 My friends, Noctua has done it. They have finally given us what we asked for. Higher RPM and therefore higher performance fans with the same outstanding Noctua technology, warranty and build quality, and in black. Instead of poop brown and vomit tan. A global leader in tech recruiting is celebrating geek pride by giving away 10 amazing tech prizes. For more info visit the modus facebook page or modus.com But if it were as simple as, wow they released those fans Linus really likes in a different color. You wouldn't be getting a full video about it, you'd be getting a tweet or something. No, these black fans are part of Noctua's all new industrial PPC or protected performance cooling lineup. They feature similar designs to my favorite two models from their traditional retail lineup. But they have some upgrades that allow them to deliver even better performance and longevity. So first up, the construction material has been upgraded from polybutylene terephthalate to some kind of fiberglass reinforced polyamide. This allows the structural components of the fan anyway to survive temperatures of up to 140 degrees Celsius. As if any other part of a PC would still be working at that point. So maybe not that interesting, but what is interesting about it is that Noctua sees the application for these fans in other industries. Including automotive, aeronautics and home appliances as well. So who knows, maybe that will come in handy. Next, we get a supertastic three-phase motor design that unlike traditional fan motors, provides nearly continuous power to the blade assembly rather than torquing it hard, then letting it rely on its own momentum to get another push. This improves smoothness and reduces vibration and power consumption at the same time. Next, we get IP52 dust and water resistance or IP67 dust and water proofness. Depending on which skew you go for, with the badass IP67 ones being obviously more expensive. This makes the new PPC fans ideal for use in what Noctua is describing as challenging conditions. Although, I mean, you know, I guess being rained on is a condition that I'd consider to be challenging for a normal fan, or maybe even more than challenging, like ridiculous. The last change, oh yeah, more on that last bit later. The last change is the only one that I don't much care for. Noctua has increased the running speeds from 1500 RPM to 2000 or even 3000 RPM, depending on the skew compared to the standard operating speed of 1500 RPM for the regular retail models. This means that with regular low speed adapters, which by the way are not included in the box, but you can buy them your own multi-packs of them along with Y-cables extensions and anti-vibration mounts and all that stuff. That means that it's harder to reach a speed that I find comfortable with just one of those normal adapters. Thank goodness for PWM control though, I was able to get these down to a level that I found satisfying. So thumbs up for that. And it does all of this while maintaining the 150,000 hour mean time between failure and six year warranty of the regular fans. Now, I mentioned that these were my favorite fan models, but I didn't really mention why. Much fuss gets made about airflow versus pressure optimized fan designs and putting the right fans in the right places. But my problem with that is that I might change my configuration at some point, so I would like to have whatever is most versatile. A pressure optimized design like the NF-F12 will perform quite well in an open air situation and rock the house in a restrictive situation like if it's up against a heat sink, radiator or restrictive fan drill. That's why I prefer pressure optimized fans and I prefer noctua's over other ones because they just plain old kick ass. I don't even understand most of the technology behind them, but they're well built, perform like nobody's business, undervolt gracefully or at least lower their speed gracefully and aside from looking like rubbish, the normal ones anyway, are the best fans on the market. I guess I should mention why I prefer the A14, it's because it has a square frame, so it's much better for radiator mounting in a little bit, again, more versatile and easier to find spots for it. But that's why these are so exciting. Subjectively using them, they're obviously louder, meant for industrial environments, but for all the other benefits, I will deal with the slight inconvenience of needing to re-kajigger my fan speed controller to reach my target sub 1000 rpm running speeds. And frankly, most people aren't the kinds of quiet freaks that I am, so y'all are likely to even be bothered by this and may even consider it to be a big advantage that they are able to run at higher rpns. Now I said I'd elaborate on the water and dust resistance, so here we go. I grabbed one of the IP67 2000 rpm models that noctua shipped me and decided it was time for it to go for a swim. As a control, I grabbed an old NFP12 and put it in the same bucket. I left my camera running to see how long each of the fans would survive underwater. Now one thing that was a little bit confusing at first was the way that the older fan simply spun slower due to the water resistance, while the industrial PPC fan would start and stop to protect itself from damage. This submerged scenario is unlikely to ever actually occur, and if it did, the rest of whatever the fans attached to would pretty much be dead anyway, but the good news is that it brought our attention to a cool feature that'll be great in the real world as well. Like if a wire gets caught in a fan or something like that, your fan is more likely to protect itself. Very cool. Anyway, back to the water. Long story short, the water resistant fan lived, the other one didn't. Our hypothesis that noctua doesn't just randomly make crap up when they're doing their marketing materials has been confirmed once again. Now, you may have noticed that I've been calling this fan black all this time, but it actually still has brown accents, and normally this is the point where I'd be like, yeah, whatever, brown fan, master race, anyway, but actually that's not going to happen because I saved one more surprise for you guys at the end here. Even the little brown accent anti-vibration mounts can be taken off, so you're left with a completely clean-looking black fan. Bollin'. Just be ready to pay through the nose for these bad boys because they are extremely expensive. As usual, speaking of expensive, the pricing and availability for this product is in the video description. 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