I had just decided to add two 140mm exhaust fans to my ultra quiet PC build, for clarity my standard for quietness is it should be very difficult or impossible to tell whether the PC is even on, so I thought I should get these supposedly "best fans"
I was thoroughly disappointed
while waiting for these Noctuas to arrive, out of curiosity I went and picked up some Silent Wings 4 from a local micro center which worked incredibly well, they have a maximum fan speed that's just barely tolerable in noise (spec says 13.6dba) which is great because most motherboards will boost the fan to full speed at startup, so it is important you're not too reliant on PWM to drop the speeds.
The build quality of the fans is also impeccable I love how the screw holes are fully suspended and isolated from the rest of the frame, guaranteeing there is no vibration transfer to the rest of the case. The cable is amazing, it is soft, it is black, it is long but also the frame is designed perfectly such that any extra cable can be easily wrapped around the fan neatly.
then when the Noctuas finally arrived, NF-A14X25 G2 PP, I tested it, and it was SO LOUD
the specs say 24.8db, I don't know if I've just come accustomed to ultra quiet computers or what but I felt it was intolerably loud, even in open air with no obstructions, you can easily hear it anywhere in the room, while wearing headphones which is just unacceptable to me. It does come with the low noise adapter sure but even with that it is still quite loud, so turning on the PC will definitely still give me an unmistakable woosh of fan noise.
In fact the Noctuas are so loud they're significantly louder than the SW4 at same RPM, it is still louder at 200 lower RPM. To be fair the Noctua also blows harder, but without any measurement equipment, it is hard to tell if there's any difference in noise-normalized performance. From what I can find online, the Noctua can do 60CFM at 20dba, but the SW4 maxes out under 20dba at ~50CFM, so I'd say they're about the same if noise-normalized.
Without any performance advantage, the Noctua just loses at everything else in my opinion. The cable still has that super stiff sleeve which causes the cable to just fold instead of bending smoothly, I doubt that's actually good for the cable. The cable is super short, there's no built-in cable management like the SW4. And the final nail in the coffin, rubber pads aren't doing it no more, it may be revolutionary 20 years ago when no one else was trying to be quiet, but today, a stiff frame right up against steel case with a flat sheet of rubber in-between ain't gonna isolate the low-frequency noise fans like this produce. I believe when mounted to my case, the Noctua just produces more noise due to vibration transfer where as the SW4 does not.
To me, Noctua has become an outdated status brand rather than real cutting edge engineering, it's like the Leica camera, the Mercedes-Benz, the fact that they keep using the brown color is proof they know their brand value is higher than their engineering/performance value.
