Noctua and RotoSub are working on a CPU cooler that employs active noise cancellation in its pursuit of silence. We saw an early prototype demoed at Computex last year, and an updated version was at this year’s show. Noctua has also posted a video of the latest design in action:
The noise-cancellation tech uses a magnetic field to generate minute vibrations in the fan blades. A microphone takes in the noise produced by the fan and then tunes the blade vibration to cancel it out. At least in the video, that approach seems to be effective at masking the fan hum, which admittedly seems a little on the loud side for a modern spinner. You can read more about the design here.
The cooler shown in the video looks a lot more polished than what we saw last year. It sandwiches a single, shrouded, 140-mm fan between a pair of radiator towers fed by six heatpipes. The radiators are shaped to avoid bumping into taller DIMMs, and the microphone is situated on the side of the radiator. Although the design is "almost completed," the finished product isn’t expected to hit mass production until the middle of 2014.
Noctua doesn’t mention a price, but we were told last year that adding noise cancellation would probably double the cost of the fan. The R-ANC will likely be priced in the same realm as exotic water coolers. Fittingly, perhaps, Noctua is also working on a noise-cancelling fan specifically for liquid cooling radiators. The 120-mm radiator fan is at an "earlier development stage," so I wouldn’t expect it to be available anytime soon.
Active noise cancellation is slick, but I can’t help but think it’s a little wasted on the CPU. Quiet cooling solutions abound, and most of the noise generated by modern rigs seems to come from fans onboard the graphics card. It will be interesting to see if noise cancellation eventually makes its way to GPU cooling.
This silent CPU cooler would be awesome for my home theater/gaming computer. Does anyone know the estimated price.
Enterprise will benefit, even a slight drop in noise is a relief for the employees
You know, when we work with 10+ screaming devices around us, its annoying & generally they have more
Totally, I hated the loud PC I had that heated up my whole room. It made me feel more miserable about work.
It would be great to have this tech on water coolers, GPUs and small CPU coolers for ITX… but on a huge tower like that, which is already quite silent compared to other stuff in the box, I dont see the point.
Curious how well this will work when the thing starts to get clogged with dust after a while. Or how well this will work if dust starts to get all over the microphone.
I know and understand that one should be blowing their computer out on a regular basis… but I also know that often times we do not clean out our machine as often as we should. Lets face it… sometimes it really is a PITA. But I am curious as to how dirt, cat hair, dust bunnies, spiders, and whatever other fun things that somehow tend to find their way into computer cases will affect this things ability to actively cancel out its own noise.
Also how will other noisy components inside the case affect this? If you are running an FX 5800 Ultra, will its vacuum cleaner noise levels be picked up by the mic and screw up its ability to cancel out noise and perhaps cause the exact opposite to happen. Obviously a FX 5800 is an extreme scenario, but you understand what I am saying. How will other potentially louder, noisier components affect this?
Lots of questions, so little answers currently, But I guess time will tell.
Also, does anyone remember the Vantec Tornados? lol fun times with those
Intake filters, HTF do they work?
Just like magnets (magic)
Price will be 1 Bitcoin.
It’s hard to really tell since I’m not seeing fps numbers before and after, but to be honest, the “buzz” sound character they remove after they implement “noise cancellation” is something that is not present in a good non-noise-cancellation setup.
I’m willing to be convinced though.
[/spcr geek mode]
I think any further improvements to the current fans will be marginal. That’s why Noctua is jumping into active noise cancellation. It looks promising, but who knows if by 2014 we may even be running passively cooled CPUs. 🙂
If they can mask the sound of a fan motor and the noise of the air flow it generates, then we could use just one 200CFM+ spinner for an entire system.
Edit: Of course, that generates issues with fault tolerance.
Taking bets on price?
$200
$1.00, Bob.
My wife and I are remodeling our new place and have been looking at ceiling fans.
Now this would be and excellent application to reduce fan noise! Too bad it’ll never happen in my lifetime.
I haven’t had to buy one, but a good ceiling fan should be silent. They are massive, so you should get plenty of airflow at a low RPM.
I dunno, a few years ago this sounded awesome, when RotoSub was demo’ing. Lately, though, nothing in my PC makes any noise!
I have a generic 25$ heatsinkfan from Coolermaster and I’ve never, ever heard it! Even the HSF on my 660 Ti is generally inaudible, and highly ignorable at high percentages!
Loud computers are often the product of poor build quality and choices.
Choice: Putting a two-stroke chainsaw engine in my case because I could.
Result: Somewhat noisy, BUT AWESOME!
It is depends what you are throwing into the system in question and how much volume you have to work with. It is much easier to manage noise and thermals if you stick with power-efficient components and avoid high-RPM HDDs. You cannot avoid using high-RPM chassis fans if you want to cram quad-SLI and dual-socket system into a 1U chassis or mini-ATX towers if you want to stick with air-cooling and avoid running into thermal issues.
I wonder if they aiming for very quiet but with better cooling for the SPCR crowd or high performance but quieter for the O/C crowd?
No reason why they can’t address both maybe but the tech maybe more suited to one of the above!
[quote<]double the cost of the fan[/quote<] Jumping Jiminy! Noctua fans are already a high-end product; now doubling the cost with noise cancellation. And I thought their products, like the NF-P12, with it's cut-outs on the fan blade to reduce turbulence, were over engineered. Maybe, Noctua should step up their game and start designing blades for wind generators. I'd bet they would make the quietest, most efficient, bird-safe generator blades on the planet.
I’m impressed, but not looking forward to the price.
The next fan they design will use “teleportation” technology to transport the noise to another place in the galaxy.
The following statement is true.
The above statement is false.
Use the sound waves to wick the heat off the heatsink. Come on, you know it’s possible. Anyone who’s anyone knows this.
Just make a silent fan, not a noisy one with this sort of gimmick.
I’m wondering how you and the author know that this is a noisy fan? Have you used a microphone and amplifier on a fan before and duplicated the frequency response and amplification/volume levels of the microphone, recording device and playback devices in order to make a valid comparison?
You make it too complicated. My point is simple. There’s no need for something like this if the fan is very silent in the first place.
And no, I don’t know if the fan is noisy or not.
The whole point of this tech is to make the fan quieter than what is currently accomplishable at the same airflow. They’re trying to push the envelope in Noise/Airflow ratio.
Some people are so resistive to change. And if you don’t like that the fan will cost twice as much, buy a different fan/cooler
No, but logic dictates that by it’s very nature it adds complexity to the equation, and simplicity beats this. A lot can go wrong, the speaker may very well get confused and ADD noise.
I know on my noise cancelling headphones, they work great: inside. But any sort of wind and the effect is far worse. Which means normal headphones, that produce sound without noise cancelling, are far better still for daily, grab-and-go use, even though in theory the noise cancelling ones should produce “cleaner” sound for my ears.
There are unintended consequences. Not saying it’s going to happen here, but in first-version products? It usually does.
/cynic
Watch the video. Their point is that the fan is noisy.
I’ll be first in line for this.
Line starts at 1:00am.