A14x25r G2 (round frame) and NF-A14x25 G2 (square frame) 140mm PWM fans, which start at $44.90 in the U.S. and €39.90 in Europe.

According to Noctua CEO Roland Mossig, the G2 series products have been well-received by the PC-building community, and the company is confident that the new chromax.black versions will be suitable for users who prefer a “stealthy, unobtrusive look.”

If you are interested in the new Chromax NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler or the NF-A14x25 G2 and NF-A14x25r G2 140mm PWM fans, you can grab them from Amazon using the following links.

The NH-D15 G2 features eight heat pipes as opposed to six on its predecessor. It also comes with denser asymmetrical fin stacks that are claimed to deliver 20% more surface area for convective heat dissipation. The cooler also features an offset design that is said to offer better clearance for the top PCIe x16 slot on most modern motherboards.

Rounding up the NH-D15 G2 are two NF-A14x25r G2 round-frame 140mm PWM fans which are made out of Noctua’s patented Sterrox liquid-crystal polymer (LCP). This material is said to offer high tensile strength and low thermal expansion characteristics compared to traditional thermoplastics. The fans feature a Progressive Bend impeller design with a Centrifugal Turbulator hub, winglets, and a tight tip clearance of 0.7mm, which results in improved performance-to-noise efficiency over the previous generation models.

Noctua suggests that cooling efficiency and low-noise performance of the new Chromax lineup should be similar compared to the non-Chromax variants. In our in-depth review, the Noctua NH‑D15 G2 delivered improved thermal performance over the original NH-D15, cooling about 10W more load (around 240W sustained) while maintaining a quiet profile. We also recorded temperature drops of about 2-degrees celsius under mixed CPU and GPU loads, and an overall improvement in CPU temperatures of up to 3-degree celsius compared to its predecessor.

Today, October 23rd 2025, marks Noctua’s 20th anniversary. Although it might feel like the brand has always been around, the partnership has only existed for 20 years. Tom's Hardware Premium sat down with Noctua’s own Jakob Dellinger to reflect on the company’s small beginnings, chronicling a brief history of the company's two-decade-long impact on the PC cooling industry.

Along the way, Dellinger offers up answers to many of the burning questions you might have about Noctua's eyebrow-raising origins, its iconic coffee-inspired branding, and some of their biggest product releases.

Who is Noctua?

Noctua isn’t a company in and of itself. There are companies registered by the name Noctua around the world, but they aren’t the Noctua you and I are familiar with.

The Noctua we know today is a partnership between the Austrian Rascom and the Taiwanese Kolink, (Kolink's Hungarian branch was sold to Caseking in 2014, and has no current affiliation with Kolink International). Rascom is a company that has existed long before Noctua, and the same can be said for Kolink. When quizzed on how the brand came to be, Dellinger said:

“Noctua is the result of a cooperation between the Austrian company Rascom Computerdistribution and the Taiwanese company Kolink International. While both parties contribute to areas like R&D, engineering or logistics, other responsibilities are split up”.

He continues, “For example, Kolink is responsible for manufacturing, sourcing, packaging and onsite-QC, whereas Rascom handles product management, marketing, sales and customer support. In fact, Rascom’s and Kolink’s partnership dates back to before we founded Noctua. We initially did imports and OEM sourcing for other brands before we decided to leverage the expertise that we had built up to start our own thing.”

Among the founding team is Rascom’s CEO Roland Mossig, who founded Rascom Computerdistribution back in 2000. Initially, he was in the import business, hence the term Computerdistribution. But, he found it difficult to continue growing his business while relying on the innovation of others. That’s when Noctua was born.

The unsung heroine: Alexandra Mossig

While Roland Mossig is a key figure at Noctua, there are others, such as Alexandra Mossig, who is one of the pivotal figures who shaped Noctua into what it is today, particularly if you like those iconic coffee-colored hues.

“Roland Mossig [...] has always been in the spotlight and his leadership definitely played a key part in our success, but the importance of Alexandra’s contribution is much less known. Alexandra co-founded Rascom with Roland in the year 2000 and played a key role when we conceived Noctua.”

While founding Noctua, Alexandra developed the company’s logo, color scheme, and the brand’s visual identity. Today, she leads the HR department, while still maintaining an eye on branding.

“What makes both her and Roland’s achievements even more impressive for me is that they managed to build up Noctua while raising four children, two of which have already started working at Rascom.”

But there are other key figures at the company. In 2012, Racom hired Lars Strömbäck to the position of CTO.

“Another person I would like to mention is Lars Strömbäck, our CTO. Lars came on board in 2012 and has propelled our R&D to a whole new level. Without his expertise and the structural changes he introduced to our development and validation processes, the continuous performance uplifts we’ve been able to offer with new product generations would have been unthinkable.”

Today, around 80 people work at Rascom in Austria, with 200 individuals at Kolink in Taiwan.

How Noctua's iconic visual flair came to be

Noctua's first product, the NH-U12, didn't launch with the signature Noctua colors we all know today. But, the brand was hard at work crafting something that would stand out among the rainbow-colored crowd.

“In 2004, when we started to develop Noctua’s visual identity, we were in the first big wave of PC modding, so bold, aggressive colors and flashing lights reigned supreme. People window-modded their case side panels, installed cold cathode lights, and the first LED fans. It seemed that everyone was obsessed with creating the flashiest looking PC rather than striving for maximum performance, let alone optimal acoustics. People loved the look of these LED fans, but their performance and reliability were horrible, as most of them used cheap, brittle plastics that easily cracked and were also quite prone to resonance.”

So, Noctua dared to stand out by offering a more practical solution than what the market trends showed them, creating a niche which was focused on performance, instead of aesthetics.

“Our goal was to deliberately break with that aesthetic and come up with a color scheme that visually reflects our focus on quietness. This is why we went with earth tones, which generally signal calmness rather than aggression, and immediately stood out as something completely different. There have been lots and lots of different fan color schemes over the years, but when you see a Noctua fan, you know it’s a Noctua fan. Admittedly, another influencing factor was that many of us are coffee lovers, so if you find our color scheme reminiscent of Italian coffee culture and design, that’s not a total coincidence.”

Noctua even sold 3-pin fans

If you think Noctua, it’d almost be difficult to imagine the brand selling a fan that does not come with PWM regulation, but even to our surprise, Noctua was late to the party:

“We sold 3-pin DC fans exclusively for the first couple of years" Dellinger noted. "We were late to the PWM game because we were dissatisfied with how PWM-controlled fans sounded back then. The early PWM driver ICs and motors had horrible commutation behavior, so they typically produced clicking noises that were audible from close distances. We spent years refining the motors and driver ICs until we were happy with the result before finally launching our first 4-pin PWM fans in 2011. We still sell a lot of 3-pin fans today, but mainly for applications outside the PC market.”

But, beyond the 3-Pin fans, Noctua has had a very colorful history, which can be tracked through its slate of well-known releases.

2005: Noctua's first-ever heatsink

In 2005, Noctua launched the NH-U12. This was the partnership’s first heatsink, and as mentioned earlier, it came without any fans. Unimaginable as that may be today, it occurred more often back in the early 2000s, and the heatsink was also powerful enough to cool many of the day’s CPUs passively, without a fan. In fact, Chris Ramseyer, who’s written for Tom’s Hardware in the past, set a 3DMark record using two passively cooled NH-U12 heatsinks in 2006.

However, one crucial iconic component we know from Noctua today was missing: the beige and brown fans. Dellinger noted:

“When we launched the first coolers in October 2005, we had already been working hard on our first fans for a while, but we weren’t quite there yet. The heatsinks, however, were ready to go, and we knew they were excellent, so we decided to roll them out without fans to get started. Back then, it was more common for heatsinks and fans to be sold separately, so frankly it wasn’t as bold a move as it may seem from today’s perspective.”

2006: Mounting bracket upgrades & NF-S12 fan

In 2006, Noctua began to offer free mounting bracket upgrades for future sockets on its coolers – a tradition that holds true today.

Meanwhile, the company also unveiled its first fan: the NF-S12. This fan is a spinner aimed specifically at tackling airflow in a case, not the heatsink.

It was unheard of at the time, but Noctua engineered a fan whose blade geometry was built specifically to increase airflow in low-resistance scenarios, such as a case. Many fans on the market at the time did alright when it came to static pressure and pushing air through a dense heatsink, but when used in a case, they often ran at high RPM figures to achieve sufficient airflow – but not Noctua’s NF-S12 – this was a fan that could accomplish the same airflow at much lower speeds — and therefore, with much less noise.

One year later, in 2007, Noctua followed up with the NF-P12, designed to surpass all existing heatsink solutions in terms of overcoming thermal resistance.

2009: The NH-D14, Noctua's first smash-hit

If there’s one product that put Noctua on everyone’s wishlist, it was the NH-D14. Well, perhaps not everyone, but the NH-D14 combined a dual-tower heatsink design with a round-frame 140mm fan and a 120mm fan, along with six heat pipes. This was a CPU cooler that bested everything available in terms of its performance-to-noise ratio.

This heatsink uses the aforementioned NF-P12, along with the newly developed round-frame NF-P14 — a 140mm variant of the P-series fans.

2011: Press F for Focused Flow

Noctua’s NF-F12 fans were spinners that came with a focused-flow frame. Their design was based largely on the NF-P12 fans, but they came with a modified frame shape that focused the air beam (if you can call it that) at particular components.

This was a fan that was engineered to work well on radiators and heatsinks, but the PC building community found another great use for it: at the front intake, especially in cases with restrictive front intakes where air had to navigate a labyrinth for noise reduction purposes and then also pass through a dense air filter.

You can imagine that in a situation like this, the NF-S12 wouldn’t be able to overcome the resistance, and installing a P12 with a focusing beam (known as the F12) would overcome the resistance and aim the resulting airflow directly at the graphics card, instead of diffusing into the case.

In today’s market, there is no place anymore for an F12-type fan. Most cases use mesh intakes — but in 2011, PCs were not commonly driven by flash storage yet. In 2011, hard drives were still commonplace in the everyday desktop PC, and consequently, case manufacturers often turned to restrictive intake labyrinths to reduce escaping hard drive noise. The NF-F12 was also the first fan to feature the SSO2 bearing —the same bearing that Noctua still uses today.

2012: First A-Series fans are introduced

With the introduction of the A-series fans, Noctua introduced spinners that are suitable for attacking both static pressure and low-resistance airflow. In this big release, Noctua unveiled the NF-A14, NF-A9x14, NF-A6x25, and NF-A4x10. Curiously, Noctua did not release a 120mm variant, even as the public was begging Noctua for one.

Why? Because the A-series fans featured a handful of fundamental design changes, including Flow Acceleration Channels on the blades, and the AAO (Advanced Acoustic Optimization) frame with its stepped inlet design, inner surface microstructures to relieve turbulence between the blade tip and the frame, and rubber vibration dampers on all corners.

But Noctua wasn’t quite happy with it yet, entirely. The improvements were good enough for the low-volume products included in the release, but for the 120mm model — what was to become the flagship model — Noctua felt it had to continue development.

Of course, Noctua could have released an NF-A12 at this point, everybody would have bought it, and they would have made tons of money — but that was never the point.

2014: The NH-D15 dominates

If the NH-D14 wasn’t already brilliant, Noctua upped the ante with NH-D15, which featured a dual-tower design, this time with two round-frame 150mm A-series spinners.

“We’ve already mentioned NH-D14 before, but we should certainly also mention [the] NH-D15 as it provided another boost in performance in 2014 and, just like its predecessor in 2009, became the undisputed king of the hill for high-end air coolers. In the case of NH-D14, however, it only took the competition a couple of years to catch up. NH-D15, by contrast, was widely considered the cooler to beat for over a decade, which I think is quite impressive in its own right.”

2018: The iconic NF-A12x25 fans land on the scene

Only six years after the introduction of the A-series fans, Noctua finally felt it had come far enough in developing the 120mm A-series spinner that it felt satisfied it would be worthy of the A12 nomenclature. We got a little more than what we expected though, both in name and product design.

Let's first decipher the name, NF-A12x25: Noctua Fan, A-Series, sized at 120mm wide and tall, x 25mm thick.

As far as the tech goes, both the frame and SSO2 bearing are largely the same as in the previous A-series fans; however, the real magic lies in the fan blades. Rather than using a simple plastic dyed in Noctua’s beautiful brown, Rascom and Kolink birthed a fan blade assembly that’s made from Sterrox LCP (Liquid Crystal Polymer). This is a fundamentally different material from anything previously used in PC fans, by pretty much anyone, with the benefit of having higher tensile strength.

Noctua’s goal with the NF-A12x25 was to create a fan that produced shockingly high static pressure, despite the 25mm thickness, but also functioned great as an unrestricted airflow generator. To achieve this, it needed fan blades that were swept forward quite aggressively, really ‘scooping’ the air and drawing it in — in an almost turbine-like fashion. Except, well, they only had 25mm to work with.

Sweeping the blades forward like this came with a problem — the hub end of the blades was quite narrow, and once they were at speed scooping air, ordinary plastic would bend backwards, effectively making the blades stick out further from the hub. Think of those merry-go-round swings, except this one has a frame immediately around it.

What’s more, the blade tip to frame clearance is just a minuscule 0.5mm. This was to ensure no air could leak back through the gap, enabling maximum static pressure. This is where ordinary plastic wasn’t going to cut it anymore, either. At heavy loads, it would just expand under the pressure of all the air it’s scooping, and hit the frame.

That’s where Sterrox LCP came in to save the day with its high tensile strength, which Dellinger says was a breakthrough, especially at scale.

“We really had to step up our game to be able to mass-produce this ambitious design with its ultra-tight 0.5mm tip clearance. In the end, we were very confident with the design based on our simulations, accelerated long-term tests and the measurement data from QC, but you can never be 100% certain that there won’t be any issues until you put the product out in the wild. So the fact that by now, we have lots of these fans running for around eight years without any problems is a nice testament to the quality of our prediction models.”

2021: Passive Cooling & a black NF-A12x25

The fact that the NF-A12x25 only launched in Noctua's signature brown and beige is no surprise. What might come as a surprise is that it took three years for Noctua to release a black version.

Why? Because changing the dye in the plastic changes how the molding process interacts with the material, and how the plastic behaves, as Dillinger says:

“It’s challenging no matter the color, or, to put it in a different way, every color is a new challenge, because every color behaves slightly differently in the injection molding process. This means that we must create new injection molding tools and fine-tune them as well as the process parameters for any new color."

But, figuring out the specifics of how color pigments interact is only one part of the equation, as Noctua has to also invest in extra tooling while refining existing designs for the original color.

"The validation process for each new tooling is a long and cumbersome process with accelerated lifetime tests that take three months to run and a lot of extra time to prepare and analyze. In a best-case scenario, we can complete tooling creation and validation in around half a year. Since we can only kick the tooling for the black version off once the regular version is in mass production, the black versions always come a bit later.”

“In [the] case of the NF-A12x25, it took much longer to get the black version out, but that was less due to technical difficulties than due to production volume and supply chain limitations. We were in the midst of the pandemic, so we were severely struggling to produce and supply sufficient volumes of our existing SKUs. Adding another high-volume SKU to your portfolio is the last thing you would want to do in a situation like this!”

In 2021, Noctua also introduced the NH-P1 heatsink — the brand’s first passively-cooled CPU heatsink.

2024: The G2 gear arrives

Six years later, Noctua unveiled the NF-A12x25 G2. This second-generation NF-A series fan features an all-new blade design, though it’s otherwise built on the same principles with the 0.5mm tip clearance and the use of the exotic Sterrox LCP material.

The motor’s control mechanism has also been updated with a feature called SupraTorque, whose job it is to maintain a set RPM at specific PWM duty cycles. Basically, it will keep spinning at, let’s say, 800 RPM at 35% duty, whether it’s in a free-flow scenario or strapped to a thick radiator. Most other fans would bog down a few RPM lower, but not the NF-A12x25 G2.

“I would mention the latest G2 products, [...] It’s been quite a battle to achieve another performance uplift over their predecessors, so finally accomplishing that goal after years and years of hurdles in design and manufacturing felt very special. The excellent feedback that these products have received from customers and reviewers was the icing on the cake.” Dillinger notes on the recent launch.

Such precise control over the RPM also allowed Noctua to build in another feature. You can buy the NF-A12x25 G2 in Sx2-PP two-packs, featuring a PPA-labelled fan and a PPB-labelled fan, one of which spins 25 RPM faster than the standard NF-A12x25, and one that spins 25 RPM slower.

Why? Because a consequence of the extremely precise RPM control, Noctua found that the fans started singing in harmony when grouped to the same fan header using a splitter.

In addition to the G2 fans, Noctua also unveiled the NH-D15 G2, packing two round-frame 150mm G2-design spinners. Thanks to these incredibly capable spinners, Noctua was able to reduce the fin spacing from 1.9 to 1.6 mm between fins, which effectively meant the heatsink has 20% more fin surface over the previous generation D15. The heatpipe count also increased from six to eight.

Partnerships upon partnerships

If there’s one thing that’s clear about Rascom, it’s that it knows who is good at what. Noctua itself is a partnership between Rascom and Kolink, but Rascom’s relationship with partnerships goes deeper than that. For example, Noctua isn’t in the market for designing a case — it has instead turned to Antec, and a Noctua x Antec edition Flux Pro chassis is currently in development.

Also coming up is Noctua’s first-ever liquid cooler. Unpopular it may be, but Noctua has teamed up with Asetek, and with some luck, we’ll see the first Noctua all-in-one liquid cooler next year.

Meanwhile, in 2024, Noctua teamed up with Seasonic to bestow the Prime TX-1600 upon the world, granting us 1600 watts of Noctua-cooled, Seasonic, 80+ Titanium goodness. Curiously, it doesn’t feature a G2 fan, but rather the original NF-A12x25.

In 2021, Noctua formed a partnership with Asus to deliver co-branded graphics cards. Since then, the pair has released Noctua-flavored GPUs like the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, RTX 4080, RTX 4080 Super, and just a few months ago, the RTX 5080.

Noctua's dabbled in partnerships since 2008, where the company teamed up with LaCie, which integrated the NF-P12 to reduce noise levels of the 4-5 bay storage solutions.

Noctua's CEO reflects on 20-years of operation

Now that we're up to speed with the history of Noctua and its products, we had the opportunity to get a short statement from Rascom CEO Roland Mossig himself on the 20th anniversary of the partnership.

“It’s been a long and exciting ride since the early 2000’s when swapping a cooler’s 60mm fan for an 80mm one was enough to achieve a breakthrough improvement in performance-to-noise efficiency. Today, we have different means that enable us to keep pushing the envelope in quiet cooling technology, but it’s still the same annoyance with noisy environments that fuels our passion to make things quieter.”

With that, here's to 20 more years of beige and brown coolers. Who knows, we might even see more colorways one day. Just be prepared for a long wait.

At Computex earlier this year, Noctua showed off its first-ever AIO (all-in-one) liquid cooler intended for the mainstream market. Originally, the show floor specs stated the cooler would launch in the first quarter of 2026, but an updated roadmap on Noctua's website now tells us that release is planned for Q2 2026.

The yet-to-be-named liquid cooler from Noctua is based on Asetek's flagship G8 V2 pump instead of an in-house solution. In lieu of that, the company has decided to focus on maximizing the performance possible from Asetek's design by developing its own 3-layer sound dampening system. According to Noctua, there's a "tuned-mass damper effect" to keep the whole operation quiet.

Moreover, Noctua is using its SecuFirm+ mounting system for the cooler so it's compatible with exisitng brackets while promising future socket support. If you already own one of their air coolers, it will make the installation that much easier. The AIO will be offered in three sizes: 240 mm, 360 mm, and 420 mm, covering all bases and ensuring everyone can throw a bit of beige in their systems.

Speaking of which, to match the cooler will be NF-A14x25 G2 (140mm) or NF-A12x25 G2 (120mm) fans that offer class-leading performance while keeping the decibels low. There's also an option for an extra 80 mm auxilary fan that can cool surrounding components like motherboard VRMs, M.2 SSDs, and RAM sticks.

The RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is one of the most overbuilt RTX 50 series graphics cards on the market, featuring three NF-A12x25 G2 fans installed above a massive heatsink boasting 11 heatpipes. Such a design would logically have been perfect for an RTX 5090 model, and Noctua thinks so as well — too bad Nvidia is standing in the way.

Kitguru talked with Noctua's Jakob Dellinger, who divulged that Nvidia does not have enough GB202 chip production "at the moment" to build an RTX 5090 Noctua Edition graphics card. This problem is likely why Noctua has never built an xx90-series RTX graphics card so far. The only graphics cards it has built with Asus are cards based on the RTX 5080, RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4080, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070.

Asus and Noctua have finally launched their fifth collaborative graphics card, the GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua Edition, originally teased at Computex 2025. Following prior models based on the RTX 30 and 40 series, this new iteration introduces a significant redesign that includes the first-ever triple 120x25mm fan setup on a gaming GPU, employing Noctua’s next-generation NF-A12x25 G2 fans alongside a thoroughly custom-engineered heatsink.

The cooling system integrates an extensive vapor chamber with eleven heatpipes—seven 8 mm and four 6 mm, a notable increase from previous Noctua Editions, which typically featured fewer heatpipes and smaller heatsinks. This design aims to balance efficient thermal dissipation with minimized acoustic output. Our review of the Noctua Editiorn RTX 3080 already praised the design from back then, so we expect this to be even better. Check out the official introduction video, which goes over every aspect of the card in detail:

Noctua’s new NF-A12x25 G2 fans incorporate advanced aerodynamic features such as Progressive Bend impellers and SupraTorque motors designed to maintain high airflow and static pressure in demanding environments like large heatsinks. The fans are deliberately offset in rotational speed—arranged in an A-B-A sequence with speed variations of roughly ±50 RPM—to mitigate acoustic phenomena like beat frequencies and periodic vibrations.

Asus’ internal testing at a 360W power target using FurMark stress tests reportedly showed the Noctua Edition achieved GPU temperatures of approximately 57°C and VRAM temperatures near 52°C, with noise levels measured at 21.4 dB(A). These figures would represent a substantial noise reduction—about 14.5 dB(A) less—compared to Asus’s own ROG Astral RTX 5080 variant, while maintaining similar or lower operating temperatures. When fan speeds were artificially limited to 500 RPM, the Noctua Edition remained the quietest option tested and maintained temperatures well below the GPU’s thermal limits.

The card supports Asus' 0dB semi-passive fan control, which shuts off the fans entirely under 50°C GPU temperature, allowing for silent operation during light workloads. Additionally, there's a dual BIOS switch that enables users to toggle between a quieter fan curve or a performance mode emphasizing the lowest possible temperatures. Asus' GPU Tweak III software will allow further customization of fan curves and undervolting to fine-tune noise and thermal performance.

Physically, the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is considerably larger than standard models, extending 385 mm in length and occupying nearly four slots due to the thick triple-fan assembly and enlarged heatsink. This size makes it incompatible with many mid-tower cases and necessitates careful system planning.

Clock speeds on the Noctua Edition are set with a boost clock of 2700 MHz, modestly above the Founders Edition’s 2600 MHz but below some factory-overclocked variants, reflecting Asus' apparent focus on thermals and acoustics over maximum out-of-the-box frequencies. The card also features phase-change thermal pads aimed at improved longevity and consistent thermal performance, addressing issues like pump-out and dry-out associated with traditional thermal pastes.

Noctua’s next-generation NF-A12x25 G2 120mm fans are finally available for purchase. The latest high-performance fans are available on Amazon for $34.90 each or $64.90 for a twin pack. A follow-up to the original NF-A12x25 fans, which launched back in 2018, the second-generation model made its first appearance at this year’s Computex trade expo as part of a collaboration with Asus. The two companies jointly launched the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition GPU, which featured three NF-A12x25 G2 fans.

The new NF-A12x25 G2 is essentially a smaller version of the NF-A14x25 G2 140mm fans, which debuted last year. Noctua continues to use its patented Sterrox liquid-crystal polymer (LCP) for the fan construction, which is said to offer high tensile strength and low thermal expansion characteristics compared to traditional thermoplastics. Apart from the redesigned fan blades, the fan hub has also been optimized with a special pattern allowing the G2 to offer better airflow performance compared to the original NF-A12x25.

The fan is available in three versions: a standard PWM model with speeds of up to 1800 RPM, an ultra-quiet LS-PWM model that tops out at 1100 RPM, and an Sx2-PP set that includes two fans. The two fans in the set are intentionally offset by 50 RPM, a design choice that is said to improve push-pull performance and help reduce acoustic interference when multiple fans operate side by side.

According to the company, the new NF-A12x25 G2 fans can be used in a range of scenarios, including general case ventilation and more demanding tasks, such as cooling heatsinks or water cooling radiators. In internal testing, Noctua reports that the G2 model performed 3.5°C better than the original NF-A12x25 at a 200W heat load on a 120x49 mm radiator, with both fans operating at similar noise levels. When tested with the NH-U12A heatsink under the same thermal load, the G2 offered a modest improvement of about 1°C under identical acoustic conditions.

Noctua unveiled its pumpless thermosiphon CPU cooler project at Computex last year. Now, the company is back at the Taipei-based tradeshow, showcasing updates to the cooler prototype.

The science hasn't changed. The device is still using two-phase cooling that causes the liquid to boil and vaporize at the CPU heat spreader, go up to the radiator, and then condense back into cool liquid to start the process again.

This creates a cooling system with no moving parts or pump noise, except for the spinning fans.

The big difference now is that the condenser is a 360 mm radiator, rather than the 240 mm option we saw last year. The radiation has to be mounted in the top exhaust of a case, as it depends on gravity for the system to work properly.

The evaporator, which comes in contact with the CPU's heat spreader, has been further engineered to reduce hot spots and to guide condensed liquids back to the hottest parts of the CPU.

The system features flexible tubing, which the company says should allow for easy installation and "broad compatibility." Flexible tubing is already fairly common in off-the-shelf all-in-one coolers, though these certainly look a bit more rubberized than most.

Noctua appears to be attempting to break out of its PC DIY niche with a recently penned blog post about efficient home heating. In an article dubbed What is active radiator ventilation and why you should consider it? the Austrian thermal specialist claims that dotting its fans around your home (mostly on or around heat sources) is "a win-win for you and the environment." As it isn't April 1, the idea is worth a closer look, but the images it shares in the blog make us pine for the long-delayed chromax.white fan series.

Heating a home through winter is expensive. Moreover, much of Europe got used to cheap Russian gas in the years leading up to the Ukraine war. The onset of that war would have fast yet significant impacts on fossil fuel pricing, particularly gas used to heat homes and fire power stations. Fuel price pain has meant homeowners are turning down the thermostat a little more and/or seeking heating efficiencies from tech like heat pumps, better insulation, and other measures.

Noctua thinks that with the increase in popularity of heat pumps, which deliver water at generally lower temperatures, active convection has a more prominent role to play. It explains that radiators running at cooler temperatures can warm up a room more quickly with the help of active ventilation (like fans). The heat source powering your radiators will also "work less to maintain desired temperatures, cycling less frequently or at lower intensity," it says.

Active fans are a solution to common problems in modern, well-insulated homes. Fans pushing air can help minimize areas with poor airflow, which might be prone to cold spots, stagnant air, moisture buildup, or mold growth. Conversely, active ventilation is touted in old homes as a compensator for heat loss through windows and poorly insulated walls.

Naturally, Noctua touts its fans as a high-quality, quiet solution to your home heating efficiency problems. "For a typical radiator setup using 2-3 fans, the cost ranges from €50 to €105, depending on the model," it says. Adding gaskets, fan controllers, cabling, and power could up the cost per radiator to nearly €200 ($208), though, it admits.

To convince readers to invest in Noctua fans and accessories, the firm touts "an estimated 5-10% reduction in heating costs" from adding active fans to home heaters. Depending on the scale of your current heating bill, this could mean a pretty quick payback of the initial investment—if Noctua's figures are accurate.

As mentioned in the intro, though, Noctua's difficulties in developing white fans to which it is willing to put its name may hinder its acceptance throughout the home. Even if they blended into the décor a bit more, some would consider brown or black PC fans dotted around the house to look like electronic clutter, incongruous, or messy.

This home heating efficiency post from Noctua appears to have been inspired by a scientific research paper on forced convection published last year.

Noctua developed a custom 120mm fan grill for the Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition built for silence, and now anyone can get it for free. The company posted on its X (formerly Twitter) account that it’s sharing the high-efficiency fan grill on Printables, allowing anyone with a 3D printer or laser cutter to make one of their own.

According to Noctua, the fan grill “ensures smooth pressure gradients as the fan blades pass the radial struts,” which results in higher airflow and a noise reduction of about 2dB(A) versus the stock power supply grill found on the Seasonic power supply.

The high-efficiency Noctua 120mm fan grill, as the company calls it on the 3D model database, is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). That means you can remix it and share it anywhere you like if you attribute its original creator, do it for non-commercial purposes, and your creation should have the same license as the original (i.e., CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

This isn’t the first thing that Noctua and Seasonic have for free in recent weeks. The two collaborated on a keychain merch giveaway that’s up for grabs for users who commented on the Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition post on the Chinese video-sharing site BiliBili. These events seem to celebrate the successful launch of the PSU, an improvement of Seasonic’s flagship power supply. This ultra-quiet version retains the exact excellent specifications and performance but reduces the noise generated by replacing its cooling fan with Noctua’s 120mm NF-A12x25 fan and this unique fan grill.

Seasonic and Noctua might also have no problems releasing this fan grill for free, especially with the price that this high-performance PSU demands. The vanilla Seasonic Prime TX-1600 has a retail price of $539.99 on Amazon, while you have to pay a $30 premium to get the Noctua Edition. Nevertheless, you’re getting a good power supply for the price, with the TX-1600 being one of our recommended options in our best PSUs of 2024 list. So, if you need that much power and have grown tired of the cacophony of multiple noisy fans, this ultra-quiet PSU might just be exactly what you need for a quieter workspace.

Noctua has also shared several other 3D designs you can download, like the NV-AA1-12 Airflow Amplifier, which will turn your 120mm Noctua fan into the $100 NV-FS1 desk fa (without the stand), the NA-FD1 Fan Duct, designed to improve the performance of Noctua fans with SFF cases that has a significant gap, and the NA-FMA1 120mm/140mm Adaptor for Noctua 120mm fans. Aside from its excellent fan designs (and controversial color choices), this tendency to share some of its designs for free is one of the reasons why Noctua is loved by its fans love Noctua.

After the big launch of Seasonic's ultra-quiet 1,600W flagship PSU with Noctua cooling last week, the tech twosome is following up with some less obvious new products. Seasonic's Bilibili (Chinese) social media channel announced a new collaborative venture into the promotional keychain business today. The renowned PC power supply maker teased followers that keychains modeled on a Noctua Fan and Seasonic Power Dog would be available to a few customers to complete various social media tasks.

This week, eager participants will get a chance to grab Noctua keychains by commenting on a Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition post. The post seems pretty popular with PC aficionados and tech trinket collectors, attracting 170 comments at the time of writing. Many offered up jokes about the silence of the fan-based keychain.

The Noctua keychain delivers on the firm's unmistakable branding, with a tiny cute fan hewn from the firm's signature coffee and cream plastics. We wonder if it also works as a fidget spinner. Noctua China said it will also give away these keychains starting next week.

It is doubtful we will see similar promo trinket giveaways in the West. However, for those of you feeling pangs of Noctua keychain envy right now, we note that the cooling specialist sells eminently pocketable 40mm fans on Amazon, like the Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX Premium Quiet Fan at $13.95. Attaching your keychain hardware to one of the fan's corners would be a cinch. Moreover, it would be a working spare that you always carry around with your keys.

Seasonic's Power Dog is also very cute. We only see this Seasonic branded trinket's front and one side in the official social media posts. Its bulk suggests it might be more than an inert lump of stylized plastic. However, more digging through Chinese social media revealed that the dog doesn't feature any ports (so it's not a charger or power bank), and its tail ends with a plastic PCIe 5.0 connector replica. Seasonic also recently sold a mid-autumn festival Power Dog Lego model as a promotional gift.

At Computex earlier this year, we witnessed an exciting collaboration between cooling specialists Noctua and renowned power supply manufacturer Seasonic. The result was the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition, a flagship PSU designed to deliver unparalleled performance alongside optimized silent operation. True to their promise, this one-of-a-kind desktop PC power supply is now available for purchase.

As a quick refresher, the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition is a customized version of the original Prime TX-1600 with Noctua's cooling optimizations. It replaces the original 135mm Hong Hua fan with Noctua’s 120mm NF-A12x25, which spins up to 2,000 RPM and reduces noise by up to 10 dB(A). The PSU retains semi-passive fan control, keeping the fan off at loads below 50% under 25°C. Fully modular and equipped with Noctua-themed braided cables, it minimizes clutter but may polarize users with its distinctive design.

The PSU also maintains certifications such as 80 Plus Titanium and Cybenetics Titanium for efficiency, and Cybenetics Lambda A for low noise levels. With Noctua’s cooling expertise, the unit features a custom brown fan grill, optimizing airflow while minimizing visual impact in most PC cases.

This PSU delivers up to 1,600W, including 133.3A on the +12V rail, making it suitable for multi-GPU setups. While technologies like Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire have declined, the power supply is ideal for professionals or enthusiasts using multiple GPUs for tasks like AI workloads. It complies with ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 standards, featuring the latest 12V-2x6 connectors to support Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs with reduced risk of connector overheating. By the looks of it, the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition should be more than enough to tame the upcoming Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs.

As per Noctua, the suggested retail price is $569 and €499, and the PSU is available for purchase as of today via Noctua’s official Amazon webpage. Notably, if you do end up ordering one, the earliest shipment date one can expect in the US is around the second week of January 2025. This is possibly to maintain buzz until CES 2025 when Nvidia is going to announce at least two new GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs - the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080.

Noctua has finally resolved "Rattlegate," which affected its brand-new NH-D15 G2 flagship air coolers. ComputerBase reports that the Austrian cooling manufacturer has rectified the cooler's vibration problems at the factory, eliminating the issue on new production models.

Noctua told ComputerBase that the interlocking mechanism between the slats has been improved. Customers who neglected to refund their rattling NH-D15 G2 will be offered this same fix, featuring "free stainless steel covers that can be attached to the sides of the cooling fins."

This is fantastic news for Noctua owners. The NH-D15 G2 is one of the most highly-anticipated air coolers of the year, finally coming out earlier this year after a series of lengthy delays. Unfortunately, the G2's launch did not come without issues. Customer complaints sprung up regarding a ratting noise plaguing some of the first G2 units during operation, confirming a minor defect in its design that managed to stay hidden during testing.

The problem surrounded two of the top fins in the heatsink, where the interlocking mechanism on the top fin could loosen during shipping, causing a vibration sound to occur while the cooler was in operation. When this problem was first discovered, Noctua issued a temporary workaround to customers, recommending either a small piece of tape be attached to the side of the fins where they interlock or place a small plastic tab or foam piece with 1.8mm thickness between the top fin and second fin to stop the cooler from rattling.

Thankfully, the issue is now fully fixed. ComputerBase reports that customers of existing NH-D15 G2 coolers will be granted three options to deal with the problem. One is to use the aforementioned panels free of charge. Two is to exchange their cooler for a model from the adapted series. The third option is to request a full refund.

It remains unclear if existing NH-D15 G2 inventory will be recalled to fix the issue. Regardless, customers will be offered multiple methods to rectify the issue, whether they already have the cooler or buy a new unit that still has the defect.

Some of EK Water Block’s top employees are now leaving the company, with Head of Product Marketing Attila Gobor reportedly joining Noctua and Lead Product Designer Joe Robey moving to Thermal Grizzly as its Head of Mechanical R&D. This news, as reported by OC3D, is the latest blow in a series of setbacks that the water-cooling giant is experiencing.

The issue first came to light in April of this year when reports surfaced that EKWB had left its employees and suppliers unpaid for four months. It was soon confirmed by its CEO and founder, Edvard König, who promised to rectify problems and right the EKWB ship. All this happened nearly two years after the company cut its workforce by 25% percent, significantly as global sales of water-cooling solutions dropped precariously.

However, even after stepping back into the reins of leadership, it seems that EKWB is still not on track to profitability. The problem of EKWB’s workforce’s unpaid salaries has become so prevalent that the Slovenian labor authorities have stepped in and started investigating the company.

Although the company has not declared bankruptcy, we’re unsure how long it can survive. This latest departure of top talents could mean they already see the company as a lost cause and are jumping ship to save themselves. OC3D has allegedly talked to several industry insiders to see if there is a chance that a competitor could acquire the company. However, most responses say that EKWB has too much debt and that any acquisition would not make financial sense.

Unless EKWB can make a drastic change or someone makes an offer on the company, we’re afraid it might not last much longer. This would be a significant blow to the water-cooling industry, especially as EKWB is one of the few companies that has created premium water-cooling solutions for extreme enthusiasts. Nevertheless, Robey’s move to Thermal Grizzly might mean it plans to launch products that could compete with or even replace EKWB’s cooling solutions.

We still hope that EKWB can recover and continue making water-cooling products that will allow enthusiasts to push their chips to the limit. As our chips get faster (and hotter), we could surely use EKWB’s expertise to help us keep their temperatures down.

Noctua is legendary in the PC cooling industry, often considered the “gold standard,” even if its color of choice is traditionally brown. The company’s products are known for their high-quality designs, with attention to detail. For this reason, the product we’re looking at today – Noctua’s NH-D15 G2 – was delayed many times as Noctua worked on perfecting the new fans included with this cooler. Noctua is also known for its best-in-class customer support – something I can personally attest to, having utilized its warranty service in the past, long before I ever published my first review. 

The NH-D15 raised the bar for air coolers when it was originally released. Can its successor do the same, and make our list of best air coolers? The benchmarks will tell, but first, we’ll look at the unit's specifications and features.

Cooler specifications

Packing and included contents 

The NH-D15 G2’s packaging has improved compared to the original NH-D15, featuring a more compact box.

Opening the main box first reveals the accessories box included inside.

The cooler and fans are located directly below.

Included with the cooler are the following:

• Two NF-A14x25r G2 PWM 140mm fans
• Low-noise adapter
• NT-H2 Thermal Paste
• Cleaning wipes
• Thermal paste guard for AM5 systems
• Shim washers for LGA 1700 systems
• Torx T20 screwdriver
• Noctua metal case-badge
• Dual-tower heatsink

Differences between the NH-D15 and NH-D15 G2

▶ More heatpipes, larger contact base

Noctua’s NH-D15 G2 has two additional copper heatpipes compared to the original NH-D15, going from six to eight, and it also features a larger CPU contact plate.

▶ Included thermal paste guard for AM5 systems

Noctua includes a thermal paste guard for AM5 systems, which can be useful if the sight of thermal paste on the side crevices of the CPU bothers you.

▶ Shim washers for LGA 1700 systems

Noctua also includes shim washers for LGA 1700 systems, which can be useful if you’re not already using an LGA 1700 contact frame.

▶ NT-H2 Thermal Paste and cleaning wipes

Also included with the cooler is a small tube of Noctua’s high-quality NT-H2 thermal paste and cleaning wipes to remove any existing thermal paste from the CPU.

▶ 3 versions of the NH-D15 G2 to best suite your needs

There are three variants of the Noctua NH-D15 G2 available for purchase. But the only difference between them is how the CPU contact plate is shaped. The standard version is designed for folks using washer shims or contact frames for Intel CPUs and on AMD CPUs if offset mounting is used.

The HBC (High Base Convexity) version of this cooler is designed for CPUs that have suffered warping from LGA 1700 socket bending. Finally, the LBC (Low Base Convexity) variant of this cooler is designed for relatively flat CPUS, such as AM4 or LGA2011.

What I don’t like about the Noctua’s NH-D15 G2

▶ Torx T20 screws and screwdriver

Noctua now uses Torx T20 screws instead of traditional Phillips screws. There are advantages to using a Torx screw, but I’m not convinced it is needed for a consumer CPU cooler.

To the company’s credit, Noctua does include a Torx T20 screwdriver with the cooler. But make sure to store it in a place where you won’t lose it, otherwise you’ll have to purchase another if you ever need to remove the NH-D15 G2.

▶ Rattlegate - NF-A14x25r G2 fans

There’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink or radiator. The bundled fans have a significant impact on cooling and noise levels, as well as how the cooler looks in your case. The NH-D15 G2 was delayed many times as the company’s new fans, NF-A14x25r G2, were being developed. The new fans incorporate nine fan blades instead of seven, have stronger curves on the blades, and feature a frame made with the company’s Sterrox liquid-crystal polymer.

Unfortunately, some of the initial batch of these units suffered from production issues. This has resulted in what parts of internet have dubbed “Rattlegate”. In theory, the new fans of the G2 should operate at slightly lower noise levels than the previous generation. However, the unit I tested had noise levels slightly higher than the original NH-D15 G2. Another issue I observed is that noise levels were not fully consistent. When I recorded the maximum noise levels of the NH-D15 G2, the measurements would vary between 44.2 and 44.6 dBA.

With any other manufacturer, I would have sent the unit back to investigate for defects and request a replacement. However, I hold Noctua to a much higher standard of quality than I do other manufacturers – partly because this is the only air cooler in the world (to my knowledge) that costs a whopping $150 USD! For this reason, I’ve tested this unit with the included fans, though I suspect there is a defect in their quality.

▶ High Price

Noctua’s NH-D15 features a price higher than any other air cooler on the market – for its price of $150 USD, you could buy three or four similarly strong air coolers from Thermalright.

Testing Methodology, and how my testing differs from the competition

Since my review of Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III, I’ve been placing a stronger emphasis on testing methodology and what I feel are poor testing methods because I feel that the bar for cooler reviews on the market is rather low.

■ Poor Ambient Temperature Control

One of the biggest factors that can influence the results of a cooler is the ambient temperature. While most of the best cooling reviewers control this factor, I’ve seen some sites that list a variance in ambient temperature of up to 4C (7.2F). That results in a huge margin of error for test results, and it’s why I strictly regulate the ambient temperature while testing to 23 degrees Celsius.

■ Open Bench Testing

Some reviewers test CPU Coolers on an open test bench, the idea being to remove any variables other than the cooler. The problem with this type of testing is that it doesn’t actually represent the sort of performance you’ll see in traditional use cases. 

Due to the enclosed nature of a case, the ambient temperature within will be higher than that outside – increasing the difficulty of cooling a CPU. By testing outside of a case, you’re making it a lot easier for the cooler to do its job – making weak coolers look better than they really are. 

■ Thermal Plate Testing

Some test CPU coolers using a thermal plate, instead of using a CPU. This suffers from all the drawbacks of open bench testing, but also doesn’t effectively emulate the heat from a CPU. A thermal plate generally evenly distributes heat, with a low overall thermal density. 

CPUs, on the other hand, have most of their heat generated in concentrated hotspots. This is much more difficult to cool. The best way to explain the difference is this: A thermal plate is like a cigarette lighter. You can take that flame and put it against your hand for a quick moment and while uncomfortable – you won’t be hurt seriously. But a CPU is like a concentrated butane torch lighter that produces a blue flame – if that touches your skin at all, you’re in for a painful time. 

■ Using old CPUs to test coolers

Using an older generation CPU is certainly better than using a thermal plate, but it might not accurately represent the performance of a cooler on a more modern platform. The reason is the same: thermal density. Due to a combination of lower clock speeds and larger manufacturing processes, older CPUs aren’t quite as difficult to cool as modern Intel “Raptor Lake” and AMD Ryzen 7000 and 9000 series CPUs. 

■ CPU-only testing

Testing with CPU-only loads provides good and useful information, but it doesn’t paint a complete picture of how a cooler will perform. Many workloads, and especially gaming, will stress both the CPU and GPU. To test how well a CPU’s cooler will perform in these situations, I’ve added two tests – one with a light CPU and one with a moderate CPU load, both while running a full load on the GPU.

Testing configuration – Intel LGA1700 platform

There are many factors other than the CPU cooler that can influence your cooling performance, including the case you use and the fans installed in it. A system's motherboard can also influence this, especially if it suffers from bending, which results in poor cooler contact with the CPU. 

In order to prevent bending from impacting our cooling results, we’ve installed Thermalright’s LGA 1700 contact frame into our testing rig. If your motherboard is affected by bending, your thermal results will be worse than those shown below. Not all motherboards are affected equally by this issue. I tested Raptor Lake CPUs in two motherboards. And while one of them showed significant thermal improvements after installing Thermalright’s LGA1700 contact frame, the other motherboard showed no difference in temperatures whatsoever! Check out our review of the contact frame for more information.

LGA 1700 Installation

The installation of the cooler is largely unchanged from previous Noctua products, the main difference being the use of Torx screws instead of traditional Phillips screws.

1. Place the CPU bracket against the rear of the motherboard. Place the blue standoffs on the front side of the motherboard.

2. The next step is to place the mounting bars on top of the blue standoffs and secure them with the included screws.

3. Next, apply the included thermal paste to the top of your CPU. If you’re not sure how to do this, we have a guide you can read for more details.

4. Press the dual tower heatsink against the mounting bars, and secure it using the included screwdriver.

5. Attach the fans using the included fan clips.

6. Finally, connect the fans to the included PWM splitter cable and connect the splitter to your motherboard.

CPU Thermal results without power limits

Without power limits enforced on Intel’s i7-14700K, the CPU will hit its peak temperature (TJ Max) and thermally throttle with even the strongest of air coolers. When the CPU reaches its peak temperature, I’ve measured the CPU package power to determine the maximum wattage cooled to best compare their performance.

The general exception to this comes with the strongest AIOs on the market, which can keep Intel’s i7-14700K under TJ Max. This is no small task as many liquid coolers, including Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III 360, fail this test and as a result the CPU will throttle to a certain extent.

Noctua’s NH-D15 G2 does well here, cooling an average of 240W during the course of testing. That’s a notable improvement of 10W cooling capacity compared to the original NH-D15.

When I tested the noise levels of the cooler, there was a bit of variance. While the chart above lists 44.6 dBA, it would be more accurate to say that it oscillated between 44.2 and 44.6 dBA. 

Observant readers may notice that the chart starts at 35dBA, and might be worried that this starting point may cause the results to be deceptive. There are a few reasons that this is not something to worry about. First, noise level measurements are logarithmic. A person with typical hearing will perceive a doubling of noise for every 10 dBA increase, but the impact can vary from person to person. 

Subjectively, I feel that a 5dBA increase feels like twice as loud – but I should add the disclaimer that I suffer from conditions that can make my ears more sensitive than others. 35dBA was chosen as the “zero” because it is the lowest level my noise meter can accurately measure. 

To give you a better idea of how dBA readings correspond to noise levels in real life, I invite you to watch the video linked below. One note though: The author’s comparison for a refrigerator of 43 dB is based on older, louder models. Newer refrigerators may not operate nearly as loudly (depending on the model) - I recently purchased a Frigidaire refrigerator which has such a low noise level, I wasn’t sure it was actually operating when I first turned it on!

Thermal results with noise normalized to 38.9 dBA

Finding the right balance between fan noise levels and cooling performance is important. While running fans at full speed can improve cooling capacity to some extent, the benefits are limited and many users prefer a quieter system. With this noise-normalized test, I’ve set noise levels to 38.9 dba. This level of noise is a low volume level, but slightly audible to most people.

Both Noctua’s NH-G2 and G1 had somewhat underwhelming noise-normalized results, trailing Thermalright’s soon-to-be-released Peerless Assassin 140 by 13-16W.

165W CPU + 275W GPU results

I’ve recently updated my testing methodology to better represent the scenarios a user might actually encounter in real-life use. The first of these new tests is designed to emulate a CPU-intensive game with a full GPU load. In this test, there was a fairly significant 2C improvement compared to the original NH-D15.

Because the CPU averages 79C during the course of testing, the noise of the fans is no different than with a full workload, because my motherboard’s fan curve engages full fan speeds at 80C, and a 1C difference doesn’t make any appreciable noise drop. This is a scenario where, in theory, a quality AIO should run much quieter than an air cooler. 

Observant readers may notice a change in how our temperatures were reported. Previously I reported temperatures in “Delta over Ambient,” which is often considered a more accurate and scientific way to report thermal results.

However, I’ve found reporting temperatures in this manner often confuses some readers. I’ve had many comments wondering why the temperatures a user experienced with a particular product were 20 degrees C or more higher compared to what was reported in our charts, and as a result had to explain what delta over ambient means to them.  

I feel that reporting temperatures in delta over ambient temperature is most important when there is significant variance in the base temperature. But because I strictly regulate the ambient temperature, I don’t feel that it is necessary to report temperatures in delta over ambient form - any results obtained that are outside of an ambient temperature of 22.7-23.3 C are considered invalid.

110W CPU + 275W GPU results

120W Cinebench results

With my previous testing methodology, I used to record the temperatures and noise measurements using a 125W CPU-only test and I would emphasize how temperatures do not matter in this scenario.

As such, outside of exceptionally good or bad thermal performance, for this section I’m only going to report noise levels – because that’s the only data that matters for this test.

Noctua’s noise level here wasn’t particularly loud, at only 40.9 dBA, but it’s louder than competitors – many coolers will run at 38.2 dBA or less in this scenario.

Conclusion

Noctua’s NH-D15 G2 is a marked improvement over the original NH-D15, with CPU temperatures up to 3C cooler compared to its predecessor. Noctua also almost certainly has the best customer support in the PC cooling industry. However, since the launch of the D15, multiple companies have released excellent air coolers that cost much less, making the high $149.95 price of Noctua’s cooler way too high to justify. Given the competition from Thermalright and others, no one should consider paying such a high price for an air cooler.

Noctua certainly took its time developing the successor to the legendary NH-D15 CPU air cooler. However, the long-awaited, highly-anticipated (and price-inflated) new Noctua NH-D15 G2 seems to be suffering from teething troubles with excess fan noise, or what some channels are eager to dub ‘Rattlegate.’

An official response to a query about NH-D15 G2 noise issues from PC enthusiast @ghost_motley starts by thanking users for their faith in Noctua’s products. Reassuringly, the company has already kick-started “a thorough analysis” of the noise issue. Noctua shares its earliest inklings of a smoking gun in this case, suggesting “the interlocking of the top fin has loosened a bit, probably in shipping.”

Noctua’s preliminary analysis is that the suspected loosened top fin can vibrate when the cooler is in action, and “may result in slight rattling sound.” Its observation is that this issue causes acoustic impacts that are “very small (<0.5dB(A)).”

In its lengthy response to the ‘Rattlegate’ issue, Noctua suggests a temporary solution, while its investigations continue. “As a temporary mitigation, we would recommend either putting a piece of tape to the side of the fins (where they interlock) or inserting a small piece of plastic or foam with ~1.8mm thickness between the top fin and second fin,” says the PC cooling specialist. Perhaps those annoyed by any rattling could A/B the two temporary solutions, to find the best one.

Noctua’s excellent PC CPU air cooling reputation has been built upon unwavering quality and performance over many years. Without its remarkable cachet, it couldn’t have gotten away with charging $150 for a tower form factor CPU air cooler in 2024. It certainly recognizes a disconnect between expectations and actual quality – even if they are truly a result of the shipping process, in this instance.

The final paragraph of the Noctua statement regarding potential noise issues with the NH-D15 G2 clearly aims shore up good customer relations. Noctua sincerely apologizes to all affected, and says it understands if anyone doesn’t want to be inconvenienced by temporary mitigations. Thus, it is issuing full refunds to NH-D15 G2 customers affected by ‘Rattlegate’ – just email the firm at support@noctua.at to set the process in motion.

Lastly, Noctua explains it isn’t beginning a product replacement program at this time, as “we cannot rule out that the issue would occur again in transit.” The investigations could result in a customized solution to the excess noise issues, or a revamped design, we shall have to wait and see.

Noctua has finally released its highly anticipated NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler. We saw the final design at Computex in early June, and today the Austrian PC cooling specialist has made the revamped NH-D15 available via its Amazon outlets. The Noctua NH-D15 G2 is listed at $149.95 in the US and €149.90 in the Euro-zone. In the US, the new product demands a premium of $40 over the original model or $30 over the chromax.black model.

The product redesign and pricing increase are justified by Noctua in its latest barrage of press materials and social media postings. Noctua’s NH-D15 G2 is claimed to use the firm’s latest technologies to refine this flagship CPU cooler from multiple angles. Probably most importantly to the end users, the result is asserted to be improved performance (quieter running) plus enhanced system compatibility with the new offset design.

One of the most important changes to the Noctua NH-D15 G2 comes due to the use of the new NF-A14x25r G2 PWM fans. These round-frame fans are also supposed to hit retail today at $$39.90 per piece. However, we didn’t see them listed on the Noctua Amazon Store at the time of writing. A double pack, for push-pull configurations, is also going to be made available as the NF-A14x25r G2 PWM Sx2-PP.

In addition to the new fans, the major changes to the Noctua NH-D15 G2 include more heatpipes, a denser fin stack, and a new offset design. The previous design sported six heatpipes, which have been increased to eight in the G2. Denser asymmetrical fin stacks are estimated to deliver 20% more surface area for convective heat dissipation. Lastly, the new offset design provides better clearance over the top PCIe x16 slot on most current motherboards. Apparently, the new-generation changes mean that the Noctua NH-D15 G2 can offer higher Turbo speeds, and will be noticeably better with extreme heatloads. Please wait for our review testing for our assessment of such claims.

If you go looking for the Noctua NH-D15 G2 you might notice two further variants that are available, at the same price. The standard Noctua NH-D15 G2 has a baseplate with medium convexity. However, it will also offer the NH-D15 G2 LBC (Low Base Convexity) and NH-D15 G2 HBC (High Base Convexity). Noctua today published a video to help you decide which may be best for your setup.

Buyers of the new Noctua NH-D15 G2 will also get a Torx-based SecuFirm2+ mounting system, screwdriver, a shot of NT-H2 thermal compound, a thermal paste guard for AM5 chips, and a set of NA-ISW1 shim-washers for improved contact on LGA1700. Noctua backs its new product with a six-year warranty.

Noctua showed off its highly anticipated next-generation NH-D15 CPU air cooler at Computex 2024. The new Noctua NH-D15 G2 is primed to claim the throne as the ultimate air cooler, but it has taken the firm a decade since the original NH-D15 succeeded the legendary NH-D14 to prepare this successor. Fundamental changes with the new NH-D15 G2 design include quieter fans, more heatpipes, a denser fin stack, and a new offset design. PC DIYers should be able to grab a new Noctua NH-D15 G2 later this month.

For a second-generation device coming a decade later, at first glance, the new NH-D15 G2 CPU air cooler doesn’t look a whole lot different from the 2014 original. It remains a dual-tower design in the coffee and cream (and silver) livery we expect. However, Noctua has quite a laundry list of changes that no doubt add up to create a more desirable G2 model.

The new selling points that Noctua wants to stress with the NH-D15 G2 are as follows:

• New fans with superior P/Q performance and speed-offset for acoustic optimisation
• Tailored fin stacks with reduced fin pitch (1.6 instead of 1.9mm), 20% more surface area
• 8 instead of 6 heatpipes
• Offset design for better PCIe clearance, 9mm less overall depth

Noctua also highlighted the inclusion of a Torx-based SecuFirm2+ mounting system (screwdriver provided) with an offset option for AM5 board users. Moreover, buyers will get a thermal paste guard for AM5 chips and a set of NA-ISW1 shim-washers for improved contact on LGA1700. A shot of NT-H2 thermal paste is also provided, which is convenient.

Interestingly, Noctua also discusses three sub-variants of the NH-D15 G2, which vary by baseplate convexity. The standard NH-D15 G2 uses a medium base convexity, like a traditional heatsink from the firm. However, it will also offer the N H-D15 G2 LBC (Low Base Convexity) and NH-D15 G2 HBC (High Base Convexity). Some slides illustrating the merits of standard, LBC, and HBC contact profiles are provided below.

The Three Degrees

While we wait for the Noctua NH-D15 G2 to become available, readers must wonder what gains they could expect from this refined and modernized air cooler. According to Noctua’s testing, following the Noctua Standardized Performance Rating (NSPR) methodology, “the NH-D15 G2 performs 3.2°C better than the original NH-D15.”

Probably more impressive is the claim that the upcoming NH-D15 G2 can handle CPUs boosting 160W higher than its direct ancestor. According to Noctua, its next-gen cooler could hold CPU temperatures at a stable 60 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes, even with a thermal load pushed past 600W.

In summary, the new NH-D15 G2 is claimed to be “easily Noctua’s best-performing model to date.” We look forward to getting one of these CPU air coolers in the labs and thoroughly testing it. Hopefully, the firm will stick to its touted ETA of June 2024.

Noctua showed off many gigantic CPU air coolers at Computex 2024. However, the new coolers for Nvidia's GH200 Grace Hopper superchip and Ampere's Altra processors are among the biggest and most interesting ones at Noctua's stand.

Since it's still in the prototype stage, Noctua doesn't yet have a name for the GH200 cooler. In the meantime, we're referring to it as the Nvidia GH200 cooling solution. GH200 comprises a Grace CPU with 72 Arm Neoverse V2 cores and a Hopper GPU so there are two components to cool. The GH200 offers flexible power tuning, allowing vendors to tweak the values between 450W and 1,000W. Therefore, air and liquid cooling are both viable cooling solutions.

In the case of Noctua's cooler, the manufacturer has bonded two customized NH-U12A heatsinks to cool the CPU and GPU, along with a sizeable proprietary base plate to cool the memory. The NH-U12A is Noctua's 5th-generation iteration from the NH-U12 series of 120mm CPU coolers. The cooler features seven heat pipes and up to two premium NF-A12 cooling fans. Due to the design, Noctua has to drop one of the fans, so the GH200 cooler only features three NF-A12. Two NH-U12A CPU coolers can cool up to 1,000W of total heat emission, complying with GH200's power requirements.

Noctua is positioning the GH200 cooler as a product for consumers who need to keep the working environment's noise level within acceptable limits. The vendor cites examples, such as local HPC applications, self-hosted open-source LLMs, or fine-tuning LLMs. The GH200 cooler will be available in the fourth quarter of the year. Pricing is unknown as of now, and these will be B2B purchases on a per-order basis.

Ampere Altra processors are becoming more popular, so it's understandable that cooling vendors are releasing products for them. Noctua has released the NH-U14S AMP-4926 and NH-D9 AMP-4926 4U coolers for Ampere Altra processors. These new coolers are based on the models Noctua previously released for Intel Xeon, AMD Ryzen Threadripper, and EPYC chips, but with some customizations. For example, the coolers feature a customized contact surface for Ampere's Altra and Altra Max chips, which can scale up to 128 cores.

The NH-U14S AMP-4926 is a single-tower 140mm cooler that borrows inspiration from the DX and TR5-SP6 family of coolers for Xeon and Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC processors, respectively. It utilizes two NF-A15 cooling fans. 

The NH-D9 AMP-4926 4U, on the other hand, has a smaller footprint. Part of the 92mm category, the cooler wields a twin-tower design with two NF-A9 PWM fans for active cooling. Both Altra coolers feature Noctua's award-winning SecuFirm2 mounting system for LGA4926 for the Altra coolers, so installation should be easy and quick. They also come with pre-applied NT-H2 thermal paste.

The NH-U14S AMP-4926 retails for $139.90, and the NH-D9 AMP-4926 4U costs $129.90.

Noctua is a brand known for its air coolers, but it looks like the German cooling manufacturer is finally dipping its toe into alternative cooling solutions. Noctua showed off a prototype of an AIO-esque liquid cooler at Computex, built in collaboration with Calyos, that uses dual-phase thermosiphon cooling to dissipate heat from a CPU.

The prototype has three primary components: a heat spreader, tubes, and a radiator — in this case it is also known as a condenser — all filled with evaporative coolant. Heat from the CPU causes a chemical reaction within the liquid that transforms it into a hot evaporative fluid, causing it to rise to the condenser, which then cools the vapor, turning it back into a liquid. Gravity finishes the cycle by pulling the cooled-off liquid back down to the heat spreader, which is connected to the heat-generating CPU.

This design is not new: evaporative cooling has been used extensively in air coolers for decades, ironically, which is probably why Noctua ventured onto this route in the first place. However, it is a cooling solution that has yet to be mastered in the AIO liquid cooling space. Noctua built the prototype with standard form factors in mind — if you didn't know any better, you would think it was a traditional AIO liquid cooler. The radiator is 240mm in size, connected to two sleeved tubes that lead to a heat spreader that's compatible with LGA sockets. The heat spreader appears to be using repurposed installation mounts from Noctua's air coolers.

Noctua's pumpless solution has many perks. The lack of any pump means the unit itself is completely silent (save for the fans), and the unit technically has no moving parts (aside from the fans) — the same advantages air coolers have. Another advantage is the liquid itself, which should technically make this prototype perform better than Noctua's best air coolers. The only downside is that there is potential for the cooler to leak, but that is a problem that's basically nonexistent with current AIO liquid coolers.

Noctua has not provided any performance metrics for the new cooler — but that's expected, given that this is a proof of concept more than anything. Noctua announced that its prototype thermosiphon cooler is actively in the early development stage, and the company has no launch date or pricing projections at this time.

Hopefully Noctua will go through with this cooler and not scrap it before it comes to market. We would all love to see what a Noctua liquid cooler would look like, after all. The best part is that Noctua is toying with entering the AIO liquid cooler market with a completely unique product that does not use the same cooling techniques as its competitors. The only thing we can confidently predict about this product, if it makes it to store shelves, is that it will be very pricey.

Power supply specialist Seasonic and air cooling expert Noctua exhibited the latest product of their collaborative efforts at Computex 2024. The Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition is an enhanced version of the vanilla Prime TX-1600 with Noctua's cooling optimization.

The Prime TX-1600 belongs to Seasonic's flagship Prime series that flaunts exceptional performance and quality. The 1,600W power supply has obtained certifications, including 80 Plus Titanium, Cybenetics Titanium in the efficiency area, and Cybenetics Lambda A in terms of noise level. The Noctua Edition should retain the same certifications since Noctua only provided its expertise in cooling, and it's unlikely that Seasonic has messed with anything else inside the unit. Assuming that's true, the power supply should have the exact dimensions as the original, 8.3 x 5.9 x 3.4 inches (210 x 150 x 86 mm).

Noctua has tailored an optimized fan grill for the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition, proudly sporting the brand's characteristic brown color. There are divided opinions on Noctua's color themes. But given the power supply's normal orientation, it's unlikely to be visible in your case. The plus is that the redesign will help with airflow, which is more important than the visual makeover.

The Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition has a capacity of 1,600W. That equals 133.3A on the +12V rail, enough to power a multi-GPU setup. Although Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire are pointless nowadays, the power supply will be helpful to professionals or users who want to assemble several graphics cards for AI workloads.

The regular Prime TX-1600 employs a 135mm HA13525H12SF-Z fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) cooling fan from Hong Hua. The fan, which features a seven-blade design, has a rotational speed of 2,300 RPM. In contrast, the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition leverages Noctua's NF-A12x25, a more petite 120m fan than the Hong Hua. It also spins a tad slower, achieving a maximum speed of 2,000 RPM. Noctua claims that the NF-A12x25 lowers the power supply's noise level by up to 10 dB(A). Depending on how fast the fan is spinning, the fan contributes six to eight decibels, and the fan grills around two decibels towards improvement. The Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition retains the semi-passive fan control system where the NF-A12x25 will stay off until 50% load at up to an ambient temperature of 25 degrees Celsius.

The Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition complies with the ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 standards and provides users with the new 12V-2x6 connectors so they don't have to worry about 16-pin meltdowns on Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards, such as the flagship GeForce RTX 4090. The power supply is fully modular, meaning you only connect the cables you need to reduce cable clutter. Being a Noctua Edition product, the braided cables carry the Noctua theme (black and brown), which may be a letdown for non-hardcore Noctua fans.

Seasonic will launch the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition in the fourth quarter of this year. Pricing-wise, the new model likely carries a $30 premium. The regular Primx TX-1600 retails for $599.99; therefore, the Noctua Edition should cost around $629.99. Since it's just an offshoot of the Prime TX-1600, we expect the Noctua Edition to have the same limited 12-year warranty.

PC cooling specialist Noctua has unveiled its first foray outside of the PC market. The new Noctua Home series seeks to leverage the firm’s “superior, award-winning fan technology,” in products such as desk fans and accessories that facilitate Noctua fan usage in homes, offices, and for multi-purpose ventilation. Currently, this market is "plagued by noisy, low-quality fans," asserts Noctua, and it wants to change this - but the new Home products aren't cheap. 

It is good to finally see Noctua launch its long-anticipated desk fan, the NV-FS1, which is available at $99.90. Other members of the Noctua Home range include the NV-FS2 multi-purpose device cooling fan set and a plethora of accessories like mounts, power supplies, and gaskets.

Pondering over the main attraction first, the NV-FS1 provides quiet but powerful air cooling in an angled adjustable frame. Central to the design is one of Noctua’s well-regarded fans, the award-winning NF-A12x25 PWM 120mm fan. This is fronted by an NV-AA1 airflow amplifier (available separately), and cradled by a pivoting steel mount/stand. The included NV-FM1 stand (available separately) has dampening, magnets, zip-tie slots, and screw mounting holes for flexible placing and fixing.

The final important component of the NV-FS1 desk fan is its power supply setup. When you buy the desk fan you get Noctua’s Noctua’s NV-PS1 230/115V universal power supply as well as an NV-EC4 1m extension cable. We see the NV-PS1 is currently available separately, but not the NV-EC4.

Noctua’s NV-FS2 is the other major product in the new Home range, priced at $79.90 on Amazon. The cooling firm envisions customers buying (multiples of) this product to mount to hot-running electronic devices around the home. Examples given are A/V receivers, stereo equipment, routers, game consoles, and storage solutions. Again we see Noctua leveraging its NF-A12x25 PWM 120mm fan.

Other important components of the NV-FS2 include its soft mounting pads and gaskets, as well as a fan controller. Last but not least Noctua’s NA-FG1 fan grill makes sure this product doesn’t cause hurty fingers, and the NV-PS1 power and NV-EC4 1m extension are bundled again.

As mentioned in the intro, Noctua also released a series of bits and pieces to support its Home range. As well as the components that would allow you to make up your own desk fan (except the power extension cable), there are things like fan hubs, fan sets, pads, and gaskets. These have all been chosen to help facilitate your DIY home optimization projects, big or small.

Noctua has launched the NH-L12Sx77 low-profile CPU cooler for small form factor systems. It provides better clearance with added height and two more heatpipes for better cooling. The height increase is much needed since mini-ITX motherboards have more densely packed features for expansions and VRAM heatsinks, giving less legroom or being an obstacle for certain low-profile CPU air coolers.

As said in our NH-L12S review, the pre-included fan can be installed underneath the heatsink or above it, depending on the user's preference and the case's dimensions. While it is still a low-profile CPU cooler, it may have clearance issues with some SFF builds, like the Fractal Ridge. However, Noctua says it would be preferred for cases like the Fractal Design Terra or the Louqe Raw S1. 

The NH-L12Sx77 is designed to fill the gap left by NH-L12s. Noctua uses its own performance rating formula instead of TDP, called NSPR, but its chart shows that this new CPU cooler has better cooling potential. It will be interesting to see how the NH-L12Sx77 performs with modern Intel Core i9 CPUs, as the original CPU cooler performed well with acoustics and cooling. 

Downdraft CPU coolers have been around for a long time, both in full size and low profile,  from the AMD 939 days when Thermaltake had the original Big Typhoon to the low-profile CPU coolers like the Thermalright AXP100 with a height of 55mm, including the fans. But managing to accommodate some, if not all, cases while balancing the support for the clearance of the VRM heatsinks and DIMM slots on a mini-ITX build is not a small task. The cooler's suggested retail pricing is $74.90. In comparison, the NH-L12S sells for $64.90 via Amazon.

Apart from the new cooler design and added heat pipes, Noctua includes NT-H2 thermal paste, the NF-12x15 PWM fan rated to have a max acoustical noise of 23.9 dbA, a low-noise adapter, its well-known mounting kit, a metal case badge, and a six-year warranty. 

Joining its ever-growing roster of all-black CPU coolers, the Noctua NH-D12L chromax.black has been announced in a press release and is already up for sale. 

The Noctua NH-D12L chromax.black is, of course, just a stealthier version of the original Noctua NH-D12L, which came with Noctua's signature brown fan design. But since not everyone is a fan of Noctua's signature beige-and-brown cooling fan designs, the chromax.black series exists as an alternative that should work with more builds. Even in a predominantly white PC build, the contrast of a chromax.black cooler than Noctua's default color scheme. And Noctua recently removed its white fan plans from its roadmap. 

But enough of the basics— what can you expect from the Noctua NH-D12L chromax.black? As-is, the pre-existing NH-D12L is recognized as a strong-performing contender in its niche of short-height CPU air coolers, though clearance for its 120mm fan may still be too much to ask of some Mini ITX and other SFF PC builds. Let's dig into some proper specs.

• CPU Cooler Height: 145 mm
• CPU Fan: NF-A12x25r PWM
• CPU Fan Size: 120 mm
• CPU Fan RPM: Up to 2000 RPM
• Estimated Noise Level: Up to 22.6 decibels
• Warranty: Six Years
• MSRP: $99 USD, $109.90 Euros

Overall, the Noctua NHD12-L chromax.black seems to be an interesting follow-up to the original NHD12-L, with a small $10 price bump over the original. However, when shopping for coolers at this price point, one can't help but notice as you start breaching into $80 and above that you may want to consider one of the best AIO liquid coolers instead.

However, an AIO may not always be ideal, particularly if your SFF or slim case of choice doesn't happen to have the free fan slot(s) you need to make the most of it. And finally, performance-wise, reviews suggest that the original Noctua NH-D12L performs on par with much larger CPU coolers as well, which means it should outperform most 120 mm AIOs.

Sycom has updated its lineup of RTX 40 series GPUs with the RTX 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super, cooled by a massive heatsink equipped with two 120mm Noctua fans (via Notebookcheck). The company claims these graphics cards are incredibly quiet under load, and may be some of the quietest GPUs on the market (albeit at the cost of size). The GPUs are being sold as part of Sycom's prebuilt desktops, which start at roughly $1,800.

The cooler appears to be identical to the one Sycom uses for its RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti graphics cards. It uses an aluminum heatsink with copper heatpipes cooled by two 120 mm Noctua NF-A12x25 fans, which are mounted using a frame made by Nago Industry. Of course, these GPUs are big in all dimensions. The 4070 Super model is 278 mm long, 145 mm wide, and takes up 3.5 slots. The 4070 Ti Super version is even larger at 315 mm long and a height of 3.8 slots, though it is still 145 mm wide.

All that size does go towards apparently goes towards great performance. Sycom claims its 4070 Super hits 37.9 decibels under load and only gets to 69.3 degrees Celsius at most. The 4070 Ti Super uses more power and hits 42.1 decibels and 74.4 degrees. If the results are true for the real world, then these graphics cards would be some of the best when it comes to both noise and temperature. For reference, 40 decibels is pretty much as quiet as you can get in a normal room at a house or apartment, and 85 C is generally the target temperature of high-end GPUs.

Sycom isn't the only one using Noctua fans for its GPUs. Asus has teamed up with Noctua for years and just released its RTX 4080 Super model cooled by the same Noctua fans Sycom enlisted. However, Asus has only ever gone down to the XX70 level for Nvidia GPUs, while Sycom has a smaller cooler with 90mm Noctua fans for the 4060 and 4060 Ti. Plus, the only 40 series GPUs to come out of the Asus-Noctua partnership so far are the 4080 and 4080 Super, even though the two companies had made coolers for 3070 and 3080 cards in 2021.

If you were hoping Sycom's Noctua-cooled GPUs could fill the gap left by Asus this generation, you'll be disappointed. Sycom's graphics cards are exclusive to its prebuilt desktops, which are sold in Japan. There's technically nothing stopping you from buying a Sycom prebuilt and just taking the GPU out of it, but it would be quite a bit of work just for one component, and you'd be spending at least $1,800 for just the RTX 4060 desktop. If you don't live in Japan and don't want to buy a prebuilt, you could always just make your own GPU cooler.

Noctua announced two CPU coolers for its chroma.black range — the NH-D9L and the NH-L9x65 low-profile CPU coolers. The low-profile CPU coolers are perfect for many small form factor builds. With a black-coat on the CPU coolers, fans, vibration pads, fan clips, and mounting systems, it looks more stealthy than the nickel-plated counterparts with Noctua's signature colors on the fans. 

The newer variants of these CPU coolers support the current-gen Intel and AMD CPU sockets. Underneath that painted layer, both coolers use copper base and heatpipes, aluminum cooling fins with soldered joints, and nickel plating mounting.

Same-old-but-new-ish!

We reviewed the Noctua NH-L9x65 CPU cooler some time ago, but it is tested on an older Intel LGA 1151 Coffee-Lake-based system.

The new models are no different than the original variants but with added support for current-gen Intel and AMD sockets. So naturally, end-users will be keen to know how these perform when paired with modern CPUs.

The specs of the chroma.black variants are as follows:

Both coolers are made exclusively to be paired with 92mm fans. The NH-D9L chroma.black is a vertically aligned heatsink supporting 14mm and 25mm thick fans with the ability to mount a second fan with clips included.

The NH-L9x65 chroma.black is horizontal. It's only compatible with a 92x92x14mm CPU fan. Typical with CPU coolers like Noctua, all the required tools are included, including the well-known NT-H1 thermal compound syringe that's more than enough for a typical PC enthusiast. Keeping up with Noctua's traditions, these fans use its in-house SSO2 bearing, and the CPU coolers are backed with a six-year warranty.

One should note that these are low-profile CPU coolers made specifically for mini-ITX builds. However, you can pair these on any ATX layout motherboard, but it is best to do so with certain CPUs, irrespective of the socket compatibility. Though Noctua is one of the top-notch CPU cooler manufacturers, these are made for small form factor, and HTPC builds and not high-performance overclocked systems or to be paired with certain mid-range and high-end CPUs.

Noctua did provide a CPU compatibility list for both the NH-D9L and the NH-L9x65. Though this isn't exclusive to Noctua's low-profile CPU coolers, they are one of the companies that list the required details a user will need. 

Austria-based Noctua is widely regarded to be one of the leaders in PC air-cooling technology. This reputation inspired Korean TechTuber Attic Electronics to create a handheld cooling fan using Noctua parts. The result was superior to similar-looking off-the-shelf products. It was even created using signature Noctua colors and branding.

At the start of the video Attic Electronics shares his opinion about Noctua’s cooling fans. In particular, he praises their excellent durability, noise, and airflow characteristics. The overall product positivity also appears to extend to their opinion of the polarizing Noctua classic color scheme, saying that it is “attractive.”

Starting with a compact but stout-looking Noctua fan (perhaps 80mm x 80mm 25mm), the YouTuber introduces some of the parts he is going to use to make a DIY handheld fan. A fan holder is shown off, as is a handle. These parts will come together with the fan to make the finished handheld device. We're never directly told how these parts were made, but our best guess would be that they used the best 3D printer.

Inside the handle are some very important components for making a useful portable fan. In the video, we see the TechTuber demo a PCB that features a thumb slider potentiometer to adjust PWM fan speed, a power switch, and a USB-C charging port (at the bottom of the handle). There’s also a charging indicator light too.

We don’t know whether the fan controller PCB, the handle, or the fan mounts were off-the-shelf parts, salvaged parts, or made by Attic Electronics. They do mention that they "made a circuit", but the two resulting PCBs look like common parts. A lot of focus in the video seems to be on finding the correct color of paint to make an authentic-looking Noctua product.

The base color of the DIY Noctua handheld fan comes from Rustoleum and is labeled as a cream-colored paint and primer. After several attempts at a Noctua brown match, the TechTuber appeared to settle on Tamiya TS-69 spray paint.

In testing, and after some tweaking which involved an oscilloscope, Attic Electronics showed that the DIY Noctua handheld was simultaneously quieter and more powerful than a purpose-made product available in Korea. Towards the end of the video, he also showed a larger DIY Noctua handheld fan, perhaps made with a 120 or 140 mm fan from the Austrian firm. That would be better for the hottest days...

Will Noctua Make an Official Handheld Fan?

There is no mention of a handheld fan on the Noctua roadmap at the time of writing. The nearest similar product would be the Noctua Desk Fan which appeared at trade shows as a prototype five years ago, and on roadmaps during 2022, but disappeared from roadmap updates in 2023...

So, even if Noctua had a handheld portable fan on its roadmap, those with the necessary skills might be advised to follow in the footsteps of Attic Electronics.

For many enthusiasts, Austrian company Noctua represents the pinnacle of PC Cooling. Known for top-tier cooling designs like the NH-D15S, as well as its distinctive brown fans, Noctua has earned and maintained a loyal following since its founding in 2005. With its focus on quiet fans and capable, often high-end, coolers, the company has often landed on our list of best CPU coolers. 

But instead of focusing on massive metal tower coolers like the NH-P1, today we’ll be taking a look at five of Noctua’s small form factor (SFF) CPU coolers. You wouldn’t always want to pair these smaller coolers with top-end CPUs, we’ll be testing them with Intel’s Core i9-13900K to see just how much – or how little – they can handle in today’s world of thermally demanding processors.

Overview of the Coolers

As is obvious to anyone who has built a compact PC, SFF cases can have many constraints – and come in many sizes. As such, all the coolers we’re looking at here were designed for different scenarios. When building an SFF computer system, you’ll need to be aware of limitations caused by the case you’re using, the heatsinks of the motherboard you’re using, and/or the height of your RAM. As I found out during testing, what may work great in one SFF case may be fully incompatible in another.

NH-L9x65

The NH-L9x65 is the second-smallest cooler we’ll be testing for this story. It’s similar to many other compact top-down air coolers but features a thicker heatsink and four heatpipes, instead of the standard two for coolers of this type. It stays within the Intel recommended 95x95mm footprint, which means that you’ll have full compatibility on any motherboard no matter how compact it’s components are.

NH-D9L

In many ways, the NH-D9L is a miniature version of Noctua’s NH-D15S. The NH-D9L operates like a standard desktop cooler, with a single fan in the middle of the cooler pushing the heat away from the reduced-size dual-tower heatsinks. It is fully RAM and PCI-e compatible with all Intel ITX motherboards, and most AMD-based motherboards.

NH-L12S

The NH-L12S was designed for cases with height limitations, with a total height of only 70mm when the slim fan is installed underneath the heatsink fins. Its fan can be installed either underneath or below the heatsink. When the fan is installed at the top of the heatsink, it’s fully compatible with tall RAM, up to 48mm in height.

NH-L12 Ghost S1 Edition

The NH-L12 Ghost S1 Edition is a revised version of the previous cooler, that has been revised to fit smaller spaces, specially designed for the Louqe Ghost S1 computer case. The changes include a reduced height compared to the NH-L12S; it’s only 66mm tall instead of 70mm. The length of the heatpipes has also been shortened, and they are on a narrower angle. Finally, it has a smaller 92mm fan instead of a 120mm fan on the standard NH-L12S.

NH-L9i-17XX

The L9i-17xx is the most “basic” of the coolers we’re testing today. Its compact heatsink has only two heatpipes and a total height of just 37mm, making it ideal for the slimmest and most space-constrained environments. As such, it offers 100% RAM and PCI-e compatibility on all motherboards. We tested the Chromax black model, but if you prefer Noctua’s traditional brown and beige, the L9i-17xx is available in those colors, as well.

Testing Methodology and SFF Constraints

Modern high-end CPUs, whether Intel or AMD, are difficult to cool in intensive workloads. In the past, reaching 95C+ on a desktop CPU might have been a cause for concern – but with today’s processors, it’s considered normal operation. Similar behavior has been present in laptops for years due to cooling limitations in tight spaces. 

That said, SFF coolers aren’t designed to handle the full power of CPUs like Intel’s i9-13900K or Ryzen 7950X, and when using one the CPU will likely reach TJMax (the maximum temperature before throttling occurs) in many workloads. So if I were to apply the same standards I use for standard cooler testing to SFF coolers, most of them would simply fail. 

These compact coolers are designed to provide adequate cooling power in space-constrained environments, and as such many SFF builders prefer to use lower-power CPUs like AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600 or Intel’s i5-12400. Still, for today’s testing, we’ll be pairing them with Intel’s i9-13900K to see just how much – or little – these coolers can handle. But we’ll also be testing with different power limits, which will tell us a lot about how these coolers will perform with lower-end CPUs.

We’ll be evaluating these coolers based on their performance in 3 metrics:

1. Maximum noise levels

2. Maximum cooling performance

3. Noise normalized results with a 95W Power Limit.

These coolers will be tested in Silverstone’s SUGO 14 SFF case, which I chose for its versatility and features, including a 5.25-inch optical drive and full-size PSU support.  

Originally I had planned to include comparison results here from Noctua’s competitors, including BeQuiet’s Shadow Rock LP and Iceberg Thermal’s IceFLOE T95. But I ran into compatibility issues which prevented this.

The B660i Aorus Pro motherboard has tall heatsinks for both the motherboard’s VRMs and for the NVMe SSD slot. As a result, the heatpipes of BeQuiet’s Shadow Rock LP were blocked by the heatsinks of the motherboard, no matter which direction I attempted to install it.

I also attempted to install Iceberg Thermal’s IceFLOE T95, but the mounting bars alone pushed against the DDR4 memory sticks, making it incompatible. Installing the cooler further would have pushed the RAM modules even more, a recipe for instability at best.

After encountering these issues and finding it strange that I didn’t run into similar problems with Noctua’s coolers, I reached out to a Noctua representative. He pointed out that the company works closely with motherboard manufacturers as well as Intel and AMD to ensure broad compatibility, while also noting that the expansive range of the company’s compact coolers lets builders choose the best option for their specific system.

Noctua also maintains a Compatibility Centre database that lets you check whether a given cooler is designed to work with specific CPUs, motherboards, cases, and RAM. 

Noise Normalized results

Finding the right balance between fan noise levels and cooling performance is important. While running fans at full speed can improve cooling capacity to some extent, the benefits are usually limited and most users prefer a quiet system.

For our SFF noise normalized tests, Acoustics were limited to 38.9 dBA. This level of noise is a low, but slightly audible, volume level. The NH-D9L and the NH-L12S did very well here, with CPU temperatures of 71-72C degrees.

You might notice that in addition to normalizing the noise levels, I also limited the power levels. I had originally planned to run this test without power limits, but the Gigabyte motherboard used for this testing forces fans to run at full speed when the CPU reaches TJMax. To get around this inconvenience, I limited the CPU power consumption. I was forced to use a lower limit of 95W because the L9i-17xx will reach TJMax in hotter workloads.

Full Power Thermal Results

Even with full-size CPU air coolers, Intel’s i9-13900K will hit its peak temperature and thermally throttle to some extent. In this test, we measure the total amount of watts the cooler is able to dissipate from the CPU.

As these are smaller-sized coolers, I didn’t expect them to handle a maximum-watt load. That said, I was very impressed with the performance of the NH-D9L here. Cooling 193W means that in most common scenarios, you won’t see any performance loss when using Intel’s i9-13900K. 

There will be some performance loss compared to a cooler that can handle the full heat of Intel’s i9-13900K, but it’s not as much as you might think. I’ve previously tested power scaling on my personal blog, shown below, to see just how much power Intel’s i9-13900K really needs. 

The NH-D9L’s performance will be similar to my results with a 200W power limit enforced, where only an 11% performance loss was observed, compared to running the CPU without power limits. The L9i-17xx’s performance will be similar to my results with a 125W power limit, which resulted in a 23% performance loss.

Maximum Noise Levels

While most of the coolers run fairly quietly, the NH-L9x65’s volume is notable at 46.6 dBA. I generally prefer coolers to run at 43dBA or lower. Depending on your comfort levels, you may consider this a loud noise level. But I do think 46.6dBA is tolerable.

Conclusion

While you can’t expect cooling performance comparable to full-size desktops, Noctua has an SFF cooler that will fit your PC form factor no matter how small of a space you’re working with. And despite encountering compatibility issues with multiple SFF coolers from competing coolers, each of Noctua’s offerings fit our SFF testing rig with no problems and provided adequate cooling dissipation.

While all the coolers we tested here were able to handle Intel’s Core i9-13900K to some degree, you’ll probably want to stick with lower-end CPUs if opting for more compact coolers. Because even if your cooler can technically move a high amount of heat away from your CPU, that heat still needs to escape from your case quickly, or it’s just going to be heating up your other components. And if your case requires one of the smallest SFF coolers, there’s a good chance its internal airflow is also likely to be limited compared to larger cases.

Noctua on Tuesday introduced its NM-DD1, a special kit that allows installation of the company's coolers on delidded AMD processors in AM5 packaging. This kit can be purchased direct from the manufacturer, or you can 3D print the needed spacers and source your own fasteners. The kit was co-developed with Roman 'Der8auer' Hartung, a professional overclocker and an exotic cooling expert.

One of the ways to enhance cooling for overclocked AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors is to remove their integrated heat spreader (delidding them) and attach the cooler directly to the dies. According to Noctua, this ensures more efficient heat transfer from the heat-generating CCD chiplets to the cooler and reduces CPU temperatures by 10C – 15C. Such a boost in thermal headroom can be leveraged to significantly reduce fan speeds and related noise levels, increase CPU turbo boost frequencies, or increase the overclocking potential.

Standard coolers are not designed for use with delidded CPUs, which complicates the endeavor. But Noctua's direct die kit for AMD's delidded processors greatly simplifies the task. Of course, the greatest concerns associated with removing the IHS are the risks of damaging the processor during the delidding process and voiding the warranty. Those risks remain, but at least using Noctua's coolers with delidded CPUs is simpler.

The NM-DD1 kit contains spacers placed beneath the heatsink's securing brackets to counterbalance the height of the removed IHS and extended custom screws for reattachment of the brackets with the spacers installed. The other hardware required for delidding must be purchased separately. To further improve cooling performance, the NM-DD1 can be coupled with Noctua's recently introduced offset AM5 mounting bars, potentially leading to an additional 2C drop in temperature.

"Delidding and direct die cooling will void your CPU's warranty and bear a certain risk of damaging it, so this certainly isn't for everyone," said Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "However, the performance gains to be had are simply spectacular, typically ranging from 10 to 15°C but in some cases, we have even seen improvements of almost 20°C in combination with our offset mounting bars, so we are confident that this is an attractive option for enthusiast users. Thanks to Roman for teaming up with us in order to enable customers to implement this exciting tuning measure with our CPU coolers!"

The NM-DD1 kit can be obtained exclusively from Noctua's website for €4.90. Alternatively, customers can 3D-print the kit's spacers at home using STL files from Printables.com. For assembly, either four M3x12 screws (for NM-DDS1) or one M4x10 screw (for NM-DDS2) will be needed.

Noctua has released its long-awaited 24V DC to 12V DC step-down voltage converter. The new NA-VC1 is an ultra-compact adaptor which facilitates the running of standard 12V DC fans in 24V DC environments. 3D printing enthusiasts are one of the named target markets for the NA-VC1, as the majority of the best 3D printers use a 24V fan power system, however, there will be other enthusiast, industrial and automotive customers, reckons Noctua.

If you check out Noctua's cooling fan product pages, you will quickly notice that it offers very many more 12V fans than models designed for 24V DC operation. Thus, the NA-VC1 opens up a lot more possibilities to those when need 24V fans. The step-down voltage converter offers some premium quality features, as you might expect from this brand. NA-VC1 features such as integrated protection against short-circuits, reverse polarity, overcurrent and overheating will be welcome in this product which operates in temperatures up to 60 degrees Celsius. Moreover, its ultra-compact form will make it easy to integrate, even into space constrained environments.

Noctua CEO, Roland Mossig, acknowledged the potential popularity of the NA-VC1 within the 3D printing enthusiast fraternity. He noted the popularity of Noctua fans amongst 3D printer users but lamented that many had to turn to "cheap, poor quality step-down converters," which he asserted could "pose a serious safety hazard." Typically makers will use a "buck converter" (an LM2596 for example) or a linear voltage regulator (L78S12CV) to drop the 24V down to 12V.

In a press release, Noctua gave a few examples where it thinks the new NA-VC1 will be particularly popular. It said that 3D printers such as the Creality Ender 3 and CR-10, Anycubic Mega (and more) use 40 or 60mm fans for cooling the hot-end or the printed part. Thanks to the arrival of the NA-VC1, Noctua can now recommend standard 12V fans such as the NF-A4x10 PWM, NF-A4x20 PWM or NF-A6x25 PWM for these devices, to achieve the quietest and most efficient cooling.

The NA-VC1 is barely larger than the two 4-pin PWM connectors it is designed to mate. PWM control and RPM monitoring continues to function through the adaptor. Noctua notes that as the device supports up to 9W, users can run single fans with high power draw or run multiple lower power fans via splitter cables or fan hubs.

Noctua guarantees the NA-VC1 for six years, adding to the reassurance you might already have from the brand name and comprehensive protections. The new Noctua NA-VC1 is now available direct from the firm's Amazon stores priced at EUR/USD 24.90.

AMD's latest Ryzen 7000-series processors based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture have been heavily criticized for their high temperatures. The use of expensive high-performance coolers is a radical way to ensure proper cooling, but Noctua now offers a bit cheaper way to reduce CPU temperature by up to 3°C: offsetting CPU mounting by 7mm using special bars.

The core complex dies (CCDs) of AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors — the hottest components of the CPU — do not reside in the center of the unit, but are skewed toward the socket's south side. Adjusting the heatsink's location over the CCDs and maximizing contact pressure there significantly boosts thermal performance, Noctua found.

While results may fluctuate due to factors such as heat flux densities, tolerances of the CPU and radiator, and thermal paste application, the offset mounting can still result in considerable core temperature reductions of 1–3°C on high-end AM5 processors, Noctua said. These improvements can help to effectively cool the CPU, achieve higher boost clock frequencies, or lower fan speeds and noise levels. Lowering temperatures and increasing boost frequencies makes a lot of sense as Ryzen 7000-series processors are ranked among the best CPUs for gaming and are used for gaming under high loads.

"We have experimented with offset mountings ever since AMD introduced its first chiplet processors that had the hotspot shifted toward the south side of the socket, but on AM4, we only saw relatively small improvements in the range of 0.5°C–1°C", says Roland Mossig, chief executive of Noctua CEO. "With the new AM5 platform and its different heat-spreader design, we managed to achieve typical improvements in the range of 1°C–3°C, so we think that this will be a very interesting performance upgrade for Ryzen 7000 users!"

Noctua offers a variety of offset mounting kits for AM4 and AM5 coolers depending on their mounting pitch (83mm vs. 78mm) and architecture (single tower vs dual tower). The company plans to offer four mounting kits: NM-AMB12, NM-AMB13, NM-AMB14, and NM-AMB15. 

Noctua's offset mounting bars can be purchased either through Noctua's official website or Amazon. They cost €3.90 when bought directly and €4.90 when obtained from Amazon, which essentially means that Noctua only charges for shipping. Starting in Q4, these mounting bars will be bundled with Noctua coolers.

The NM-AMB12, NM-AMB14, and NM-AMB15 bars are compatible with contemporary cooler models and are immediately available for purchase. The NM-AMB13 bars for older models will be available in a couple of weeks.

PNY had some of the best graphics cards on showcase at Computex 2023. The manufacturer even brought some workstation graphics cards, including the RTX 6000 Ada Generation and the RTX 4000 SFF. However, two particular graphics cards caught our attention.

First off, PNY has partnered with Cooler Master to produce the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto. It has become a trend for graphics card manufacturers to pair up with cooling specialists to create innovative products. For example, Asus taps into Noctua's experience and expertise to make the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X Noctua OC Edition.

If you think you've seen some thick GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards, think again. For example, the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto is a 4.5-slot graphics card, which is insane because it covers almost all the PCI slots from your typical mATX case. For comparison, Asus' custom GeForce RTX 4080 with Noctua features a 4.3-slot design. The dimensions for the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto are 12.2 x 5.6 x 3.5 inches (310 x 142 x 89mm), so it's comparable to Asus' offering, which measures 12.2 x 5.7 x 3.5 inches (310 x 144.8 x 87.5mm). In PNY's case, Cooler Master designed the cooler, while PNY took care of everything underneath the shroud.

Not much is known about the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto. PNY didn't reveal the clock speeds for the GeForce RTX 4090 Verto. The shroud is a prototype, so that the retail version may look slightly different. The graphics card utilizes a dual-fan cooling solution and appears to feature a pair of Cooler Master's Mobius 120P ARGB 30th Anniversary Edition 120mm fans. The prototype has the cooling fans connected to the PWM fan connectors on the motherboard. It draws power from a standard 16-pin (12VHPWR) power connector and offers an HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.

There aren't many blower-type GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards on the market. Thus far, we only know about two Ada Lovelace models that sport a blower design. In addition, Leadtek sells the WinFast RTX 4070 AI Blower 12G and the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12GB Hyper Brain, a China-exclusive SKU. Unfortunately, pickings are incredibly slim regarding blower graphics cards, and while Leadtek is a globally renowned brand, its products aren't widely available in the U.S. market. Therefore, PNY has an excellent opportunity for success with the GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition comes in a standard dual-slot format with dimensions of 11 x 4.7 x 1.6 inches (278.4 x 119.4 x 40mm), so it's a good fit inside small form factor (SFF) cases and workstations where you have multiple GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition graphics cards. The blower design is perfect for expelling heat outside the case instead of standard graphics card coolers. The GeForce RTX 4070 Blower Edition employs an 82mm fan for active cooling. Again, PNY didn't share the clock speeds for the graphics card.

In addition to unveiling the second-generation NH-D15 for consumer processors, Noctua has exhibited two upcoming CPU air coolers for AMD's next-generation Ryzen Threadripper processors. Unfortunately, the prototypes lack an official name, but Noctua told us that the single-tower and twin-tower coolers are based on the NH-U14S TR4-SP3 and NH-D9 DX-4677 4U, respectively.

Both Threadripper coolers feature a large base plate measuring 70 x 56mm, effectively covering the Threadripper processors entirely. Noctua didn't confirm the socket, but it's like the new Socket SP6 (LGA4844) that will house AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 (codename Storm Peak) chips that are based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture. Noctua's surface area is in the same ballpark as the dimensions of the Socket SP6, which reportedly measures 58.5 x 75.4 mm.

Noctua didn't offer many details on the Threadripper coolers. They can accommodate up to two cooling fans; in the case of the dual-tower variant, there's space for a third cooling fan. However, tests have shown little benefit to adding a third cooling fan, so the retail model will likely stick to a two-fan configuration to keep costs down. To ensure maximum coverage, the two Threadripper coolers will come with a pre-applied NT-H2 thermal compound in a honeycomb pattern. They also feature an updated SecuFirm2 mounting system that fasts onto the socket through four spring-loaded screws.

Ryzen Threadripper 7000 processors scale up to 64 cores and 128 threads. Noctua has produced CPU air coolers for previous Threadripper chips with similar configurations. So don't let the size of the new coolers fool you. They will have no problems cooling AMD's cove-heavy processors.

Noctua plans to launch the two Threadripper coolers in October, suggesting that AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 processors should hit the retail shelves by then. Based on comments from an Asus employee, we already know that the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 will arrive before the end of the year. Noctua's ETA seemingly narrows the potential time frame for the Zen 4-powered processors' launch. There are high hopes that AMD could revive the HEDT market segment with its Ryzen Threadripper 7000 lineup. Consumers, who prefer air cooling over liquid cooling, will have ample options, as Noctua has already prepared two high-performance CPU air coolers for Ryzen Threadripper 7000.

Among many other products, Noctua has unveiled the highly-anticipated 2nd Generation NH-D15 CPU air cooler at Computex. The new cooler provides a much-needed update to the NH-D15, which launched in 2014 as the successor to the legendary NH-D14 and used to be one of the best CPU coolers on the market.

The second-generation NH-D15 doesn't deviate from the dual tower design characteristic of Noctua's previous installments. However, Noctua made multiple improvements to the design that may not be visible at first glance. First, the company has optimized the tailored fin stacks on the cooler by reducing the fin pitch. As a result, the second-generation NH-D15 has a fin pitch of 1.6mm instead of 1.9mm, equivalent to 20% more surface area for improved heat dissipation.

Besides the compact fin pitch, the second-generation NH-D15 has more heat pipes. It's a welcome upgrade since the transition from the NH-D14 to the NH-D15 saw the same six-heat pipe layout. However, Noctua has implemented two more heat pipes on the second-generation NH-D15, bolstering the number of heat pipes to eight to enhance the cooler's thermal performance further.

Despite being a big cooler, the NH-D15 was compatible with many motherboard configurations. Noctua continues to improve compatibility, which is good since graphics cards are becoming overly thicker and more intrusive. The second-generation NH-D15 has an offset design to offer better clearance space with the primary PCIe expansion slots on motherboards. According to Noctua, the design allows for 9mm less overall depth.

The second-generation NH-D15 will leverage a pair of next-gen Noctua 140mm cooling fans that flaunt an optimized pressure/airflow (P/Q) curve. In addition, the cooler retains the Torx-based SecuFirm2+ mounting system, which is easy and quick to install. Noctua will include the company's latest offset mounting system for the AMD AM5 socket with the second-generation NH-D15. The 7mm offsets slightly move the heatsink over the chip's hotspot to provide better contact with the Core Compute Dies (CCDs), resulting in a more uniform heat distribution. According to Noctua's tests, it could help lower temperatures by up to three degrees Celsius. The offset mounting system is available separately for $3.90 via Noctua or $4.90 on Amazon.

The cooler is compatible with Noctua's new direct die mounting kit, which the vendor has launched for those brave AMD owners that have de-lidded their Ryzen 7000 chips. Consumers can use the direct die mounting kit with the offset mounting system for even more gains. The direct die mounting kit works with most Noctua coolers since 2005 and will retail for $4.90 on Noctua starting June 2023.

The second-generation NH-D15 includes a tube of Noctua's NT-H2 thermal compound, an NM-SD1 Torx T20 head screwdriver, and an NA-TPG1 thermal paste guard for AM5 processors.

Barring any setbacks, Noctua plans to launch the second-generation NH-D15 in the second quarter of 2024. However, the company didn't reveal the pricing of the cooler. Previous editions, such as the NH-D14 and NH-D15, retailed for $89 and $99; therefore, the second-generation NH-D15 could debut with a similar price tag.

Update 5/10/23 - Noctua contacted us with the following statement: We're currently focusing all our energy on getting key products like the next-gen 140 mm fans and the next-gen NH-D15 ready. This means that we are devoting less resources to comparably low priority projects like the white fans. This doesn't mean that they have been scrapped entirely, and we'd say there's still a chance that we may have them before 2025, but we're currently not pushing hard on this and therefore don't feel confident giving an ETA.

Cooling specialist Noctua has updated its roadmap with an edition marked 'Version 5/2023'. The previous update was back in January, and we note there have some interesting changes, both additions and subtractions, from the list. Our headlining observation is that the highly anticipated white fans from Noctua have been completely removed from the roadmap. They were previously penciled in for 2024.

Other changes of concern are Noctua notifying us of delays with respect to a host of other products. Looking at the positives, we observe that the next-gen Threadripper coolers are due in Q3, and a trio of existing desktop CPU coolers are getting the chromax.black treatment scheduled for Q4 this year.

PC builders like to have options, and Noctua's products are no stranger to our list of the best CPU coolers. Those that are repelled by the signature Noctua colors of coffee and cream will often favor neutral shades like black or white. The bad news is it looks like modders and DIYers waiting for white Noctua fans have entered a new indeterminable period of want. We have dropped a line to Noctua in the hope that the omission of white fans on the latest roadmap is an oversight, rather than a product planning decision. While we wait, we must assume the following: in its official roadmap small print Noctua says that anything not on the roadmap "will usually take at least another year to be released."

In our handy  Jan / May roadmap comparison, above, you can also see that the following products have slipped by (another) quarter, or more: 8-way fan hub, slim 60mm fans, 24V 40mm fans, next-gen 140mm fans, and the next-gen NH-D15 CPU cooler. The latter product might be delayed by more than a quarter as the final column of the roadmap simply reads "2024," with no mention of any quarter.

Noctua's next-gen NH-D15 has been the most problematic when ti comes to schedule slippage. This is far from the first time it has been pushed back, as it was originally expected to debut in 2021. In our Noctua roadmap update story from last October we noted that the NH-D15 was "on schedule for launch in Q1 2023," and now it is listed as being ready sometime in 2024. The original NH-D15, an update to the legendary NH-D14, was released a decade ago, but buyers of new retail units get SecuFirm2 mounts for the latest AMD and Intel desktop CPUs. What will change in the next-gen version remains to be seen.

New on the Noctua roadmap in its May 2023 edition are the next-gen AMD Threadripper coolers, which are scheduled for the next quarter (Q3 2023). These look timed to coincide with the launch of the new (TR7 platform) AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 chips, coming to HEDT and workstation platforms.

Lastly, those thinking about building an air-cooled PC system where the Noctua NH-D12L, NH-D9L, or NH-L9x65 are on the short list might be interested to know chromax.black versions of those should become available in Q4 this year.

A PC enthusiast in China has built a custom PC case specifically to fit the substantial Noctua NH-P1 passive cooler — with room for little else. With a self-imposed design constraint of using a Mini-ITX platform, ChipHell’s FreshCool created a custom case measuring just 30 x 20 x 20 cm (LWH), or roughly 12 x 8 x 8–inches. The result, spotted by FanlessTech, is a pleasingly compact passive system. Moreover, it looks much like a modern manufactured case, featuring contemporary design trappings such as a side window, a generous amount of venting, and a vertically barred front. Perhaps it was Fractal North inspired.

What kind of thermal load will this passive PC system have to cope with? The system’s main heat source will be the Intel Core i7-12700, which of course has the Noctua NH-P1 attached. FreshCool says that if the CPU is limited to 65W, in testing it never strayed beyond the 50 degrees Celsius range. A 100W limit meant that the processor would run at temperatures in the mid-70s. Finally, the translation isn’t great but it seems like if the power limit is completely unlocked (140W), the 12700 will start to throttle under load after 90 seconds. We don’t have any info about what tests were run, ambient temperatures, etc.

On the quest for a truly fanless system, FreshCool chose to install a Seasonic PX450. This is a fully modular 450W PSU, and it offers 80 Plus Platinum efficiency with an attractive 12-year warranty. Other key components of the build include a Maxsun H610 ITX motherboard, 32GB of RAM (Kingston 2x16GB), and a WD Blue SN570 M.2 SSD.

In some further comments and replies on the ChipHell forums, FreshCool joked with other users about the case looking like a cooking appliance. The PC DIYer also revealed that they had previously considered using a SilverStone Sugo 16, with a comparable size but designed for active cooling. FreshCool didn’t use the Sugo after determining that "its ventilation efficiency is not good" for creating a passive system. However, for builders wanting a discrete GPU the Sugo has room for cards up to 275mm long and 147mm wide.

This custom case obviously won't win any gaming performance awards, since it lacks anything better than the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770. That's enough for streaming video or perhaps playing Minecraft, but it falls well short of even the slowest dedicated solutions that we've tested in our GPU benchmarks. Of course, few graphics cards offer fanless solutions these days, which would defeat the point of this build.