alt Hacker NewsIf you need that kind of precision, yes.
But I don't think they really need that.
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This level of quality is why they have my business. We had a CI setup with rpi boards that needed fans (uart clock tied to cpu clock so heat meant slowing down and the uart dropped characters). I got tired of seeing random test failures on some board and driving up to the office to replace the fan that had failed. And they were loud and annoying. I ended up frustrated and expensing hundreds of dollars of noctua fans. Dead quiet, did a better job, and not even one ever failed on me.
I used to really like Noctua fans, for a while they were obviously the best fans by a significant margin.
But for all their tight tolerances and exotic materials and a high price to match, they generally don't outperform BeQuiet's more regular materials but use-focused fans that are half the price. Nor are they significantly better than Arctic's general purpose fans at a quarter the price.
It'd make more sense to just buy the fan optimized for the specific common purpose (airflow or radiator) than pay double for the Noctua for a more generalized fan, but is not the best at either common use case.
Seems like these days their target audience is those who believe their marketing materials about them being the best, instead of believing the benchmark performance data.
If they didn't go to these length, they wouldn't be the brand that they are. They would just be one of any other random fan manufacturer.
It's par for the course in the premium PC parts industry. It's overkill in a way that does not impact performance at all because gamers will pay for that.
If you're okay with some of your fans being noisy and/or inefficient, I'm sure you can work with flimsy tolerances.
Thermalright etc. have definitely shown that a slab of metal and some generic fans can be rather quiet and easily compete with Noctua at a fraction of the cost.
It's like the gold plated headphone jacks they used to sell to audiophiles.
They want them to be really silent. There's more details here: https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/nf-a12x25-technical-...
It's luxury watch engineering for gamers. You do not need it, but it's kind of charming when anyone competently takes a niche to its extreme, imho.
That said, on my last PC build I ended up buying Pure Wings 3, which are quite competitively silent at similar airflow and much cheaper.
And white. Because I do like silly pretty PCs, as long as they don't have RGB on.
https://eikehein.com/pc/pc2.webp