 Linus Tech Tips coverage of Computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital. Our trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance, and our trusted retail partner is NCIX.com. Now we talk about Noctua products a lot, but they don't really release that many new products all at once for the most part. But we've got Jacob here from Noctua to tell us about a whole bunch of crazy stuff that's going on in their booth. So why don't you tell us about these yellow fans first? Yes, it's with pleasure. First of all, the yellow color is just because they are CNC mock-up prototypes. They will have the normal Noctua color when they're ready. They are new additions to our A-Series fans. We had 114, 92 Slim, 60 and 40 in the past. And these are going to be 20 cm, 92 mm with 25 mm thickness and 80 mm. They will have all the features of the A-Series you already know, like flow acceleration, channels or SSO2 bearings. Awesome. So basically we're getting updates to a couple sizes that we haven't really seen before and that we're kind of due for an update. Yes, exactly. Now speaking of usual Noctua color schemes. Whoa, what is this? These are black fans targeted for industrial customers. They are made from fiberglass reinforced polyamide, which is even more rigid than the fiberglass reinforced PBT we normally use. They will also come with IP class 52 water and dust protection and a new six pole motor design. So why do we need a six pole motor design? What's the difference between this and the four pole here? The improvements of the six pole motor design are that it offers even smoother running, even lower vibrations and even lower power consumption. All right, let's move on to heat sinks. How did I manage to miss this? Project Redux. This is exclusive. If I don't get the exclusive thing, I'm not even doing my job. Jacob, what's Project Redux? Yeah, this is for all the people who ever wanted a Noctua fan but felt it's just too expensive. We'll take some of our most popular models like the NFS 12B or NFP 14, streamline the packaging and make them available at quite a bit more affordable prices. Very cool. Now, being a design and engineering company first and foremost and a marketing company second most, Noctua just calls this prototype D type CPU cooler. But what's cool about this is it stays out of the no zones for your CPU socket. It stays away from high profile memory heat sinks and it also gives you the same cooling surface area and performance as something that previously took up a lot more space by simply using their new 92 millimeter fan design right down the middle. So this will be coming at some undisclosed date because right now it doesn't even have a name yet. Moving right along, they've improved compatibility for their low profile coolers. Check this out. So they basically cut away a little piece here on the side that allows for things like this high capacitors that are next to the PCI Express slot. So you can use these easily in either an AMD or Intel mini ITX configuration. Now Haswell kicks out a fair bit of heat, so they're also adding a higher performance ITX cooling solution that is still low profile enough that it sits easily next to a half height PCI Express graphics card and doesn't interfere with your full height DDR3 memory modules. It also is designed to stay out of the way of your four pin connector as well as your SATA connectors. The last thing that we have to show here is the fact that this is not new at all. This is the original knock to a CPU cooler, the U12 or something like that. Doesn't matter what it's called anymore. You can't buy one, but it's still Haswell compatible with updated mounting hardware and you can still get a free mounting kit if you are a knock to a customer and you provide proof of purchase. Now, Jacob, I ran through all that really quickly because honestly, this is going to be the star of the show right here. Tell me what this guy is because it's like, check this out. This goes back to my NHD14 unboxing where I held it up and I'm like, it's the size of my head. This is the size of my head again. Yeah, it's actually an update, long expected and a weighted update to our popular NHD14. We're working really hard to further improve performance and the way we did it is that we expanded the width to 150 millimeter to fit the new NFA 15 fan. At the same time, we've also increased spacing between the heat pipes. We've now got better heat distribution over a larger surface area and this allowed us to really provide a nice additional performance boost compared to the original D14. Now, the original D14 had some compatibility issues from time to time with high profile memory and this being even wider, how do you address that? Yes, we have these little cutouts here and if you drop the front fan, you can actually install RAM modules with up to 70 millimeter height. If you're willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of performance, this cooler gives you actually more flexibility as far as high RAM heat spreaders are concerned than the original NHD14. Here's a look at the cutouts. Those cutouts are on both sides, meaning you can flip it around. You don't have to worry too much about, oh, I put it on the wrong way. Don't worry too much about that. This will help on LGA 2011 where there's RAM on both sides. Ah, when there's RAM on both sides. Sorry, I was holding the microphone there. So if you have RAM on both sides, then you'll be able to have clearance on either side. Now, let's move into the space age stuff that totally doesn't exist yet. Now, my understanding is Noctua had to take possession of one of the largest Austrian diamond mines in order to create this new technology. Tell me what the devil makes this so much more special than what we've already seen as base plates for CPU heatsinks. I'm going to try and show them that sparkle there. What makes this base unique is that it has a copper diamond composite insert. So inside the copper base, we have an insert made from a composite material that features a thermal conductivity of 500 watts per meter Kelvin, which is roughly 25% more than pure copper. Okay, so why are we doing this already? What does it do? Well, the benefit of it is, as we show in this, these simulation outputs here, is that we get a better heat distribution across the base. So we get more heat to the outer heat pipes and can make them work more efficiently. The reason why we haven't been doing anything like that so far is that the hot pressing technology needed to make this type of material is brand new and it's very expensive. So I cannot really say whether we will actually make it to the market with this one yet. Now, if you make a base out of powder, how is that going to even be held together? First of all, it's pressed together by hot pressing, so it forms a solid material. But we also need the copper wrapped around it to make it really solid and to allow us to nickel plate it and solder the heat pipes to it like we usually do. There you go, guys. Performance isn't always about looks, as Noctua has proven to us time and time again. But this, my friends, if you've hung with us this long, is the Voodoo magic that's going on. A fan with active noise cancellation technology. So why don't you first explain what is ANC? The basic principle behind ANC is that you use one sound wave to cancel out another sound wave by overlapping. So this will be a zero decibel CPU cooler? Well, in theory, yes. In practice, unfortunately, that's not possible. The main reason for this is that the way fans emit noise is just so complex. They produce rotating pressure fields and in order to do active noise cancellation on that, you have to exactly match these rotating pressure fields. So how do you even get close? What are you guys doing to make a fan make noise and make anti-noise at the same time? Well, the brilliant thing about the Roto sub technology that we're using is that we actually employ the fan impeller to create the anti-noise signal. Now, the way this works is that we have a coil inside the fan frame and a magnet sitting inside the blade tips. And when we switch on the coil, we can pull down the blade tips just ever so slightly. And when we switch off the coil again, they go back up. So does this create additional vibration when the fan's spinning that can be transmitted to your case? No, it doesn't because most of the fan vibrations, unless the fan is broken, comes from the blades passing over the struts. And these are exactly the pressure fluctuations we're cancelling out with the active noise control as well. So there's going to be products at some point. Maybe, you know, it'll be a while in the future. But this fan, what's the challenge building a radiator fan that uses this active noise cancellation technology? The challenge we're facing with radiator fans is that there are just so many types of different radiators, different frame grills, etc. Basically, the controller we're working with and the logic working inside the controller is designed to be self-adaptive and self-learning. But we're still seeing better results when we can somewhat control the environment. All right, now show us what controls the environment better than an entire self-contained Noctua cooler that uses this technology. And tell us about this cooler. Yes, in this case, we have the fan sitting in between the fin stacks. It's a similar design as the popular NH-D14. And in this case, we know exactly the distance between the fan and the fin stacks and what will occur when the fan will hit the air coming from the fan will hit the heatsink fins. Okay, show us your demo here and they're going to have to rely on this graph, but we've heard it. It actually works. So there's a microphone inside the case. This whole thing is tool-less. So you actually slide the entire assembly with the fan in the middle into place after you've already installed the cooler. You no longer you said you're able to get pretty similar performance to that double stack cooler over there with the shroud and with a single fan instead of two fans, making it lower profile. And check out this. That is the microphone that goes into the actual so there's actual logic built into your CPU cooler now, which is absolutely fantastic. So guys, we are going to have Jacob press the switch and turn the active noise cancellation on and off. And we're going to direct your attention to this little graph over here. So this is showing actually here if I if I tap on the back of the case. Hold on if I yell on the there we go. You can see my voice right there. If I stop talking. Okay, so you can see the microphone is working now. Go ahead and turn active noise cancellation on and off. I'm going to I'm going to stop talking. We're going to see if they can figure it out. There's a lot of ambient noise here. I guess I'm sorry, but you guys are going to have to kind of take my word for it. What it does is it eliminates that that noise. It doesn't make the fan completely silent. But you know how you often talk about different characteristics of fans where a decibel meter doesn't necessarily tell the whole story because it just tells you the sound pressure. It doesn't tell you if it's a low hum or whether it's an annoying kind of noise like that. So this it works and it's extremely exciting. When can we buy one? Well, there's still a lot of challenges we face in manufacturing because it's of vital importance to get everything lined up very precisely. Because the risk with this kind of technology is that if you're just off by zero point one or zero point two millimeter, if the sound waves don't overlap exactly as you want, you will end up creating more noise than you originally had. So we have to make sure that everything is just super precise in manufacturing. And I think if I think if everything goes very smoothly, we could have a product ready on the market in spring 2014 or maybe for next computer. Wonderful. So guys, thank you so much to Jacob for joining us here. It's been a pleasure. Don't miss any of our Computex 2013 coverage. We're powered by Western Digital here at the show as well as Corsair Vengeance Gaming peripherals and NCIX.com. And as always, guys, don't forget to subscribe.