Noctua is primarily known for its highly efficient air coolers that offer high performance and are also surprisingly quiet. Yet, some customers want to have a PC that produces no noise at all and who prefer fanless cooling systems and cases. Bringing Noctua's expertise to passive coolers has always been something that its customers were enthusiastic about, and it looks like their dreams are about to come true 'very soon.'
Noctua first demonstrated its prototype fanless CPU cooler in mid-2019 at Computex. The tower heatsink featured multiple aluminum fins, six heat pipes, and weighed in around 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms). It was designed to cool a CPU with an (up to) 120W TDP in a completely fanless case, or a processor with an (up to) 180W TDP in a case equipped with quiet fans, or when equipped with a fan itself. The device was designed primarily for AMD's AM4 and Intel's LGA115x platforms, though it is reasonable to expect it to be compatible with LGA1200 and eventually LGA1700, too.
"This means that different manufacturing machinery is required, e.g., much stronger stamping presses, etc. Getting this sorted in a reasonably cost-efficient way was quite a challenge. […] We found the technical possibility thrilling and hope that many customers will share this feeling. There’s a certain beauty and simplicity to going completely fanless rather than just running slow fans, there’s no real possible point of failure, less dust build-up, and of course, the bliss of complete silence."
