Author: Scott Piercy

Editor: Nigel Woodford 

Model: Noctua NF-S12, Noctual NF-R8

Manufacturer: Noctua

There's usually very little to get excited about in the case of ventilation. The compromises involved have changed very little over the years. Fans that help ventilate more air through a case often are more noisy than there lower CFM counterparts. Quieter fans usually are quieter because they are slower and thus move less air. For longevity purposes, ball bearing fans are often used in mission critical situations because they have longer life spans than less expensive sleeve bearing designs. Unfortunately they are also louder than sleeve bearing designs as well.

The acoustic properties of a system design are becoming more and more important these days. Developments of faster CPU's, GPU's, and Memory, are all placing an additional thermal load inside your average PC. Getting all of that hot air out of the case is primarily the role of case fans. And it's more than a simple matter of using a higher CFM fan. Anyone who's messed with 210CFM 120mm Delta fans knows they can move tons of air out of a case. But it's hardly worth going deaf over.

Living Room/Family PC's and Home Theater PC's are becoming more and more commonplace, and thus fitting a PC into that environment unobtrusively is a worthy and important design consideration. Enter Noctua.

Noctua is a joint venture of the Austrian Rascom Computerdistribution Ges.m.b.H and the Taiwanese Kolink International Corporation. More specifically, the joint venture was predicated off of the work of the Austrian Institute of Heat Transmission and Fan Technology.

Noctua's fan designs take a two-pronged approach to dealing with airflow and noise. First, by offering a new take on fan bearing design, and secondly by fundamentally altering the design of the fan blades. Let's take a look at these two pieces and see exactly what they have done.