Noctua Fan Products:

      As with all of the parts we will be using today, our goal is to reduce or eliminate noise without compromising performance.  If your only goal is to reduce noise the solution is as simple as removing the active cooling! Unfortunately the type of system that will run well with no additional active cooling is probably not a Club Overclocker build. 

There are a lot of fans on the market promising to reduce noise.  Our choice for replacing the active cooling fans in this build is Noctua out of Austria.  Noctua offers a complete line of cooling products that offer both high quality construction and sound optimized design.  The main reason we have decided to go with Noctua stems from their use of self-stabilizing oil-pressure bearings and the sound optimized blade design in all of their fan products.  When you take their 6 year warranty into account and you have one of the finest near silent fan solutions available today.

     Noctua was kind enough to provide enough fans to cover both the case and any additional active cooling that may be needed by the CPU heatsink.  Each of the fans comes solidly packaged in Noctua's unique color scheme.

     The same unique color scheme is carried through the components.  This earthy brown color scheme stands out and will likely not match anything else you have.  Once installed I find the fans look expensive and different without becoming an eyesore.

Specifications:

NF-S12-1200

     Each of the Noctua fans comes with a set of mounting screws or noise dampening silicon mounts, a 12 v adapter and the 4 pin noise adaptors (the U.L.N.A is shown here with the 120 mm).  Each of the fans has a long sleeved cable run attached that should reach most controllers.

Lets take a closer look at the Noctua fan technologies as shown on the Noctua website:

Noctua Raised Blade Design

"Current silent fans frequently employ conventional blade geometries, which were developed for higher speed ranges and significantly lose efficiency at lower rotation speeds. The Noctua Raised-Blade-Design of the NF-R8 series was developed by the Austrian Institute for Heat-Transmission and Fan Technology (Österreichisches Institut für Wärmeübertragung und Ventilatorentechnik, ÖIWV) and specifically tailored to 80mm fans with extremely low rotation speeds. The result is a performance improvement of up to 10% compared to conventional blade geometries.

"Both the angle of attack and the design of the blade area of the NF-R8 rotor are optimised for maximum airflow and minimum noise emission at speed ranges below 1800RPM. Raising the leading edge above the rotor hub and lowering the trailing edge below the bottom of the rotor hub results in an extended profile chord length, which compensates for the reduction in blade surface caused by the steeper angle of attack and hence increases the overall blade force. The continuous radial increase of the blade curvature towards the blade tips ensures sufficient static pressure despite of the slow rotation speeds. A significant reduction in noise emission is achieved through the rounding of the fan blades towards the rotor hub as well as the rounding of the rotor hub itself. This way, the NF-R8 is significantly more quiet than other high end silent fans at the same performance thanks to its specific optimizations for ultra low noise application." ~Noctua

SSO Bearings

     "Thanks to an optimized principle of operation, the self-stabilizing oil-pressure bearing (SSO bearing) of the Noctua NF-S12 and NF-R8 series surpasses current types of ball, sleeve or liquid bearings in terms of long-term stability and quietness.

     "The rotary motion of the axis generates pressure upon the special oil enclosed within the bearing. This causes the build-up of a dynamic pressure field that centres and stabilises the axis within the bearing shell. While conventional liquid bearings employ the principle of hydrodynamic pressure too, the SSO bearing is equipped with an additional magnet that supports the self-stabilisation of the rotor axis. This allows for a faster, more precise and more reliable centring of the rotor axis and thus increases the long-term stability and quietness of the bearing: When the fan starts, the dynamic pressure field of the liquid bearing needs to build up first, which results in an initial precession of the axis, the so called gyro effect. This amounts to an increased abrasion until the axis is stabilised through the build-up of the dynamic pressure field, which may by and by lead to increased noise emission and bearing defects. Because of this, the SSO bearing possesses a built in magnet, whose field ensures the immediate self-stabilisation of the rotor and hence reduces the gyro effect. In addition to the stabilisation during the start-up phase of the fan, the supporting magnet allows for a more exact centring of the axis within the bearing shell and thus further reduces bearing resistance, abrasion and noise emission." ~Noctua