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We can all rest easy knowing our savior Noctua hasn't betrayed us.This whole debacle started off with good intentions: A user reported product-level concerns that prompted further investigation, as it's always possible that media samples either don't exhibit issues or are limited in quantity. This is good, particularly when the reporting is done with the consideration that there's always room for a one-off defect, user error, shipping damage, or some other one-time event; unfortunately, like most curiosities and slight offenses posted on the internet, the trouble cascaded out of control until people were threatening to stop buying Noctua ever again. It's an interesting, insane flip that internet outrage culture causes: in the blink of an eye, we go from, "I trust this product and have liked it for years, have recommended it, and presently use it for critical systems" to "I'm never buying this again, I can't believe they did this, and I'll cost them so many sales they won't believe it." That brief injection of anger satisfies the itch to hoist someone to the gallows - this time, it was Noctua.
People are binary in this way, if our CPU and GPU coverage has taught us anything. There's little room in internet comments for a saner middle-ground between raving praise and seething rage. Brand loyalty rules over thought, and the last week demonstrated how impossibly high standards and unrepentent loyalty turn a small fault into a warfront.
We can't speak for every single Noctua fan that came off the line, but we can speak for our sample size - and it is a decent sample size, all things considered. It's not like we're a validation house that was contracted to test hundreds of these, after all. Between our eight presently tested samples, we cannot see any meaningful difference using our measurements. Visible differences, yes, but that's about it. This sample size includes fans from the original Reddit post, sent by OP for t esting. Noctua might deserve a bop on the nose for the color change, though that's an awfully small thing to boycott over - pigment and plastic coloring is going to change by region. It's difficult to color match cross-region, and this looks like an instance where Noctua either didn't see the issue, didn't think it was an issue, or didn't have time to respond to the issue. And "issue," all things considered, is a heavy word for "beige" vs. "slightly more beige."