Noctuas fans… er, fans… have long complained about the company's firm stance on color. The original beige-brown palette is still popular, of course, but when the Austrian company began offering many of its coolers and fans in black, PC aestheticians hoped that white would soon be an option too. Well, not anymore, how a simple reply to a post on X shows that all development has come to a standstill and there are no plans to return.
Admittedly, there wasn't much hope from the start, as Noctua announced the white-themed project back in 2019, and the lack of significant news about its launch showed that Noctua wasn't particularly interested in moving forward with development. White PC components are a small niche compared to the vast ocean of black-finished items, but vendors like Corsair and Lian Li are happy to offer white versions of their regular models.
Noctua is a small company and its portfolio of fans and coolers is equally small, so they obviously felt that the investment in the project simply wasn't worth it, as the tweet confirms:
We have made the decision to focus all of our focus and resources on technical development projects such as the next generation 14cm fan, so the white fans have been put on hold and removed from our roadmap. At this point, it is unclear whether the project will be revived in the future or not.March 3, 2024
If you've long wanted the very best air cooler for your CPU or the quietest fans in your PC case, Noctua was pretty much the only choice, and one of its heatsink-fan combos still sits at the top of our list of the best high-performance fans. Final air solution.
However, Thermaltake and DeepCool also offer coolers that can keep up with Noctua in terms of performance, although the former's products are a lot cheaper. Since the market is very competitive, it makes sense to stop developing white fans and coolers.
Or is it? I mean, how hard is it to create a white version of a fan? Although color pigments affect the physical properties of plastic, this is not very important, and Noctua's designs do not rely on ultra-high speeds to achieve proper cooling, so the plastic is not subjected to significant stress.
The fact that Noctua issued four years Reaching this point suggests to me that things weren't particularly interesting in the project to begin with.
In other words: the presentation of white fans and coolers at the Computex trade fair in 2019 seems to have been more of a marketing exercise than a serious development. At least in my eyes. If you've been waiting for a white NH-D15, it's time to look elsewhere, as I strongly suspect Noctua won't be restarting development any time soon.
