I think Noctua did NOT regret sending those fans.

Finally someone willing to tryout the stoner/shower thoughts everyones had

"I wish I had a 3d printer..." How far you've come since then!

How about taking the tiny fans away one by one to see at what point u get signif rise in temps?

With the current heatwave in Europe I would like to cover my body in heatsinks and all these little fans and see if it cools me down. No thermal paste though, it's bad for the skin. :P

You can brag to your friends "my fans cost more than your whole computer"

Using the little fans as a front intake on a case like a fractal design meshify C?

You seriously need an 3d printer :O This adapter would have been fairly easy and quick with a 300x300mm print volume printer, or even with a small printer in 2 pieces. The time you spent manually cutting all the holes you could be chillin' with a beer waiting for printer to finish

Great, so now we know that the radiator is the limiting factor here.

Power consumption is about 8 times higher with the little ones. Each motor also generates heat, which escapes easily in an open test like yours, but might might become noticeable in a PC case. Actual noise levels would also be nice to see.

You have to replace the little fans with bloweymatrons

Keep on going with stuff that's so silly that it's actually good. Saw the thumbnail and thought it was a car radiator :)

When I saw the thumbnail browsing on mobil I thought I was looking at a 2 meter tall server with too many fans.

Reminds me of when I modded my Silverstone TJ08-E front intake panel, to use 4x Noctua 92mm fans instead of the stock Silverstone AP181, and it performed essentially the same, just quieter...was a pretty fun little mod.

This earned a sub. That's twice you did some kind of testing that I've never seen before. I will be keeping my eye on you sir.

Your math is bad. Pressure is a function of force over area. You can't just add up the pressure from each individual A4x20 fan like you can with the air flow numbers. The greater the surface area one fan has to take care of, the lower its effective pressure is going to be. That said, those little fans were very impressive! I thought they would be much louder and not perform nearly as well as they did! Also, it's not really fair to say you can just replace any 140mm fan with a 120 and expect similar performance when you used the Best 120mm fan ever produced as the comparison point.

I love your channel and your Projects. Underrated Channel!

use NF-A4x20 on x570 chipset instead of supplied motherboard vendor fan

I like your channel, because you think outside of the box. You swim against the tide, even though the sign says "beware of the riptide". People like you, are the ones who make great discoveries.

I love the experimentation. Nobody else out there would think to try out 21 Nocuta NF-A4x20 fans! Nice job!

What would be interesting to see is if these small fans can help a custom water loop that has a undersized radiator on it

Noctua: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY FANS

Haha! What a test! It looks dope and performs well. Good on you and good on Noctua for supporting such content!

Hey man! I've never heard of you or your channel before. I've been into tech and tech videos for 15 years now. I saw your video in my recommended and thought: " Who dis?" Love your content. I am now adding your channel to my subscriptions. Yay!

Every time I come back to this channel I become more impressed. You are clearly growing! Two minor critiques: 1: Whenever you reveal new results or sets of numbers, like you did at 2:51 and 3:08, try to catch the attention of the viewer to indicate that something has changed. While watching a format like this, the viewer glances at and reads the numbers you initially show, and then they look back to you as you're talking and gesticulating (The eye always goes back to motion). Then, because the viewer is looking at you, having just a soft fade to a new set of numbers in the exact same place, size and style of the old numbers isn't eye-catching enough to immediately draw the viewer's eye back to the numbers, which makes the viewer, once he realizes numbers have changed, doubt as to whether or not he's missed something, or struggle to remember what the old numbers were. In light of this, I would recommend, especially when comparing numbers, to do more side-by-side, like you did at 7:22, but where you introduce the new numbers next to or beneath the old numbers to make comparison easier, so the viewer doesn't have to scrub backward in your video to compare. Or if you are switching to a new set and no longer showing the old, change up the positioning between numbers or do a full screen change, or a have a flashier transition, or verbally direct the viewer's attention back to the numbers first. Otherwise we're so focused on you and what you're saying that when the numbers fade mid sentence in the same spot, we might not catch the change as easily. 2. You buried the lead! I clicked on the video after seeing the thumbnail of all the crazy small fans on a radiator and reading the title, but then I just saw you sitting there talking about the conception of the video. You only have a few seconds to engage a viewer after they click, so your first few seconds should almost be a continuation of the thumbnail that teases what I'm about to see and hooks me. You have all this beautiful footage of the radiator and it's monolithic extravagance with all these fans, but it doesn't show up until half-way through. I would start with maybe 3-5 seconds of that footage as a, "This is what you're about to see" hook, then cut to you and do the rest of the video. That anticipatory glory footage teases what's to come and draws me in so I'm more likely to engage with the rest of the content, and creates a bigger payoff when you do finally show it in it's full glory. Other than that, awesome content. Your montage of building the rig with the overhead pan shot was fantastic. This video was on par with a bitwit or jayz or linus video for sure! Keep up the great content!

I love the crazy experiments you do man. Do more with the small fans, I feel there is a thread to be tugged on here.

I love this channel. He does all the stuff i wonder about but have no means to test

Telling you, man, it's incredible the engineering behind Noctua fans. That they can make those 1U server fans so quiet is a beautiful thing. Thinking about putting one of those on my NVMe heatsink.

Thanks for the unique content, is fun to watch and really cool... And has sweet info passed in the end... For the fans, try cooling everything... RAM, HDD, increase airflow in chassis, try cool monitor... hey, you asked...😁

She'll tell you size doesn't matter but in the end it does. JayZ did it a while back. Still great video and cool idea, keep em coming! 👍

Interesting test. And it shows how CFM works dependant on area of mass. Thank you.

That has to be the sickest fan setup I have ever seen, way cooler than any rgb or color scheme or other design elements. If I ever saw that in someones computer it would blow my mind.

"Sure you can have 4 fans." *HOW ABOUT 21 MORE*

Create a VRM and RAM cooling brackets and cool down your test bench even more.!

I think it'd be interesting to test it with some form of obstruction and see how it goes. This is super informative, though. Thanks for going through the effort

Totally loved this! Lemme tell ya...that panel of 21 fans looks freakin sweet 🤩

2020 major hardware looking back "i wish i had a printer"

You're limited more by the flow rate of the pump and the coldplate design than by the fans with an aio like that.

I love your content man, never stop!

Vid quality is getting better and better. Keep it up bro! 👍🏽

now if only those tiny fans were used on x570 motherboards for the chipset and were made thinner.

im not apple fan, nor samsung not intel, amd, nvidia but im Noctua fan boyyyyyyy

This has quickly become one of my favorite channels on youtube. I guess you could say... Im a huge FAN...

You have earned a sub for this video, showing the little guys some love

Try those mini fans on tower coolers

well, the 40mm fans in servers are running at 10'000 RPM... no wonder they are louder ;)

Holy crap I have been looking for this video and I finally found it while watching one of your older videos(I'm new to your channel btw) and I'm so happy I finally found it.

No matter how many other brands anyone could think of, Noctua seems to be the only brand that has reached the summit so far.

Build a ridiculously flat gaming system with side-flow air cooling.

Use the tiny fans to build an extremely flat PC that can fit beneath a Screen or maybe under the desk.

Wow someone who doesn't talk for 30 mins and gets to the point. Subd

Awesome video. I should check out some of those little fans for my network gear.

You completely ignored the Power consumption of the fans.. ..it's i little detail but would be great if you compare every detail :) ..so Power consumption would be: 2x NF-A14 PWM @ 100% = 2x 1,56 Watts = Total of 3,12 Watts, 2x NF-A12 PWN @ 100% = 2x 1,75 Watts = Total of 3,5 Watts, 21x NF-A4 PWM @ 100% = 21x0,5 Watts = Total of 10,5 Watts !!! Turns out big fans have a additional perk :)

Wow, this was good missclick :D Nice video! Subscribed

I've always thought it would be interesting to use those tiny fans to cool specific components, like VRMs or something. Not sure it would make a difference but hey, you've got so many now

Congratulations, this is really informative.

Wild, try a lower rpm? Perhaps it just needs air flow

stack them all in a huge line and put it on a chipset and see what happens.

You would think the A4's would do terribly as each hub just blocks air, I guess noctua is just that good. Its cool that you tested the 140mm and 120mm differences now we can save a few dollars getting the slightly cheaper smaller ones and not lose out on performance

Now it's time to chill the chipset! I was already looking for a couple of them to install it on the Z77 Sabertooth and get rid of the loud stock ones

maybe the radiator was too thin?

Hey thx for the video. Quick suggestion, add charts! Those are nice visuals for this kind of comparison.

1st vid I've seen of yours. I thought "What a ridiculous premise; that's the silliest thing *ever* " :) ......... and subscribed immediately! +1 to removing small fans to see at what point it makes a temp difference.

Gotta love Noctua being willing to experiment like this

We need more people like you in charge of the world.

those little tiny server fans are so awesome I have two of them in my collection

Always fun to see a tech-tuber being the crazy beta-tester for hardware, billing the companies. It's awesome. I bet there is a technician at Noctua saying "When *I* asked to do it, it was rejected, but when *he's* asking, it's okay?!?!?!"

I wasted a lot of tech stuff and I've honestly not seen something like this. That mini fan array is comical to look at, another great video.

I got one of those adaptors since I had trouble fitting a full size fan into a space in my Shift X ITX case.....the last fan on the back of my radiator was blocked by the pump mount, so ended up using one of these....not ideal but worked great. Maybe others have a small system and sometimes big fans dont fit.

I have a two 200mm fans on a 280mm radiator :) The Cooler Master H500M mesh case comes equipped with two of those in the front and I just slapped a radiator behind the fans to push the air inside the case.

This is electrical engineering Art... Fan displacement and efficiency aside. Thanks for sharing this work

More videos like this... I love weird cooling experiments..... Can you use a vent tube to hook up a window unit AC to cool your PC? I've always wanted to see that one

I don't even know why anyone would test this with those fans, but YOU did! Thank you, now we know not to try this ourselves xD

This is amazing, thank you

This crazy video made me subscribe! haha

Just imagine all those 21 fans got single ARGB led built in! And was placed front side of a glass front panel case! Yeah I would go definitely for the setup, even if it is 5-10% hotter. Never thought of this concept mate. Nice idea thanks for sharing.

That's a lot of fans. Back in my extreme cooling days (TEC+Waterblock) I rigged-up a mazda MX5 car rad with its two 12 inch fans. I had the fans powered by a variable PSU and as they were sped up, the sound was identical to a C130.

Maximum Boost by Corky Bell has a chapter on intercoolers and radiators. Basically your intake duct area on the front of the car only has to be 25% the area of the fin area of the radiator. The other 75% of where the air passes through is consumed by fins and tubes, but that's on a car which is moving. Also that ratio does not account for the fan frame or hub motor in your application. There is also a tapered duct from the front bumper to the radiator surface so this idea may not be practical for a PC. Hope this helps.

Sorry I keep posting on all your videos. Just discovered you, but yeah, your vids are a lot of fun.

One seriously good use for those A4s for enthusiast consumers though, could be to optimize case airflow. Either by directing extra fresh air directly to a problematic component, e.g. the CPU, or by increasing the airflow at a part of the case that sees less air passing by, like the bottom left quadrant in many cases

I'm using them small ones on my freenas box and my htpc box, love them fans, quiet, look somewhat nice as well

I use the NF-A4x20 for NVME SSD cooling, also replaced some of my switches 40mm fans (but i used flx version), you can also use them to cool chipsets and vrms, they are very easy to mount and cool decently.

I loved the Video since the Title =) Totaly great idea!

You can hook fans into a raft type assembly by zip tying the corners together. It doesn't help with cable management, but I've used this to make tall and narrow window fans.

For the first part, it makes perfect sense that a good 120mm will perform similarly to a 140mm because the turbulence on the fan exhaust would push air beyond just the 120mm area, and cause airflow to reach the remaining borders of the 280mm radiator that the fan doesn't directly "point at". So unless you literally tape up the 280 radiator into a 240 preventing any airflow, the 280 rad still gonna do the same thing and won't magically become a 240 rad. I have a feeling if you use a 92mm fan and 3D print some effective ducting to prevent static pressure loss and maximize airflow coverage, you could well get the same results as 120 vs 140 too.

Really cool test. Noctua make the best fans ever 😊 Would be awesome if they made a desk fan or an office fan. They'd sell like hotcakes! 😜

Noctua really love this boi

Yo dawg, you heard right. I do like fans. *This is why I'm here in the first place.*

Push and pull setup for fans on radiator is best, when it comes to numbers of course there is always an advantage.

When I did that I used zip ties to hold the fans together and daisychained, ran the cables into one long link using a soldering iron. Basically making my own bus.

Used to be there were few options for higher static pressure 140mm fans so the 120mm adapter thing was an obvious choice for 140mm radiators. Now days there are a million options just as good and in some cases better when it comes to 140 non RGB.

Now you need to test those A4s in push-pull config on that radiator.

noctua seems like a chill company

I would like to see this test with a hotter cpu and see if that makes any difference as its harder to make a cpu run cooler the lower the temps are in the first place.

Very cool of noctua to send you the fans!

Thumb nail looked like a car radiator with fans. Cool test and comparison man👍❤✌

Watching this in 2021, I was watching you make the adapter plate and was wondering why you weren't 3D printing it... then you mentioned you didn't have one! Can you tell I'm a newer subscriber?

You made me a big fan

great experiment, those 5000 rpm fans reminded me toffifee chocolate

thx very good test