 Linus Tech Tips coverage of Computex 2016 is brought to you by the Corsair Lapdog, the portable gaming control center that lets you use a full-size mouse and mechanical gaming keyboard on your couch as well as MSI. So here we are in the Noctua booth where they are showing off a product that has been three years in the making. This, my friends, is the unnamed, unlabeled successor to the NF-F12 fan. And we don't know much about it other than that it is a balanced blade design, so they're saying it's going to be perfect for radiators and heatsinks, and that it has been an absolute bitch to manufacture. And the reason for that is that in order to achieve the, well, a few things, so the airflow, noise, and reliability that they're going for, they needed 0.5 millimeters of clearance between the blades and the outside of the frame. The problem with that, and my friends at Noctua said that this was news to them too, is that fans as they spin over time actually flatten out. So in their reliability testing, the blades were hitting the damn frame. So it has been a complete nightmare to get the tolerances close enough to have a true successor to the NF-F12. But they say they're close, so hopefully it's happening pretty soon. What they also have here is a way of improving the look of your existing Noctua heatsink. So this doesn't look like it normally would. No, these are Chromax covers. So they're kind of these stealth metal covers that you can put over top of your existing NHD-15 or your existing NH-U12S. And they've got a couple of different variants they're showing off. They've got a plain one and one that it looks like will be a bit more expensive with these little colored arrows that show through. And that will ship with all of the Chromax colors in the box so you can swap them out as you wish. Well, hold on a second Linus. I don't want to shroud for my heatsink. Noctua hasn't released a heatsink, like a performance heatsink in a million years. What are they, sit on ass all day? And the answer as far as I can tell is yes. Yes, they do. No, I'm just kidding. While they didn't bring any actual upcoming product, they did bring a lot of excuses. So these are five prototypes of different fin designs, some that we've seen from Noctua's competitors of elsewhere in the market that basically demonstrate that yes, we are looking into it, but there's a variety of reasons to do with boundary layers and free streaming air and the speed of the air right next to the fin being significantly slower than further away from the fin, which hurts thermal transfer and blah, blah, blah. We're trying all these things, but the truth is compared to a flat fin, they just don't work that well. So in theory, copper aluminum composite fins would help to spread out the heat more and would allow you to solder the fins directly to the heat pipes, saving that nickel layer that would be a thermal barrier. In practice, it's very much more expensive and makes pretty much no difference. We're talking 0.1 of a degree. They've also got an offset split fin design that breaks up that boundary layer halfway through each of the heat sink layers. Again, the actual backflow from this design as well as this scoop, so kind of like what you would put on the hood of your car, this flow duct scoop design creates a situation where you actually have to throw so much more RPM at the problem that yes, you're getting more performance, but you're also ending up with a noisier product, which as you guys are probably aware, Noctua is not really that down for. This guy right here, they actually had a lot of hope for. This is oblique groove patterns and has to do with kind of when the air gets sucked into a groove, it exits at a higher velocity and they figured maybe that would help, but nothing conclusive so far. And finally, little, you know, golf ball type indentations. And I think you've pretty much got the story so far. So there you have it. They have a better fan that they're finally bringing to us and that may actually, if they can figure out how to make this one, signal the solution to the problem with that active noise cancellation when I showed you guys two years ago and a bunch of excuses. So thanks again to Corsair for sponsoring our trip to Computex 2016. Make sure you check out the lap dog at the link in the video description and thanks to MSI as well, who's showing off their Aegis X desktop here at the show as well as their GTX 1080 Gaming X8G. We've got that linked in the video description as well. Don't miss any of our Computex coverage by making sure you're subscribed to Linus Tech Tips. So hopefully you know where that button is and I will see you guys again next time.