Noctua's iconic beige and brown PC fan now comes in a slightly less iconic all-black version for PC builders who can't stand the original colour
Overview & Key Takeaways
It's a bit more versatile but a bit less interesting to me.
Noctua's NF-A12x25 G2 is our pick for the best PC fan for good reason. It delivers great airflow, no matter what RPM you run it at, and it's quiet to boot. If the only thing stopping you from picking some up until now was its love-it-or-hate-it colourway, I've got good news for you.
On the Noctua site right now, you can spot the 'Chromax Black' model in one or two PWM models, though you have to get the beige/brown color if you want the low-speed LS-PWM model.
As Noctua points out on the website, there's no need for it to change its award-winning formula here. The black fans operate exactly like the standard ones, complete with a Progressive Bend impeller design, a Centrifugal Turbulator, Sterrox liquid-crystal polymer impeller, and more tech that I barely understand. The bottom line is that these fans are mighty good. We know that from testing them.
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Thanks in part to a genuinely tiny gap between the fan blades and their housing, we noticed these little fans have "absurdly impressive performance, even at low RPM". We spotted in our testing that it's not the quickest of the fans we've tried, but it's among the best-performing anyway.
Unfortunately, though, this new colorway does not do away with one of the biggest downsides of choosing Noctua—the price. On Amazon, the black model is the exact same price as the beige one, at $35. At that price, you can almost get entire sets of PC fans for just a single G2 model, and given you might want to put upwards of five in a case, that's an awful lot of cash.
(Image credit: Noctua)
Still, if you want the absolute best PC fans right now, and don't really like Noctua's classic color theming, the black variant certainly gives you more customisation room. You can even pick up the 140mm NF-A14x25 GW in black, too.
Noctua says its colored variants are quite difficult to build, recently arguing it's "less like painting a wooden fence...And more like changing the color of a carbon-fibre Formula 1 part". That's because it needs to min-max tip clearance and carefully analyse what the coloring pigment could do to performance.
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If you want a white and black build, or perhaps a sleek all-black one, I do think the old colors would perhaps mess with the aesthetics a little, even if the black model isn't quite as iconic in my eyes.
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