The ability to concentrate is one of the key skills of software engineers. Although modern computers can be very quiet, the wrong choice of fan can have a very negative impact 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 the noise level very subjectively. This test is also adapted to this, which does not measure the sound pressure level of the fan itself in a soundproof chamber, but the real noise of a fan mounted on the CPU cooler under normal load. During the test, the fans were mounted on an NH-U12P cooler, under which the AMD Ryzen 9000 series processor was hidden. The maximum speed was achieved by setting the BIOS. Idle in Windows means the state in which the speed stabilizes after the computer starts and after all applications and services running in the background are launched. The real load in this test was the compilation of a larger C# project in Visual Studio 2022.