White is the new black when it comes to PC gear right now, with motherboards, graphics cards, cases, and even PSUs coming clad in snowy tones. However, while nearly every cooler manufacturer, including Arctic, be quiet!, MSI, and NZXT have given their cooling gear the white treatment, Noctua has steadfastly resisted. Is there any milky-white Noctua gear in the pipeline? We asked the cooling brand, and the answer is a firm nope.
Noctua chromax.white fans were first shown off at Computex 2019 in prototype form, but their launch ended up being delayed from 2020 to 2023, until eventually a post from the company on X revealed that they’d been “removed from our roadmap” entirely. The nearest you can really get to white Noctua gear is using its NA-HC4 heatsink covers. Now, the company tells us, white is pretty much off the cards.
The white stuff
Speaking to Club386 in a wide-ranging interview, Noctua chief product officer, Jakob Dellinger, confirmed to us that “there are people asking for white repeatedly,” but says “it’s really not where our focus lies.” As with the reasons why Noctua black coolers arrive later than their brown and beige counterparts, it’s all down to production logistics with moulds and tooling, especially as using different pigment particles can affect cooling as well as looks. When it comes to the latter, according to Noctua, white presents an even bigger problem than black.
“White is a delicate colour to work with in terms of production.”
“White is a delicate colour to work with in terms of production,” says Dellinger, particularly when it comes to “getting it to really look nice and completely speck-free. In this regard, it definitely prompts you to create custom tooling for each fan you want to produce in white.”
Noctua has very tight quality control when it comes to the precision engineering involved with making its fans and heatsinks. If you buy a black cooler, Noctua wants to be sure it will perform just like the brown and beige one.
Moulds and tooling
“Ultimately, a lot of engineering and validation work goes into just making sure that, for example, the white fan has the exact same dimensions to the micrometre, and the exact same performance, the exact same behaviour as the regular ones,” explains Dellinger. “You could not produce black, brown, or beige colour in the frames from the same tooling, because all the colours behave slightly differently.
“I’d rather validate tooling for a new fan design than an extra colour set.”
“With high-precision fans, you have to create dedicated tooling and dedicated moulds for each colour. That means if we want to go for, let’s say, white, we have to create an extra set of tools. And that’s not just an expense in terms of investment, but you also have to validate those tools.”
That’s not a one-off cost, either – you have to do it for every single fan or heatsink variant in your arsenal if you want to produce white versions across the board. “This is just not where we want to invest our resources,” he says. “I’d rather validate tooling for a new fan design than an extra colour set.”
Is that really the end? There’s no chance Noctua will ever make chromax.white heatsinks and fans? “I’ve learned over the years that it’s good to never say never,” grins Dellinger. He’s not adamantly ruling it out forever, but it does look as though there are zero plans for Noctua to make any white heatsinks and fans anytime in the near future.
We’ve got some more Noctua goodies in the bag from our interview with Jakob as well, including the latest on its pump-free thermosiphon cooler, which we’ll be sharing over the next few weeks.
For more insight into Noctua’s livery, check out our feature on why Noctua coolers are brown and beige. If you’re thinking of upgrading soon, make sure you also read our full guide to buying the best CPU cooler, which includes plenty of Noctua gear.
