Noctua's April roadmap or what's planned for when
Along with a cooler release, Noctua has updated their roadmap, leaving no stone unturned. A lot of products are being pushed to a later date, including the upcoming 140 mm fans. But the good news is that at least fan grilles, which will surely appear in our tests sooner or later, have appeared out of the blue in the window for the coming months or maybe just weeks.
Neither the new generation of 140 mm fans nor the successor to the NH-D15 cooler will be released as scheduled at the beginning of the year. It is a good habit for Noctua to keep a sort of calendar (or in more modern language “roadmap”) with planned releases of upcoming components.
There was even supposed to be a cooler coming out, which has been delayed multiple times already, in the fourth quarter of this year, which is expected to push the level of twin-tower designs. But the next generation NH-D15 will come out early next year at the earliest, it seems. The latest roadmap from April 2022 lists this cooler in the first quarter. This is, of course, not a guaranteed date, but only an assumed one, and again it may be delayed again. Similar to how the planned release of the new 140 mm format fans has been pushed back from the second to the third quarter of this year.
Not even the 8-channel fan hub is planned for the second quarter anymore. It is already in the third one as well as the voltage converter from 24 to 12 V. The latter was also supposed to come out no later than the summer, but will be delayed in the end.
On the contrary, surprisingly, the fan grille is due to come out in the second quarter, which is this quarter. Considering that Noctua has never publicly announced their work on it before, this is quite a last-minute surprise. We don’t have design details for this grille. But one possibility is that it will be a simple grille that will have a protective function and will serve mainly as a complementary accessory to high-speed fans. Or it could be primarily an aerodynamic grille that would streamline the air in front of the rotor by suppressing turbulence. A third possibility is that it will be a combination of both features. Given the precision with which Noctua approaches fans, this scenario wouldn’t be surprising either.
Also new in the roadmap is a slim 60 mm fan. It is tentatively scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2022. But what won’t happen again this year is a desktop fan powered by a USB connector and white fans. Changing the color may be more complicated than it seems. This is because it is an intervention in a material that is supposed to meet certain properties that correspond to the original, beige-brown variants of the fans. Noctua has written about this before in connection with the NF-A12x25 PWM chromax.black fans, but in the end they are no different, retaining both the low thermal expansion and other properties.
We haven’t yet mentioned the small, 40 mm 24 V fan (tentatively Q4/2022) and the new generation of coolers for Intel Xeon processors (Q3/2022).
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
