You are going to have to attend slightly longer for Noctua’s next-gen 140mm fan. Regardless of constructive indicators out at Computex this 12 months that had instructed the fan would head to mass manufacturing by the tail-end of 2023, that plan has been scuppered by late situation. This implies it has to undergo a prolonged validation course of another time, and now we’re a Q2 2024 launch, if not later once more.
Noctua pushed again the fan’s launch date on its product roadmap round a month and a half in the past, however I’ve reached out to firm spokesperson Jakob Dellinger to seek out out precisely why.
“We cannot be capable to kick off mass manufacturing on the finish of the 12 months as focused again in June, so we now have moved our present ETA from Q1 to Q2 2024,” Dellinger says.
“As ordinary, this projection is predicated on our present best-case state of affairs and we can’t rule out additional delays in case the options that we’re at present focusing on don’t give the specified outcomes or additional issues come up.”
Dellinger says the reason for the delay is the Sterrox LCP materials now used for the body of the fan. Now if you’re well-informed about Noctua’s fan improvement course of—and why would not you be—you may have seen that that is the exact same materials that was initially rolled out to the body to try to repair a earlier situation. So in fixing one situation, it is led to a different displaying up throughout the prolonged validation course of.
All of it comes all the way down to the minimal clearances required for this fan to function effectively. An entire redesign of Noctua’s standard NF-A14, the next-gen model guarantees to be higher in each method, however to do this it has a tip clearance—the hole between the blade and the body—of solely 0.7mm.
I’ve seen this fan in individual and that 0.7mm hole is barely simply seen in the event you get your eyeballs proper up into it.
“Whereas deformations of some tenths of a millimetre won’t pose an issue for standard fan designs, they’re extremely problematic with a tip clearance of solely 0.7mm,” Dellinger says.
“At Computex, the answer that we have focused was utilizing our Sterrox LCP materials not just for the impeller, but additionally for the body. Sadly, in depth testing with LCP body samples has proven that this didn’t absolutely resolve the problem and there was nonetheless a slight danger of essential deformation in case radiator screws have been tightened too onerous.”
“We now have due to this fact determined to regulate the essential development of the body corners for elevated stiffness. Which means we’re within the technique of doing a tooling modification that can take a number of weeks adopted by a number of weeks of additional validation processes.”
Noctua had beforehand famous that the unique tooling and validation levels for the fan prolonged from across the finish of 2021 and properly into 2022, although an preliminary situation found throughout validation despatched the fan again by the method. Since then, repeated points have seen the fan return to tooling and validation a number of instances, and this most up-to-date journey will see it pushed again to no less than Q2 2024.
“If the modification yields the specified outcomes and the next validations do not immediate any additional issues, we purpose to carry the fan to the market in Q2, however as ordinary, we can’t rule out that further measures grow to be obligatory.”
Greatest case state of affairs, this can be a roughly three month delay from the unique on-sale date round Q1 2024, although it seems like Noctua’s taking part in it by ear. The top consequence needs to be a fan price ready for, because the efficiency graph proven by Noctua at Computex confirmed it delivering greater airflow and better static strain than Noctua’s NF-A14 throughout radiator, air cooler, and case fan functions.
