Noctua shows cooler prototypes at Computex
Austria’s Noctua has shown its latest products on its stand in the Computex halls. The company is working on a successor to its recently introduced NH-D15. That successor must become asymmetric so as not to block pcie slots.
According to Noctua, the NH-D15 is a great success, with only one downside: on some motherboards, the first pcie slot is blocked by the large heat sink. The successor, of which Noctua showed a prototype, will have an asymmetrical design, so that the lock remains free. Noctua also developed a version with a single cooling tower as a successor to the U14S, which is also narrower on the left side to keep the PCIe slot free. The coolers get one or two 150mm fans.
The company is also working on a smaller cooler with 92mm fans, which could potentially be used in a 3u server. The 95 by 95 millimeter footprint makes the cooler, in D and U variant, suitable for mitx systems, among others. The low-profile coolers that Noctua showed, with a height of 65 mm, are also suitable for mitx systems. Finally, the manufacturer also made an improved cooler for AM1 systems. They get a hefty block of copper that is secured with screws instead of pushpins to dissipate heat, with a new 80mm fan on top.
Of course, the company also gave an update on its active noise canceling technology for processor coolers. During the first production runs, various problems appeared that had to be solved. For example, the magnets in the fan blades turned out to be demagnetized when plastic melts and the software still needs to be optimized. The technique works by means of a coil in the fan housing that attracts magnets in the blades very precisely. For example, anti-noise could be produced on the basis of input from a microphone in the cooler.
Finally, Noctua showed two more new projects. With the Cube heatpipes, the company wants to be able to accommodate more heatpipes in the contact block with the processor. Normally they are bent into a U-shape, which takes up a lot of space. The blocks at the ends allow more heat pipes to make contact with the CPU. The second project concerns a polyamide coating on the cooling fins of a fan to reduce turbulence noise. This dust-like finish is said to provide approximately 2dB(A) noise reduction.