Linus Tech tips coverage of computex 2016 is brought to you by the Corsair
lap dog the portable gaming control center that lets you use a full-size
Mouse and mechanical gaming keyboard on your couch as well as MSI so here we are
in the noct TOA Booth where they are showing off a product that has been
three years in the making this my
friends is the unnamed unlabeled
successor to the nf12 fan and we don't
know much about it other than that it is a balanced blade design so they're
saying it's going to be perfect for radiators and heat sinks and that it has
been an absolute to manufacture
and the reason for that is that in order to achieve the well a few things so the
air flow noise and reliability that they're going for they needed 0.5 millim
of clearance between the blades and the outside of the frame the problem with
that and uh our my friends that knock to us said that this was news to them too
is that fans as they spin over time actually flatten out so in their
reliability testing the blades were hitting the damn frame so it has been a
complete nightmare to get the tolerances close enough to have a true successor to
the nff 12 but they say they're close so
hopefully it's happening pretty soon what they also have here is a way of
improving the look of your existing Noctua heat sink so this doesn't look
like it normally would no these are chromax covers so they're kind of these
stealth metal covers that you can put over top of your existing nhd15 or your
existing nhu 12s and they've got a couple of different variants they're
showing off they've got a plain one and one that it looks like will be a bit
more expensive with these little colored arrows that show through and that will
ship with all of the chromax colors in the box so you can swap them out as you
wish well hold on a second lonus I don't
want to shroud for my heat sink Noctua hasn't released a heat sink like a
performance heat sink in a million years what do they sit been on ass all day and
the answer as far as I can tell is yes yes they do no I'm just kidding while
they didn't bring any actual upcoming
product they did bring a lot of excuses
so these are five prototypes of
different fin designs some that we've seen from noct toz competitors of
Elsewhere in the market that basically demonstrate that yes we are looking into
it but there's a variety of reasons to do with boundary layers and free
streaming air and the speed of the air
right next to the fin being significantly slower than further away from the fin which hurts thermal
transfer and blah blah blah we we're trying all these things but the truth is
compared to a flat fin they just don't work that well so in theory copper
aluminum composite fins would help to spread out the heat more and would allow
you to solder the fins directly to the heat pipes saving that nickel layer that
would be a well a thermal barrier in practice it's very much more expensive
and makes pretty much no difference we're talking 0. one of a degree they've
also got an offset split fin design that breaks up that boundary layer halfway
through each of the heat sink layers again the actual backflow from this
design as well as this scoop so kind of
like what you would put on the hood of your car this flow duct scoop design
creates a situation where you actually have to throw so much more RPM at the
problem that yes you're getting more performance but you're also ending up with a noisier product which as you guys
are probably aware Noctua is not really that d for this guy right here they
actually had a lot of Hope for this is oblique Groove patterns and has to do
with kind of when the air gets sucked into a Groove It exits at a higher
velocity and they figured maybe that would help but nothing conclusive so far
and finally little you know golf ball type indentations and I think you've
pretty much got the story so far so there you have it they have a better fan
that they're finally bringing to us and that may actually if they can figure out
how to make this one signal the solution to the problem with that active noise
cancellation one I showed you guys two years ago and a bunch of excuses so
thanks again to Corsair for sponsoring our trip to computex 2016 make sure you
check out the lap dog at the link in the video description and thanks to MSI as
well who's showing off their agis X desktop here at the show as well as
their GTX 1080 gaming x8g got that Linked In the video
description as well don't miss any of our computex coverage by making sure
you're subscribed to lus Tech tips so hopefully you know where that button is
and I will see you guys again next time