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Noctua Case Fan Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Introduction
By far the most common component in any modern (and pre-modern for that matter) computer is the fan and just about every computer in existence contains at least one. Their primary duty is to keep air moving either inside a case or across a heatsink in hopes of keeping things cool and increasing system stability. On the surface it would seem that the more fans you have running the better and early casemodders took this theory to the extreme with some wild and crazy case mods.
So what are the drawbacks to having fans? Well as with anything with moving parts the more things move the louder things get and fans are notorious for turning a quiet office environment into an afternoon on the flight deck. The trick is to find the subtle balance between total noise output and sufficient airflow.
Noctua is a cooling company in Austria that has addressed the issue of fan noise by attacking the source of that noise, the fan. As you can imagine there are several factors that contribute to how loud a will be including:
Rotational speed
Bearing wear
Blade geometry
Housing design
Vibration
So what are the drawbacks to having fans? Well as with anything with moving parts the more things move the louder things get and fans are notorious for turning a quiet office environment into an afternoon on the flight deck. The trick is to find the subtle balance between total noise output and sufficient airflow.
Noctua is a cooling company in Austria that has addressed the issue of fan noise by attacking the source of that noise, the fan. As you can imagine there are several factors that contribute to how loud a will be including:
Rotational speed
Bearing wear
Blade geometry
Housing design
Vibration
Noctua has address each of these issues in a very unique way and is really what separates these fans from your standard Sunon or Panflo found at any computer store.
