One New Product and a LOT of Excuses
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
919 words · ~4 min read
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Linus Tech tips coverage of computex 2016 is brought to you by the Corsair
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lap dog the portable gaming control center that lets you use a full-size
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Mouse and mechanical gaming keyboard on your couch as well as MSI so here we are
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in the noct TOA Booth where they are showing off a product that has been
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three years in the making this my
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friends is the unnamed unlabeled
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successor to the nf12 fan and we don't
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know much about it other than that it is a balanced blade design so they're
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saying it's going to be perfect for radiators and heat sinks and that it has
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been an absolute to manufacture
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and the reason for that is that in order to achieve the well a few things so the
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air flow noise and reliability that they're going for they needed 0.5 millim
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of clearance between the blades and the outside of the frame the problem with
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that and uh our my friends that knock to us said that this was news to them too
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is that fans as they spin over time actually flatten out so in their
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reliability testing the blades were hitting the damn frame so it has been a
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complete nightmare to get the tolerances close enough to have a true successor to
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the nff 12 but they say they're close so
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hopefully it's happening pretty soon what they also have here is a way of
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improving the look of your existing Noctua heat sink so this doesn't look
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like it normally would no these are chromax covers so they're kind of these
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stealth metal covers that you can put over top of your existing nhd15 or your
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existing nhu 12s and they've got a couple of different variants they're
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showing off they've got a plain one and one that it looks like will be a bit
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more expensive with these little colored arrows that show through and that will
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ship with all of the chromax colors in the box so you can swap them out as you
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wish well hold on a second lonus I don't
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want to shroud for my heat sink Noctua hasn't released a heat sink like a
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performance heat sink in a million years what do they sit been on ass all day and
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the answer as far as I can tell is yes yes they do no I'm just kidding while
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they didn't bring any actual upcoming
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product they did bring a lot of excuses
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so these are five prototypes of
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different fin designs some that we've seen from noct toz competitors of
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Elsewhere in the market that basically demonstrate that yes we are looking into
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it but there's a variety of reasons to do with boundary layers and free
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streaming air and the speed of the air
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right next to the fin being significantly slower than further away from the fin which hurts thermal
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transfer and blah blah blah we we're trying all these things but the truth is
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compared to a flat fin they just don't work that well so in theory copper
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aluminum composite fins would help to spread out the heat more and would allow
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you to solder the fins directly to the heat pipes saving that nickel layer that
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would be a well a thermal barrier in practice it's very much more expensive
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and makes pretty much no difference we're talking 0. one of a degree they've
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also got an offset split fin design that breaks up that boundary layer halfway
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through each of the heat sink layers again the actual backflow from this
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design as well as this scoop so kind of
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like what you would put on the hood of your car this flow duct scoop design
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creates a situation where you actually have to throw so much more RPM at the
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problem that yes you're getting more performance but you're also ending up with a noisier product which as you guys
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are probably aware Noctua is not really that d for this guy right here they
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actually had a lot of Hope for this is oblique Groove patterns and has to do
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with kind of when the air gets sucked into a Groove It exits at a higher
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velocity and they figured maybe that would help but nothing conclusive so far
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and finally little you know golf ball type indentations and I think you've
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pretty much got the story so far so there you have it they have a better fan
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that they're finally bringing to us and that may actually if they can figure out
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how to make this one signal the solution to the problem with that active noise
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cancellation one I showed you guys two years ago and a bunch of excuses so
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thanks again to Corsair for sponsoring our trip to computex 2016 make sure you
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check out the lap dog at the link in the video description and thanks to MSI as
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well who's showing off their agis X desktop here at the show as well as
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their GTX 1080 gaming x8g got that Linked In the video
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description as well don't miss any of our computex coverage by making sure
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you're subscribed to lus Tech tips so hopefully you know where that button is
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and I will see you guys again next time