The Best-Looking CPU Cooler! - Noctua Chromax Black

[Origami Cactus]

2 minutes ago, Zberg said:

I did not know you could do that!

Woops sorry for spreading misinformation, you were right! I re-checked, and it turns out that they were just the heatsink covers, but local shop had just named them wrong, my bad.

[ShinyAkko]

Any ideas on if the orange corner covers will be available individually? They'd compliment my Gigabyte GPU nicely if I could put them on my already existing case fans.

[maksakal]

10 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

No?

Atleast in my country you can buy the heatsink separately.

Heatsink with covers = 50€

2x fans (20 each) = 40€

total 90€, so only a little more than a standard cooler.

I've been looking at the SKU list and haven't been able to find a SKU for what you are describing. Even then, they would be giving the covers away for less then half the price.

Maybe a retailer which takes the fans out the packaging or something, but that raises the question, who has a market for those weirdly shaped A15 fans? And why go through all that effort just to break even or maybe even lose money.

Sorry to say so but I have a hard time believing this.

[maksakal]

Noctua's site got slashdotted by LTT.

Would be nice if we could get black 40mm fans too. I use those with 3D printed brackets to cool the VRM and M.2 SSD's.

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, Zberg said:

I actually hate the little ridges on the bequiet fans, I think they look like ruffles chips and cheap.  Incidentally, I am getting a DR4 for my mini-itx build, bc the damn thing does just look good (overall) and performance is fantastic.

 

Regardless, DRP4 has been making a killing in that if you wanted the BEST in air cooling, it was either the DRP4 or D15.  The D15 would require the extra step of getting separate costly chromax stuff worsening the value of the product (or looking terrible with base model).  If you wanted a one step, slick looking, black-matching everything install, the DRP4 was the clear easy pick.  Now people no longer have to do the " i WOULD get a D15 but its ugly AF" and they can buy one that actually looks good.  I have no clue how it took noctua this long to make this jump, as they are probably going to make a fortune off this move.

 

 

 

 

Ridges aren't there for decoration you know. Also, until you actually hold one in hand you'll never understand how heavy they are and how chunky the plastic of blades is compared to most other fans.

[spartaman64]

3 hours ago, Fasauceome said:

yeah but at the same time

 

it creates a bit of a disconnect with the actual variance. In this video it would be more accurate to show that the results are very similar rather than one being superior, as there is actually little variance and therefore the gaps in the results are a bit artificial.

 

3 hours ago, Enderman said:

It's actually called misleading graphs, and is something that is taught not to do in elementary school.

The point of a graph is to represent the data visually, which means literally making them almost the same length when there is almost no difference between the data.

You're supposed to grasp that there ISN'T a big difference between them, otherwise it's just misleading.

You NEVER start a graph not at 0, and if you're trying to emphasize a marginal difference in data then you put a break in the graph and clearly point out to the audience that the difference is shown amplified.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_graph

yep i was taught to use the zig zag thingy in high school science classes because sometimes the graphs wont even fit on the paper if you dont or you have to use some crazy units like each square is 1000 liters or something

[Zberg]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Ridges aren't there for decoration you know. Also, until you actually hold one in hand you'll never understand how heavy they are and how chunky the plastic of blades is compared to most other fans.

That's all fine.  Like I said I did pick one (DR4) up for my mini itx build as now and then while rendering the AMD stock fan cranks up a little too loud and its annoying.  I like the way the actual heatsink block looks, and it clearly is a good performer.  When its off and I can see the fan, I think it looks ugly (just the fan).  Noctua fans dont have ridges and they are the best in the business, so I think bequiet doesnt really NEED them.  I realize this is all a very minor and stupid point, and I am truly, ridiculous  

[Energycore]

Great job Linus, you crashed Noctua's servers

[BaneWilliams2]

**Cries in Australian**

 

Seriously, we have a tonne of tech enthusiasts here, we punch well above our population weight in tech purchasing power, we are closer and cheaper to ship to than the USA when dealing with a chinese product, and we finally after years of complaining, have an Amazon front page.

 

So..... why? I'd love to purchase this, but as it is I need to do so from the USA and ship it from the USA to here, which is pointless. Noctua gear is sold at all our high end tech stores, the distribution is already there....

 

I don't mean to be a giant complainy pants, but when I see that list of amazon sites I can purchase it from, it hurts

[victoriasecrets]

Why not test using the same fans on each heatsink? There won't be varience then

[maksakal]

Here in NL competition between webshops means low prices and next day delivery is the standard. Amazon is horrible, their prices are nowhere near competitive, their customer services are not on par with what we are used to here and shipping takes too darn long!

When I consult a pricewatch Amazon is ussualy somewhere in the middle of the list with the top 3 easily 10 to 20 euro's cheaper.

Ordered one, price 100 euro's (vs 80 euro's for the non black) and it will be delivered next week.

@Noctua Please next time don't do an Amazon exclusive.

[RejZoR]

7 hours ago, Zberg said:

That's all fine.  Like I said I did pick one (DR4) up for my mini itx build as now and then while rendering the AMD stock fan cranks up a little too loud and its annoying.  I like the way the actual heatsink block looks, and it clearly is a good performer.  When its off and I can see the fan, I think it looks ugly (just the fan).  Noctua fans dont have ridges and they are the best in the business, so I think bequiet doesnt really NEED them.  I realize this is all a very minor and stupid point, and I am truly, ridiculous  

Frankly, Noctua disappointed me every time I used them. Especially from fans side of things. Granted, experience was from some years ago, but their highly praised mounting system felt so wonky even when it was fully tightened on the socket compared to any other vendor. The fan was releasing weird resonating noise. And their color schemes were ugly the entire time. Like 2-3 years ago I bought a 40mm fan from them, all fancy with accessories in a box and stuffed with fancy acronyms for their "features" and in the end it was a whiny little crappy fan that was so bad in almost everything but airflow that I replaced them with years old 40mm Noiseblocker fans. I later bought bunch of cheap Gelid 40mm fans and they looked cheap, but given they were basically half the price of Noctua and still quieter, it didn't really bother me. It's always such "ugh" experience with Noctua I really don't regard them highly in any way. BeQuiet on the other hand, I never considered them for anything and always regarded them as some sort of B grade brand for some reason. Until I got their Dark Power 11 Pro 750W PSU and noticed how good the SilentWings 3 fan is in it. Have been running entire case with SilentWings 3 for few years now and they are amazing fans. Nice looking, really sturdy with huge airflow and low noise footprint. I now regard them almost the highest among all vendors of cooling because they have really high quality products that I could actually experience. Where with Noctua, it was a disappointment basically every time so I just straight avoid them now. The visuals of those ridges on the back of SilentWings 3 blades are the least of my concern when everything else is top notch.

[Spotty]

Woah there were a lot of ads and product placement in this video.

 

Not including the ad from youtube...

• Sponsored video from Noctua
• Madrinas Coffee product placement
• LTT water bottles product placement
• LTT Swacket product placement
• LTT underwear product placement
• LTT Graphics Card shirt product placement (wall)
• LTT Constellation shirt product placement (worn by Linus)
• LTT mouse mat product placement (desk)
• LTT hat (behind Linus on the desk)
• LTT Lanyard (desk)
• Glasswire ad spot
• LTT mouse mat product placement (kitchen set)
• Promoting a different LTT video
• LTT mouse mat again (workshop)
• More LTT water bottle product placement (in B roll shots of the coolers)
• More LTT water bottle product placement (in the RF chamber)
• LTT water bottle/merch ad with link to LTT Merch store
• Displate ad spot
• LTT Merch product placement in Displate ad spot (Dennis & David)
• Promoting a different LTT video again
• Amazon affiliate links in video description
• if you play this video backwards you can hear a faint voice in the background saying "Browse privately with Private Internet Access".

 

 

I understand you have staff to pay, I really do... But even Michael Bay would think this is too much product placement (needs more explosions though). 

 

@LinusTech I thought in sponsored videos you didn't do ads for other companies? The excessive merch product placement is one thing, but I was surprised to see the ads for Glasswire and Displate in a sponsored video for Noctua. There's also no other video for today when you usually say that sponsored videos are in addition to regular videos and don't replace them.

While it does have the Sponsored banner at the start of the video, there's no mention in the Youtube video title or video description that this is video is an ad (or "Showcase") for Noctua. Could fix the title by changing it to "The Best-Looking CPU Cooler! - Noctua Chromax Black Showcase".

[LukeSavenije]

13 hours ago, Velcade said:

Ugly products?!  Embrace the brown.   Love me some Noctua

finally, someone who buys the real noctua

[porina]

 

Just arrived from Amazon UK. Finally I can get rid of AIO pump vibration.

[SenKa]

21 hours ago, Fasauceome said:

So, when did your graphs not start at 0? I was a bit confused during the comparisons

In these cases I believe its because the data before it is literally impossible to measure. Your zero point is not 0 because under no reasonable circumstances will you be in a 0DBA room for noise testing nor will your CPU idle at 0 degrees.

 

When your zero point is not 0, measuring data before it statistically is the same as insinuating that the measurement is negative up until said zero point.

[Fasauceome]

6 minutes ago, SenKa said:

In these cases I believe its because the data before it is literally impossible to measure. Your zero point is not 0 because under no reasonable circumstances will you be in a 0DBA room for noise testing nor will your CPU idle at 0 degrees.

 

When your zero point is not 0, measuring data before it statistically is the same as insinuating that the measurement is negative up until said zero point.

But then in that case, why graph it? If the graph is meant to show a quantitative difference on a normalized scale, and you don't even have a normalized scale, then I think it would make more sense to display the figures in a different way

[porina]

13 minutes ago, SenKa said:

In these cases I believe its because the data before it is literally impossible to measure. Your zero point is not 0 because under no reasonable circumstances will you be in a 0DBA room for noise testing nor will your CPU idle at 0 degrees.

Good point, but I think it is reasonable to draw sound levels down to 0 dBA. This is meant to indicate the threshold of human hearing. For noise level measurement, there is a rule of thumb, if the unwanted noise is 10 dB lower than the sound you are trying to measure, it is generally considered insignificant in contribution.

 

Having said that, measuring low level noise is difficult even if you can exclude environmental noise. Electrical noise of the measurement system can become dominant over acoustic noise. I currently have access to a fully anechoic chamber at work. With the measurement equipment I have, I can only show the sound level in it is less than about 10 dBA. The equipment simply can't read any lower due to electrical noise. I haven't measured it, but I suspect my house late at night with doors shut can be almost as quiet.

 

Also it may help to give some context to dB scale which is not linear. 3 dB change is a double/halving in power. 6 dB change is a double/halving in level. In subjective terms, 3 dB is considered to be the smallest change that is generally noticeable. You can hear smaller changes. For example, if you played a continuous tone and changed it by 1 dB, you can probably hear that. But a 1 dB change in more complex sound like music, you probably wouldn't notice it. Sound level measurement in dBA isn't perfect either. It doesn't entirely take into consideration that different sounds are different, so take it with some caution if deciding how annoying something might sound. A high pitch whine at the same level as a wind noise will sound much worse!

 

Temperature is more tricky, but I think it should be extended down at least to typical ambient to indicate some level of increase.

[SenKa]

27 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

But then in that case, why graph it? If the graph is meant to show a quantitative difference on a normalized scale, and you don't even have a normalized scale, then I think it would make more sense to display the figures in a different way

Because you do have a natural 0 (a requirement to make a valid graph), it is just not a numeric 0. The 0 point of the graph does not affect the data being portrayed visually, but starting the graph at 0 would be mathematically incorrect as I stated earlier. I can still very easily discern that the black U12S was between 1 and 2 DBA quieter, and roughly 2c cooler; thusly the graph is valid as meaningful valid data can be quickly pulled from it.

 

Basically: Starting from numerical or natural 0 does not matter from a visual perspective, but for true correctness from a mathematical standpoint the editor was correct by starting from the natural 0 of the data set, not numerical 0.

 

10 minutes ago, porina said:

Good point, but I think it is reasonable to draw sound levels down to 0 dBA. This is meant to indicate the threshold of human hearing. For noise level measurement, there is a rule of thumb, if the unwanted noise is 10 dB lower than the sound you are trying to measure, it is generally considered insignificant in contribution.

That is fair, but at the same time I believe the point was that they did not want to include ambient sound in their data set and started from ambient in whatever room they were in. I seem to remember a video where they explained this was their ideology, but couldn't tell you what or when.

 

10 minutes ago, porina said:

Temperature is more tricky, but I think it should be extended down at least to typical ambient to indicate some level of increase.

I think the indication is fairly obvious, but not going down to ambient does deviate it from the way they graphed sound so I am going to agree with you that they should have extended to ambient.

 

Overall the biggest sin is not including the variance of measurement in their graph, by far.

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, porina said:

Temperature is more tricky, but I think it should be extended down at least to typical ambient to indicate some level of increase.

For measuring temperature such as for CPU cooler efficiency you could (and imo should) measure the delta over ambient and start the graph at 0°C.

 

The temperature graph shown in the LTT video is pretty useless since it doesn't even state what the ambient temperature was. Was it in a 20°C air conditioned room on an open test bench or was it in a 40°C closed case?

Edited October 9, 2019 by Spotty

[maksakal]

Can you guys please stop this whining about the graphs? If you can't read and interpret numbers it's probably your or your parents mistake. If you would graph from 0 you would end up with 4 lines which visually look almost the same. The range they picked is a good trade off between readability and emphasis on the point being made.

So who cares?! Linus literally says the minor difference is probably due to manufacturing deviations. This isn't a vs. between manufacturers, it's just a comparison between 2 products from the same manufacturer. It's not like they're trying to make one product good over the other. The question being asked is whether the coating makes any difference and the answer is no.

If the only thing you take out a 10 minute video is a graph which is being shown for 2 seconds, there's something seriously wrong with you.

[Ankerson]

I have a D15 Chromax coming for my main system, will use the original D15 in another machine. 

 

I have Black Chromax fans coming for the case too and for the old D15 for when I swap it out to the other machine.

 

Was just waiting for the release to make the switch to the black fans.

[Spotty]

24 minutes ago, Ankerson said:

I have a D15 Chromax coming for my main system, will use the original D15 in another machine. 

 

I have Black Chromax fans coming for the case too and for the old D15 for when I swap it out to the other machine.

The normal (non-LTT) Chromax fans don't come with the orange corners though do they?
Do you think you'd go with the orange corners on the CPU and just use the black (or another colour) on the case fans or would you keep the CPU cooler fans black to match the case fans?

I'm not sure if I would like having the mismatched colours or if I would like it to have the CPU fans to stand out a little more

Or you could just unicorn vomit it and have a different colour on every corner.

[Ankerson]

14 minutes ago, Spotty said:

The normal (non-LTT) Chromax fans don't come with the orange corners though do they?
Do you think you'd go with the orange corners on the CPU and just use the black (or another colour) on the case fans or would you keep the CPU cooler fans black to match the case fans?

I'm not sure if I would like having the mismatched colours or if I would like it to have the CPU fans to stand out a little more

Or you could just unicorn vomit it and have a different colour on every corner.

No they don't.

 

I am going to go with all black or maybe red corners.

 

I have a black and red color thing in my case.

[porina]

1 hour ago, maksakal said:

If you would graph from 0 you would end up with 4 lines which visually look almost the same.

That is exactly the point many are trying to make. Differences were minor.

 

1 hour ago, maksakal said:

If the only thing you take out a 10 minute video is a graph which is being shown for 2 seconds, there's something seriously wrong with you.

It being shown for 2 seconds makes it worse. You hardly have time to read the labels, look at which is longest and it's gone unless you go back and hit pause. The perception is based on size so a long bar looks like it is a LOT better than a short bar when you do charts like this. A similar bad practice, not used here, is to scale a 2 dimensional illustration to represent something. As area increases with the square, doubling the length results in a misleading bigger area increase.