Noctua makes a great fan. The NF-S12B redux-1200 from Austria's Noctua has dominated the top of our Best PC Fan Guide for years. What may take the top spot is Noctua's latest creation, a next-generation 140mm fan that has been in development for a whopping eight years.

One would expect this fan, which has been cooking in the oven for so long, to be unbeatable, but Noctua has already recorded impressive improvements in static pressure and pure airflow performance. That's all well and good, but if it doesn't make it into my machine, it will be of no benefit to me. So I visited Noctua at Computex and asked (politely) when this fan would actually see the light of day.

"We're looking at the first quarter of next year," Dan Carter of Noctua told me. 'Hopefully, we'll be in production by the end of the year, and we'll be able to launch early next year. That's our current plan."

"We're still waiting for the final steps, so of course we don't know for sure, but it's very promising at this point."

That would mean that by the time anyone would be able to purchase the product, it would have been a fan in development for nine or so years, loosely. So what has happened in the meantime?

"Basically, the first five years, from 2015 to 2020, we're basically trying out different designs, looking for something that really delivers the performance we want.

"In Phase 2 of the development until 2022, we were able to develop an impeller that we are really happy with. Then we were able to enter the tooling phase and begin preparations until near the end of 2021"

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From there, it wasn't until around 2022 that this fan began to look like it was approaching mass production. However, that did not happen; Noctua now has to re-run the final phase of the validation of this fan due to several problems that were discovered in the final stages of development.

"The first problem was that when removing the impeller from the mold, we found that the coolant was slightly too cold," Carter says.

"In other words, it had expanded slightly over the years of use."

"So we went back. We changed the temperature at which it was cooled and hoped that would solve the problem. It seems to have done so."

This single problem was enough to send the fan back through the lengthy verification process that Noctua described step-by-step at the Computex booth. This process is so involved that even a single redo of the testing process could extend the release date by as much as a year. However, there was another concern.

"The second was ...... Basically, we found that if some fan clips or screws were tightened too tightly, too much force would cause the frame to warp slightly.

The next generation 140mm fan has only a 0.7mm gap between the fan blades and the fan outer frame. We tried to capture this on camera, but it was very tight. This is really a very small space and could actually shrink over time due to forces on the fan (impeller creep) and the frame. one-tenth of a millimeter is too large."

"That's why we re-evaluated things, again."

To prevent this creep due to the forces on the fan, a material was needed that was "very dense, very stiff, and very good at not expanding. That was an expensive material known as liquid crystal polymer (LCP).

Originally planned to be used only for the fan blades, Noctua replaced the ABS/PBT material it planned to use for the frame with the same LCP material. This is expected to stop warping that could shorten the life of the fan. The difference between the old prototype and the new LCP is immediately apparent: the LCP is so dense that it has a marble-like effect on the surface.

However, this LCP material has its own challenges, and while Noctua is planning a black Chromax version of this fan, it may end up being gray due to the density of the material. Likewise, it is very expensive.

"LCP almost completely eliminates warping; unfortunately the price will go up more because LCP is much more expensive."

A 140mm single costs over $40/€40, which makes me sweat a bit. To justify such a price point, these fans need to last longer. This fan will not be mass produced until the end of the year, so this is not the final price, but a rough idea of what you can expect to pay for one.

What you get in return may be the most exciting fan I have personally ever seen from a performance standpoint: a huge leap forward in static pressure and airflow over the NF-A14, making it truly an all-rounder. The new design can also lower temperatures by about 3°C versus the current design in a graph showing the performance of the two fans when normalized to the same noise level.

Even the central hub of this fan has been redesigned to turn it from a dead zone into a useful cooling component. Instead of a flat surface, a beveled section pushes air away from this central area and onto the blades, making it more distributed.

We're told that "a lot of R&D went into perfecting it," but looking at the list of development steps, tweaks, and prototypes of the various fans, we think it's pretty close. It is difficult to say how much I would be willing to pay for this fan. If the price is too high, I would probably opt for the cheaper one and put up with it a couple of times. That said, if this product delivers on its promise and doesn't cost much more than $40, then grabbing one of these would solve a decade's worth of cooling in one fell swoop.

Noctua also plans to include a pair of these fans in their next-generation NH-D15 air-cooled cooler.

Hopefully this project is not too ambitious and there will be a real product available on the shelves next year.