Gadgetory

the Internet outrage engine coughed up plumes of coal as it spun up to maximum rpm a few weeks ago this time targeting knocked to his fans after receiving a few different requests to look into manufacturing quality difference between Noctua fans made in China and Taiwan we managed to bring in a fair sample size to measure linear feet per minute air flowed through the radiator TVA output PWM range and a couple of other things we also got to see for ourselves that the two fans have visible color differences ranging from off Bay's to weather worn off beige so today we're looking at the differences between the two sources of origin for the fans see if they matter before that this is brought to you by EVGA s at CLC 280 liquid cooler for CPUs which we've previously benchmarked and found to be a high performer given its relative silence the temperature output learn more about this $140 cooler at the link in the description below the original reddit post that sparked all of this came because a user ordered fans from Knox WA a lot of them had seldom came from Taiwan some came from China and they're marked on the boxes made in Taiwan or made in China if you look at the fans there's a slight color variation between them one of them is actually as much as it's easy to joke about is a slightly more off beige than the other one so the China made fans have darker blades the housing is a slightly different color and in the original post there were some concerns over whether the cooling quality the noise output quality we'll call it would be the same between the two fans with generally the expectation being in that reddit thread that the Taiwan made fans would be superior to their China made counterparts so we spoke to Knox wa about this a bit after we got some initial testing done and this stack of fans over here most of them are from the original reddit poster who made the threat on build a PC so we were able to test those then this stack of fans is about is probably 80% of my current collection of bands between Noctua directly buying them on eBay to make sure we could get the right China or Taiwan fan and then sourcing them elsewhere so we have a decent sample size I'll warn you now we got most the way through testing them before I basically said okay this is enough data as you'll see momentarily but so the thing is it looks like this is an issue we're primarily on the visible side we're looking at pigment differences maybe differences in where Noctua or their factory more appropriately sourced the plastic or the pigments or whatever they use to color the fans be in different countries different factories it's possible that they didn't use exactly the same color which if you're going to complain about it that's a fine thing to complain about perhaps not wish it I've noticed but ultimately you're looking at color matching this and trying to see differences between them if you can sure it's you know be careful when you're buying them I suppose that's what it comes down to now in terms of quality differences that's where we come in so we did anemometer testing for linear feet per minute which we're calling F p.m. here L p.m. if you'd prefer and that was using a crackin X 42 radiator as basically an airflow straightener but it also just because it's a standard type of object that you would use that would create a need to have static pressure performance so we use that and then we're also looking at decibel performance at 20 inches from the fan and radiator combination and then we're looking at PWM range at 100% down to 20% where there's normal variance anyway we'll talk about that more in a moment the main fans we're looking at in this content piece are going to be the NS a 14 the 140 millimeter static pressure band and then we do have the n FF 12 the 120 millimeter ones but as you'll see from the a 14 s they really kind of sum things up and the a 14 in the original reddit post did actually have more visible differences than other marketing aspects of the fan design then would be present in the n FF 12 because they just have fewer features on them so some of those include what Knox would calls flow acceleration or stepped Inlet designs things like that these are typical marketing names for small optimizations made to a product that may or may not improve performance there's really no easy way to tell without getting an a/b test going where you have one that's just there what you're looking at more is normally the motor in the and only the fan blade design rather than the housing where you're looking at these tiny triangular indents on the inside of the housing but to be fair they do look a bit different between Taiwan and China and so that comes down to the mold so nice wood tells us that they have a new mold that they made for the China Factory they also told us when I get this right that their fans have more or less always come from both China and Taiwan but that the same model is rarely made in both locations at least simultaneously so this recently changed because Knox we need is a tool up to meet demand and the injection mold twins were made new at the China location we were also told that the fans have primarily been produced in China these models over the last few years so it's actually impossible right now for us to get stock of the Taiwan fans from Knoxville directly they don't have them we have to find them elsewhere so if you do end up with a fan from each location you're probably buying stock that a retailer has that for a little while that's what it comes down to well it's going to test in other ways more information in the description in the article below if you want to read about the testing but we can blow through this one pretty quickly because it's really just a couple of fantast we are not focusing on temperature testing because there are a million variables and any differences you see there are going to be because of things like prime95 deciding to change its power cycling or whatever software you're using doing something different or what any amounts of small things what makes far more sense to do it as the air flow which we're doing with an anemometer and a hot wire so linear feet per minutes or measurement through a radiator ideally you have a static pressure some something that would benefit from static pressure off my spend and then the other aspect is decibels and we can look at PWM range but temperatures don't really matter because it follows that if your air flow is the same then your temperature should be the same with variables from the CPU and the motherboard notwithstanding let's first call PWM to set the stage PWM town control varies from fan to fan and fan manufacturing differences mean that your top end and low end rpm is going to change between units doesn't matter if it's Noctua or someone else the same is true for water pumps and is true across the industry in general in general PWM variants can be up to 15% between fans so you really want to fix the fan speeds of testing differences in frames and blades and things like that since otherwise just testing normal pwm variance Noctua noted to us that pwm to RPM response typically varies by one to four percent in their products something that we can validate with a tolerance of ten percent in pwm range pretty standard this means a few things one you need a larger sample size of fans of test we have a decent sample size but it is by no means 100% conclusive we can draw some pretty good conclusions from it however and it also means that you really want to fix those rpm if testing it with pwm fan speed percentages the numbers are going to be all over the place it's not a reliable way to do things and we'll start there anyway and move on to testing that shows at a fixed rpm we're also looking at PWM range to see if the China mate or Taiwan made fans are consistently lower or higher in our p.m. here's a line plot showing rpm on the vertical axis versus QAM signal on the horizontal axis the fans are all close to one another with normal variances dictating the differences averaged across all tested fans and pwm ranges we found a difference of 2.5 percent in rpm to PWM response between 10 with no particular favor shown toward China or Taiwan manufacturing note again that we were limited by sample size to about 8 fans tested so we can't make sweeping statements that this will always be true but with our sample size which is a decent amount we can say that it is true we see no significant difference between region of origin with these fans and again variance in PWM signal its response is normal anyway adjusting PWM speed by plus or minus 1% will often allow rpms to match as we'll do in a moment here's a look at a table of just sones rpms at each PM range to better illustrate the point numerically this variance is normal between all fans and is not a product of being made in China versus Taiwan continuing on with PWM points for a minutes here's a chart showing noise levels at the very end PWM ranges keep in mind that fan rpm changes between fans at each percentage at 100% PWM our DBA range is forty two point eight to forty three point six so a little bit less than one DBA not noticeable and more or less within our accuracy anyway ninety percent post a range of forty point six to forty 1.4 DB a eighty percent is 38.2 to thirty nine point one with no particular benefit on the China or Taiwan made and in general there's no pattern forming that said one single fan from the China manufacturing plant sent by the reddit original poster did generally perform about 1 DBA louder than the quietest fan which is more than we can say for most the others which were a bit more consistent this continuous scaling down and the fans get closer as we go with our ability to test halting at around the 27 28 DBA area let's fix the RPM level to get a better idea of performance manually setting fan speed in BIOS to match 1400 RPM or 1000 RPM we end up with the numbers on-screen now at 1,400 rpm every fan regardless of country of origin is within fractions of a decibel of 41 DBA the differences here are imperceptible to the human ear you would not be able to identify one to the next and a blind test although we did not produce a frequency spectrum plot we did not notice significant differences in fan frequency output from a subjective standpoint at 1000 rpm every fan is within plus or minus 0.5 DB a of 33 DBA making them again effectively identical in noise levels we did not subjectively notice differences in frequency spread at this rpm either moving on next to linear feet per minute testing with an anemometer logging over a period of several minutes using the X 42 radiator as a flow straightener and then averaging the end of the results strain here's a look at linear F p.m. response to PWM signal again keep in mind that PWM signal doesn't mean much the fan RPMs are not the same so performance is different as a result of rpm changing not necessarily as a result of the fan body manufacturing quality look at that aspect next linear feet per minute will be abbreviated as f PM for this section f PM post a difference of plus or minus 2% from 20% to 100% PWM and 10% intervals with no favour shown toward Taiwan or China maids and again our difference here is Thames from PWM to rpm response variance which is within normal manufacturing parameters we're averaging around 5:15 to 5:20 F p.m. at 100 percent duty cycle with a 14 fans about 460 to 477 F p.m. at 90% and so on down the line our results are fairly tight and tied together at a fixed fan speed of 1,400 rpm the numbers are largely the same across the board the only standout is the first Taiwan made fan which technically blots 6fp lower results an average of this rpm well this is within our test margins without extreme equipment we really can't dig deeper than this and as far as our testing is concerned these are all effectively equal and will produce indistinguishably different thermal results given the proximity and fpm differences and thermal testing would stem more from variables in the CV test than from fans just like normally at 1,000 rpm it's more of the same story we're close enough in performance to write this off as more or less equal greater test resolution and controls would be required to plot differences reliably at which point you're exiting what a user would ever reliably or reasonably detect anyway so it's no longer a scenario which is entirely relevant to this matter speaking regionally there's no pattern between the two sources and all the fans are more or less equal they are functionally equivalent in performance so we're not seeing any real difference between the fans that we have we tested all of these and most of these didn't get to the NFF 12s because it just it wasn't necessary and they were the source of the concern anyway because after we had all that data you're basically looking at plus or minus 2% in the most extreme cases and basically zero when you match the RPM and this is where it boils down to a couple of comments about the internet and about Knox with position Noctua has an interesting challenge they have positioned themselves as a supremely accurate and high quality company when it comes to fans specifically and they are fighting their own reputation here by having a small bit of variance between more or less color which probably triggered looking into the other smaller aspects of the fan and the housing design Knox was in a position where these small changes are perceived as probably a whole lot worse than they actually are and that's because it diverges so strongly from their brand perception now does it matter that these changes are these differences are present not in performance we couldn't find any in noise levels our sample size although pretty damn good is obviously not representative of the whole so it's possible if they're bad bad bands out there one of the china-made fans did have about 1 DBA consistently higher output than the other fans so there's going to be variants there will always be that one-off product that just didn't come off the line quite right but we're not really seeing a lot of that here so they're fighting their own reputation is what it comes down to and then as far as the original reddit thread it was great that the original user noticed those differences is great as always to report those differences like the user did and make the thread to bring awareness the problem get people who have the means the test of stuff to actually try and test it and see if there's a problem that's all good what I would like to see more caution around is maybe the relating the reply comments below it where people immediately jump on the boycott bandwagon or the oh my god I can't believe they did this they're outsourcing the China bandwagon when we really need a much more level head to look at this kind of stuff because a lot of the time the answer is they just switched factories if I switched molds and that happens every day you probably don't notice it normally not to what it got noticed and for that they have at least briefly been punished but we don't see a reason for them to need that punishment so from what we've seen here not a big difference if someone else happens to find bans that between China and Taiwan do show major differences please let us know tweeted us at gamers Nexus make sure you check your PWM signal to two-hour p.m. response to make sure that you're not just actually measuring differences between PWM speeds because that's pretty common so if you've equalized your rpms you should be able to get decent pass between the two feel free to let us know if you find a significant difference if you do we can revisit but again everything we've seen here it looks like not a big deal perhaps you could bop Noctua on the nose for changing their color they have told us that they're looking into that and hoping to get things more standardized normal off page instead of off page and slightly more off page in the future I don't think they use those exact words to describe their colors but you get what I'm saying so thank you for watching as always you get a paycheck Thomas live skimmers next to stuff that directly you'd pick up a shirt like this one the GN anniversary shirts on gamers Nexus squarespace.com and subscribe for more we'll see you all next time people look at the other small aspects of the card like there's the card one more time video cries all the time