Noctua today introduced another addition to its chromax line of all-black CPU coolers: the new NH-L9a-AM4 chromax.black is a low-profile quiet CPU cooler for AMD's Ryzen-based HTPCs and Small Form Factor (SFF) builds. Thanks to the same proven heatsink design and NF-A9x14 PWM fan as the original NH-L9a-AM4, it stays true to the same successful formula of fusing a height of only 37 mm with strong performance and excellent quietness of operation, as well as 100% RAM and PCIe compatibility. At the same time, the chromax.black version, with its black fan and black coated heatsink, combines these assets with a sleek stealth look.

"AMD's Ryzen platform has become more and more popular over the last few months, not only for high-end builds but also for compact HTPCs and Small Form Factor systems", says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "We've already introduced the black NH-L9i low-profile cooler for Intel in October, but now we also want to give design-conscious AMD users a new option with the black version of NH-L9a-AM4!"

Noctua today presented new additions to its chromax line of black, colour-customisable cooling fans. The new chromax.black.swap versions of the award-winning NF-A20, NF-A12x15, NF-A9, NF-A9x14 and NF-A8 fans as well as the corresponding NA-SAVP5 and NA-SAVP6 anti-vibration pads now give customers the option to colour-coordinate Noctua 200 mm, slim 120 mm, 92 mm, slim 92 mm and 80 mm fans with individual build designs and popular colour schemes such as all black, black and white or black and red.

"First introduced in 2015, our chromax line is aimed at customers who value individual, focused build aesthetics just as much as class-leading quality and performance," says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "With the new chromax.black.swap models, we're broadening the scope to include fan sizes other than the regular 120 and 140 mm formats, some of which should be particularly attractive for ITX and Small Form Factor builds."

Noctua today introduced the long awaited all-black versions of its award-winning NH-D15, NH-U12S and NH-L9i CPU coolers. Staying true to the successful formula of the original models, the new chromax.black versions with their black fans and black coated heatsinks combine the same signature quiet cooling performance with a sleek stealth look. The NH-D15 chromax.black and NH-U12S chromax.black will initially be exclusively available in a Linus Tech Tips limited edition that includes extra orange anti-vibration pads and custom fan stickers.

"Our customers have been asking us for all-black coolers for a long time, but we're soldering the fins to the heatpipes in order to guarantee optimal performance over many years of usage and this production process is difficult to combine with coatings," explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "It took a lot of time and engineering work to find an appropriate coating material and production process that gave us satisfactory thermal performance and consistent visual appearance. Now, we're proud with the end result and confident that the new chromax.black coolers will meet the high standards Noctua users have come to expect."

Noctua today presented new fan and heatsink accessories as part of its chromax line that allows colour-configuring Noctua products in order to coordinate them with individual build colour schemes. Complementing the existing NA-SAVP1 anti-vibration pads in black, blue, green, red, white and yellow, the new NA-SAVP1 chromax.grey anti-vibration pads are a perfect fit for the light and dark grey colour scheme of Noctua's 140 and 120mm redux line fans. The new NA-HC5 chromax.black.swap, NA-HC6 chromax.black and NA-HC6 chromax.white are add-on heatsink covers for the popular NH-U14S, NH-U14S TR4-SP3 and NH-U14S DX-3647 CPU coolers.

"We've seen an overwhelming customer response to our chromax line that allows users to customise the visual design of their heatsinks and fans in order to create unique, individual builds that impress with subtle, classy colour accents rather than overblown lighting effects," says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "With the new pads and heatsink covers, we're expanding our offer, giving customers even more possibilities for colour-coordinating their fans and enabling NH-U14S users to customise their coolers."

During our visit with Noctua, we spotted what every air cooling enthusiast has been hoping for, a brand new top of the line D-type cooler. Noctua's next generation model is of course based on the award-winning NH-D15 and NH-D15S and comes packing 7 heat pipes alongside a 10% increase in surface area for improved performance. It also takes design cues from the NH-D15S by using an asymmetrical design for improved PCIe clearance while also retaining the same fin cutouts for improved RAM clearance of 65 mm.

The company plans to release two versions, one with a single fan and of course a dual fan thus offering both a high compatibility and a maximum performance model. The bundled fan will be Noctua's proven NF-A15 PWM model which when paired with the new redesign results in a cooler capable of dissipating over 400-watts on the TR4 socket. Speaking of sockets, it will support all current offerings including AMD, LGA20xx, LGA115x with a separate model for socket TR4. It has a current ETA of Q1 2020 and will come bundled with Noctua's NT-H2 thermal compound.

Noctua today presented its new NH-U12A premium-quality quiet CPU cooler. The NH-U12A is the latest, 5th generation of Noctua's award-winning U12 series of 120mm size coolers. Conceived to push the envelope of the 120mm form factor, it combines two of Noctua's flagship model NF-A12x25 PWM 120mm fans with a completely redesigned heatsink featuring 7 heatpipes and an increased fin surface area for superior heat dissipation. This way, the NH-U12A can rival the performance of many 140mm sized coolers while offering 120mm class case and PCIe compatibility.

"The original NH-U12 was the very first product we introduced back in 2005 and the U12 series has been at the core of our product line-up ever since," explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "Today, we're proud to continue this successful legacy by introducing the 5th generation that provides even better quiet cooling performance, which enables it to compete with much larger units while offering superior compatibility. In a nutshell, the NH-U12A is an ideal choice for customers who are looking for a cutting-edge cooler that's hassle-free to integrate in most setups."

Noctua today announced that all of its current multi-socket desktop CPU coolers, such as the popular NH-D15, NH-U14S and NH-U12S, now also include installation hardware for the AM4 socket of AMD's Ryzen processors. Although Noctua introduced its dedicated SE-AM4 models in early 2017 and has provided free-of-charge upgrade kits ever since the launch of the AM4 platform, the updates of the existing multi-socket models now allow customers to install them on all current mainstream sockets without ordering extra mounting kits. As suggested retail prices remain unchanged, the updates come at no extra cost to the customers.

"We've supported AMD's Ryzen platform with our SE-AM4 models and free-of-charge mounting upgrades from the very beginning", says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "As with Intel's LGA115x and 20xx platforms, our customers have greatly appreciated our free upgrade policy. We've provided many thousands of free mounting kits and quite a few customers have migrated 10-year-old heatsinks they had already used on several socket generations. This means a lot to us and we'll continue to offer the free kits of course. However, with AM4 becoming more and more popular, we think it is time to also include the mountings with our existing models so that customers have everything at hand when they purchase new coolers."

ASUS today launched the Republic of Gamers (ROG) Ryujin line of all-in-one liquid CPU coolers for AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors. Positioned above the ROG Ryuo series, which opened to pre-orders earlier this month, the Ryujin was first showcased at the 2018 Computex. These coolers are characterized by a somewhat square pump-block design that resembles a that of a chipset heatsink; but is embedded with a 1.77-inch color OLED display that shows an animated ROG logo by default, but can be reprogrammed to show just about anything, such as clan logos, live CPU temperature/load monitoring, etc. Another innovation that sets the Ryujin pump-block apart from every other Asetek cooler out there, is a tiny lateral-blower fan embedded into the block, which ASUS claims can bring down CPU VRM and M.2 SSD temperatures by up to 20°C.

The Ryujin series comes in two variants based on radiator size, the Ryujin 240 (120 mm x 240 mm radiator), and Ryujin 360 (120 mm x 360 mm radiator). These are 27 mm-thick aluminium radiators, which are ventilated by matte-black Noctua IndustrialPPC 120 mm PWM fans that are part of the package. These fans each spin between 450 to 2,000 RPM, pushing up to 121.8 CFM of air, with noise output up to 31 dBA. As we mentioned earlier, the product pages for both models mentions that the coolers only support AMD socket TR4, with full coverage for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper integrated heatspreader. This could help ASUS command a slightly high price, given that it's catering only to the market that can afford HEDT processors.

Tech Day slides leaked to the web by Kitguru provide a confirmation of how AMD is wiring out the additional two dies on the 24-core and 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2000-series MCMs on the socket TR4 platform. We had speculated that because the quad-channel DDR4 memory and PCIe interfaces are wired to two diagonally-opposite dies on AMD X399 chipset motherboards; in the interest of backwards compatibility, AMD could wire out memory and PCIe from just two out of four dies on the multi-chip module, and have the two additional dies seek memory and PCIe over the InfinityFabric interfaces.

The obvious trade-offs with this design choice is that latencies to the dies with indirect memory/PCIe access are higher, and that reflects heavily in AMD's own performance figures for comparing the 32-core 2990WX with the 16-core 2950X from the same generation. The 2990WX is "only" up to 64 percent faster than 2950X at Cinebench R15 nT, despite having double the number of cores. To its credit, the 2950X has higher clock-speeds (3.50 GHz nominal with 4.40 GHz boost) than the 2990WX (3.00 GHz nominal with 4.00 GHz boost). The presentation also puts out interesting bits of information such as AMD's own performance numbers showing 10-15 percent performance gains between the 2950X and the 1950X; and performance gains of the 2990WX over Intel Core i9-7980XE.

Noctua today expanded its line-up of premium-grade quiet 5V fans with new 200, 140, 120, 92, 80 and 40mm models. The new 5V versions of the existing award-winning NF-A20, NF-A14, NF-A12x25, NF-F12, NF-A9, NF-A8 and NF-A4x10 designs will be available both in 3-pin and 4-pin variants, the latter supporting PWM-based speed control. All fans include a USB power adaptor cable that allows them to run on USB host devices, power banks or USB power supplies.

"We've seen a growing demand for 5V fans from our industrial clients, the 3D printing community and DIY customers who seek to replace noisy 5V fans in devices such as DVRs or network and storage solutions," explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "Several years ago, 5V was a niche market, but today there are more and more devices using 5V fans and our PWM-enabled 5V fans give engineers unique options to increase customer satisfaction by using sophisticated speed control in order to achieve quieter operation."

Noctua today introduced three quiet CPU coolers for the LGA3647 socket of Intel's Xeon Scalable (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze) and Xeon-Phi processors. Coming in 140, 120 and 92mm form factors respectively, the new NH-U14S DX-3647, NH-U12S DX-3647 and NH-D9 DX-3647 4U cover all bases from large, ultra-high performance workstations all the way to compact 4U size servers. Thanks to their premium-grade Noctua fans, all three coolers are exceptionally quiet and ideally suited for use in noise-sensitive environments.

Noctua's Chromax line was introduced for hardware enthusiasts who don't dig the beige and tan color scheme on Noctua products. The Chromax family has grown over the years to include fans, heatsink covers, colored cables, and anti-vibration pads. Noctua has announced at Computex 2018 the addition of the NH-D15, NH-U12S, and NH-L9i CPU coolers to the Chromax line of products. Everything from the heatsink, fan, cables, and mounting parts will come in black. As usual, colored anti-vibration pads and heatsink covers will be available for consumers who desire to add some color to the CPU cooler. Additionally, Noctua also plans to expand the Chromax fan portfolio to include the NF-A20, NF-A14, NF-A12x25, NF-F12, NF-A9, and NF-A8 models.

We also got the opportunity to witness some of Noctua's latest accessories. First, there's the 24V to 12V DC-DC step-down converter which basically lets consumers run any Noctua 12V fan in 24V environments. The converter features support for PWM control and RPM monitoring. Nevertheless, it also allows voltage-based speed control since the output voltage scales with the input voltage. The nifty gadget supports fans up to 1A and operating temperatures up to 60°C. On another note, Noctua also showcased its eight channel PWM fan hub that allows users to control up to eight fans simultaneously. The hub draws power via a 4-pin PWM or SATA power cable. The rear side of the hub incorporates a magnet for easy installation on PC cases. One of the more peculiar accessories is the desk fan. With NF-A12x25 120 mm fan in the center, the prototype boasts a three-way Airflow Amplification System (AAS) which allegedly combines helix energy recovery, progressive ow acceleration, and Venturi-effect volume enhancement. The desk fan draws power from a USB port.

Noctua is preparing updated versions of its NH-U12, NH-U14S, NH-C14S, NH-D15, and NH-L9x65 CPU coolers. The cooling specialist took the opportunity to showcase the prototypes at their booth. The fifth generation of the NH-U12 will come with seven heatpipes and up to 37 percent more surface area than the previous NH-U12S. The CPU cooler will feature two NF-A12x25 120 mm fans in a push-pull configuration. Noctua also promises excellent memory, case, and motherboard compatibility. The company's next-generation 140 mm U-Type CPU Cooler will be based on its award-winning NH-U14S. Improvements include 30 percent more surface area and seven heatpipes instead of six. The heatsink's asymmetric design will allow for better PCIe clearance and 100 percent memory compatibility when in single fan mode. Noctua will update their 140 mm C-type CPU cooler as well. Based on the NH-C14S, the new iteration will provide improved and quieter cooling performance.

Although the NH-D15 is already a powerhouse of an air cooler, Noctua plans to kick it up a notch. The upcoming model will get the heatpipe treatment as well putting the total to seven instead of the six heatpipes on the previous iteration. The additional heatpipe provides up to 16 percent more volume and contact area between heatpipes and fins to further boost cooling performance. Noctua also had a 65 mm low-profile CPU cooler on display. With a footprint of 95 mm x 95 mm, the cooler is based on the NH-L9x65 and employs a NF-A9x14 PWM fan. It's been resdisgned to provide 100 percent memory and PCIe clearance with Intel motherboards, and on most AMD motherboards including the mini-ITX form factor. It will come with Noctua's award-winning SecuFirm2 socket that supports the AM4 socket out-of-the-box.

Noctua today presented its much-anticipated next-generation 120x25mm A-series fan and the complementary NA-SFMA1 adaptors that allow it to be used on 140mm based watercoolers. The new NF-A12x25 is the first fan made of Noctua's novel Sterrox LCP material and integrates the company's latest innovations in aerodynamic engineering in order to achieve an unprecedented level of quiet cooling performance. While the NF-A12x25 becomes the new flagship model in the 120mm range, the classic NF-P12 will be reissued in the streamlined, more affordable redux line.

"The NF-A12x25 is our most advanced fan today. We've spent more than 4.5 years developing it and it's been easily the most thorny, intricate development project we've completed so far," explains Lars Strömbäck (Noctua CTO):"In order to achieve our goal of surpassing our renowned NF-F12 and NF-S12A, we went for a completely different approach and had to use a tip clearance of only 0.5mm, which poses various new difficulties in manufacturing."

Noctua has started teasing for the upcoming launch of their latest-generation fan design, based in more than four years of development on new materials that shed some of PBT's known weaknesses. The new fan line was first announced at Computex 2017, and at that time, the development resources poured into the project were well over more than four years and 200 test designs (we already wrote an exhaustive piece on these new fans, if you want to know more or need a refresher).

Noctua says these new fans will be twice as good as their existing ones; the company showed at Computex 2017 how a single A-series fan achieved identical temperatures to a setup which used two NF-F12 fans on the same processor, workload, and heatsink. And you thought the NF-F12 were good already, right? There's no actual release date for now, but there's a teaser image of the packaging doing the rounds already - and if that's that far along finished, then we're certainly not that far away from release. Here's hoping pricing will be competitive - but perhaps it needn't be, considering the expected performance - and the fact that Sterrox, the compound used in their manufacturing, is four times more expensive than common PBT.

Noctua today introduced the long-awaited chromax editions of its most renowned 120mm and 140mm fan models as well as chromax line cables and heatsink covers for its award-winning NH-U12S and NH-D15 series CPU coolers. All the new chromax line products allow users to colour-customise their Noctua cooling systems in order to match popular build colour schemes.

"Noctua is an engineering-driven company: we pride ourselves on relentlessly tuning our products for maximum performance and quality rather than putting form before function, but of course we understand that many customers put an emphasis on build aesthetics these days," explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "With the new chromax line fans, cables and heatsink covers, we now offer a range of products that's ideal for those who care about looks just as much as about quality and performance."

Noctua today presented two updates to its range of quiet low-profile CPU coolers. Successors to the award-winning NH-L9a and NH-L12, the new NH-L9a-AM4 and NH-L12S models now support the AM4 socket of AMD's Ryzen processors. Whereas the NH-L9a-AM4 stands a mere 37mm tall, which makes it ideal for use in compact HTPCs or Small Form Factor cases that offer minimum clearance for CPU coolers, the slightly bigger NH-L12S comes equipped with the new NF-A12x15 PWM fan and combines excellent compatibility, surprising efficiency and remarkable flexibility.

"AMD has made a big impact on the market with its Ryzen architecture and the platform will become even more interesting for compact HTPC builds when the first Ryzen-based APUs are introduced next year," says Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "We're thus updating two of our award-winning low-profile models to support Ryzen's AM4 socket."

Noctua today updated its range of ruggedised 24V industrialPPC fans. Using the novel NE-FD4 motor driver IC that complies with the Automotive Electronics Council's highly rigorous AEC-Q100 failure-mechanism-based stress test qualification, the new Q100 revision NF-F12 (120mm) and NF-A14 (140mm) models complement the industrialPPC line's signature rigidity and IP67 ingress protection with extreme electrical robustness and sophisticated inrush current suppression. This makes them ideal not only for automotive applications but also for use in hostile or sensitive electronic environments.

"With its highly rigid polyamide construction and IP67-class water and dust protection, the industrialPPC line has opened up a wealth of new industrial markets for us since its introduction in 2014," explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "True to the industrialPPC's tagline of 'Protected Performance Cooling', we have now also toughened up these fans from an electronics point of view so that they are equally well protected against environmental and electrical hazards."

Noctua is stocking up inventories of its AMD Ryzen Threadripper-compatible NH-U14S-TR4-SP3 tower-type CPU cooler. A variant of the NH-U14S (pictured below), the cooler will be available from 12th August in the United States, through Noctua's eBay store. Other retailers will have stocks by the end of August. Noctua believes the NH-U14S features sufficient muscle to cope with the 180W TDP Threadripper processors, some of the lower variants come with 140W TDP. The TR4-SP3 variant comes with a slightly enlarged base, for better coverage of the large integrated heatspreaders of the Threadripper chips. The other Threadripper-compatible coolers in Noctua's lineup are the NH-U12S-TR4-SP3, and NH-U9-TR4-SP3.

A recent maelstrom has hit Noctua in social forums due to a then unverified, reported issue with manufacturing differences between fans of the company that have been built on Taiwan or China factories. The issue, first brought about by Reddit user Kendalf, left open some questions on cooling and noise deltas between Taiwan and China-made Noctua fans, while admitting that the issue could be with a particular batch/testing conditions/other unidentified variables. But the Internet is fantastic, and what was posted as a legitimate question was quickly turned into a pitchfork-handling mob crying "Noctua never again" and "Down to Noctua" (which really are one of the most innovative companies in the cooling space...)

Noctua today presented three high-end heatsinks for the TR4 and SP3 sockets of AMD's latest Ryzen Threadripper (X399) and Epyc platforms. The new TR4-SP3 versions of the award-winning NH-U14S, NH-U12S and NH-U9 coolers are tailored custom models that feature a larger contact surface as well as a SecuFirm2 mounting system for TR4/SP3. Supplied with Noctua's renowned NF-A15, NF-F12 and NF-A9 premium fans, the new coolers combine outstanding cooling performance with exceptional quietness of operation.

"A high-end platform usually calls for high-end cooling solutions and that's precisely the case with AMD's new Epyc and upcoming Ryzen Threadripper ecosystems", explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "We have therefore customized our award-winning NH-U14S, NH-U12S and NH-U9 coolers so that users can enjoy the performance and quietness of these proven premium heatsinks on the new AMD platforms."

Noctua, a company well-known for the performance and acoustic characteristics of their fans (and especially for their love-it-or-hate-it brown and tan fan color scheme) has showcased their next-generation A-series fans, which took the company more than four years and 200 test designs to achieve. This is surely a case of discovering how to not make a product in 200 different ways. Noctua only had to get it right once; and it would seem they did.

Noctua are promising unparalleled performance at the A-Series noise levels. The reasons for this are varied, but one of them - perhaps the most important - comes from the fact that Noctua has ditched PBT - the plastic most commonly used in this kind of products - for a completely new compound, which the company calls Sterrox. Sterrox is a liquid crystal polymer of the same family as Kevlar. This means it has an ordered molecular structure (whereas PBT manifests a chaotic one), which means Sterrox is a much more rigid compound. This helps the fans keep their shape after spinning for long periods of time - something which happens with PBT-made fans. The chaotic structure and lower rigidity means the material deforms due to the centrifugal forces, effectively elongating the fan blades (an effect dubbed impeller creep), which means usual fan designs have to take this into account, usually by increasing the gap between the frame and the fan blades. Noctua aimed for a 0.5 mm tip clearance (much lower than the usual 1.5 or 2 mm), which results in much better air and noise performance. A narrower gap means that less air leaks through it back to the front of the fan, which allows more air to be pushed through heatsinks and radiators. And the fact that the fan blades are more rigid means they don't suffer microscopic wobbles and vibrations on the surface when spinning - hence, quieter. But how good are these new fans, really?

Noctua showed off protoypes of variants of its various high-end CPU coolers, which come with support for Intel's Core X family socket LGA2066 processors. While LGA2066 has a higher pin-count, it has the same exact CPU cooler mount-hole spacing as LGA2011(v3), and as such, any LGA2011-compatible cooler should run on LGA2066. All Core i7 LGA2011(v3) chips are either 140W or below. Noctua on its part, is confident that that all its LGA2011(v3)-compatible coolers run on LGA2066 by default, and is willing to giveaway LGA2066-supporting SecuFirm 2 retention modules for free, for users of older Noctua heatsinks which can handle such high thermal loads.

In addition to its socket TR3/SP3 Threadripper-ready CPU cooler prototypes, Noctua showed off this prototype of a super compact socket AM4 CPU cooler, the NH-L9. Ideal for SFF builds, the cooler sits just 37 mm tall, and features a dense aluminium fin-stack which propagates along the plane of the motherboard, to which heat drawn from the base is fed by nickel-plated copper heat pipes. The heatsink is ventilated by an included NF-A9x14 PWM 92 mm fan.

Noctua at its Computex 2017 booth, showed off its very first socket TR4/SP3 (AMD Ryzen Threadripper) ready CPU cooler prototypes. These coolers are variants of Noctua's existing platforms - NH-U14S, NH-U12S, and NHU9, but come factory-fitted with socket TR4/SP3 retention modules, and large bases. The coolers also include new-generation PWM-ready variants of the NF-F12, NF-A15, and NF-A9 fans. All three are tower-type heatsinks, designed for clearance around the large CPU socket, and the practically non-existent gap between the socket and the memory slots, at least on motherboards we've seen so far.