Noctua's passive cooler is 'coming soon' to put an end to case fans

Noctua fanless CPU cooler prototype at Computex 2019

(Image credit: Noctua)

Noctua's highly anticipated passive cooler is "coming very soon", the company has said in a tweet. Responding to curator of all things passive, FanlessTech, Noctua has confirmed that its passive cooler is finally happening after multiple delays.

I first saw Noctua's passive prototype back at Computex 2019. The Austrian company famed for its love 'em or hate 'em fan designs and excellent performance was promising a passive cooler that can deal with many of the top gaming chips at the time. It's able to handle 120W, and that's without any case fans.

Coming very soon! ;-)May 16, 2021

That's a pretty tempting offer, and Noctua has only since sweetened the deal, saying PC builders should "prepare to be surprised" by how well it performs.

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Good things come to those who wait, and we have had to do a fair bit of waiting following a handful of delays. That said, the cooler went into mass production late last year/early this year, with a view to launch by the second quarter.

If you're wondering why you'd even want a passive cooler, Noctua's Jakob Dellinger explains all that in an interview with RelaxedTech:

"The key challenge is that for a passive cooler to be truly effective, design parameters such as fin pitch and fin thickness need to be quite different," Dellinger says. "You need a certain pitch to get low enough flow resistance for sufficient natural convection and a certain fin thickness in order to get the mass that is required for absorbing enough thermal energy. This means that different manufacturing machinery is required, e.g. much stronger stamping presses, etc. Getting this sorted in a reasonably cost-efficient way was quite a challenge."

"... There’s a certain beauty and simplicity to going completely fanless rather than just running slow fans, there’s no real possible point of failure, less dust build-up, and of course, the bliss of complete silence," Dellinger notes.

If any of that sounds good to you, keep an eye out for the Noctua passive cooler over the coming months. I think it's really happening this time!

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.