Noctua’s fanless CPU cooler is finally close to launching, with the Austrian company tweeting on Sunday that it’s “coming very soon!”
In an email, Noctua also confirmed that “The cooler is indeed still on track for Q2. Pricing will be disclosed at launch.”
The company first introduced the idea for its “Passive CPU Cooler” at 2019’s Computex trade show. The product essentially nixes the fans on a standard CPU cooler and instead bulks up the metal heatsink to include bigger aluminum fins capable of distributing the heat.
The prototype unit from Noctua ended up being quite large, weighing in at 3.3 pounds. But on the plus side, it generated no sound. Hence, the fanless design should appeal to PC builders who want a quiet desktop rig. No fans also means potentially less dust buildup. At most, Noctua’s cooler can run a CPU at 120 watts in an entire fanless case. If the desktop rig has some fans, then the threshold rises to 180 watts.
The big question is whether the product can truly keep the CPU cool (or at least cool enough). In 2019, Noctua demoed the prototype on a fanless desktop case built with an Intel Core i9-9900K processor running at 95 watts. Although quiet, the Intel processor still got pretty hot at 92 to 95 degrees celsius. But this occurred while the PC was running a CPU stress-test workload.
Noctua previously planned on releasing the Passive CPU Cooler in Q1, but the company delayed the launch until Q2. In an interview with RelaxedTech, Noctua said one challenge has been mass-producing the unconventional CPU cooler in a “reasonably cost-efficient way.”
