The ability to concentrate is one of the key skills of software engineers. Although modern computers can be very quiet, the wrong fan selection can have a very negative effect on the impression of a modern PC. That’s why I decided to try five different fans from Noctua to see for myself if they live up to their reputation for quiet operation.
The human ear perceives noise levels very subjectively. This test is also adapted to this, as it does not measure the sound pressure level of the fan itself in the soundproof chamber, but the real noise of the fan mounted on the processor cooler under normal load. During the test, the fans were mounted on the NH-U12P cooler, under which the AMD Ryzen 9000 series processor was hidden. The maximum speed was achieved by BIOS settings. Idle in Windows is the state in which the speed stabilizes after its start and after all applications and services running in the background are started. The real workload in this test was compiling a larger project in C# in Visual Studio 2022.