Interview With Noctua's Jakob Dellinger

Interview

Noctua has become one of the most popular companies in the cooling market and they have been constantly releasing top notch products one after another. Noctua has been getting a lot of positive attention for their superb fans and exceptional coolers and the color scheme is the reason why people recognize Noctua products when they see one. Noctua took the enthusiasts' hearts by storm and quickly developed into one of the most acclaimed suppliers of premium quality quiet cooling products. Today, Noctua is present in more than 30 countries across the globe and working with several hundred sales partners.

[RelaxedTech]: Hello Jakob, can you please introduce yourself and tell us what your role at Noctua is? [JD]: Hi everyone, my name is Jakob Dellinger and I’m responsible for press and PR at Noctua.

[RelaxedTech]: How long have you worked at Noctua and can you describe a typical day?
[JD]: I’ve been at Rascom, one of the two companies behind Noctua, since 2001 and I’ve contributed to what would officially become Noctua in 2005 from the very beginning. My typical working day starts with some press review and news monitoring, which usually turns into studying new reviews of our products and discussing with journalists. A key part of my job is to channel the feedback we get from the press into our product development, so the next step for me is to evaluate it and to report my findings during our development meetings. We spend a lot of time discussing what further improvements we could make and where to go with future products. Another part of my job is to develop communication strategies for upcoming products, so once we’ve settled on how something should look like, I will help to make sure that they are presented in an appropriate way, prepare press-releases, coordinate the product launch, etc.

[RelaxedTech]: How has Noctua grown since it was founded in 2005 and is the cooling market more competitive these days with so many brands coming into the market?
[JD]: Well, we’ve pretty much started from scratch with Noctua and now we’re present in more than 30 countries across the globe and widely considered to be among the leading suppliers of premium quality quiet cooling components. The market has certainly become more competitive over the years though, it now takes much more care and attention to make a product successful than it did 8 years ago. At these times, most quiet fans were slowed down versions of OEM fans that have been originally designed for much higher speeds. I think we’ve been pretty much the first to get back to the drawing board in order to develop fans specifically for much slower speed ranges and their specific aerodynamic parameters. Nowadays, everyone tries to do the same thing – with varied scientific background and success of course, but you can no longer grab much attention simply by offering a fan that looks different. Obviously, the proof of the pudding is still in the eating and many of the innovative-looking new designs surfacing these days utterly fail to perform, but it certainly has become much more difficult to get attention for a new fan design over the years. On the other hand, we can certainly benefit from our excellent reputation in this somewhat confused market – customers know that Noctua is always a safe choice.

[RelaxedTech]: As we leave 2013 behind and embrace 2014, what can we expect from Noctua in 2014? Is there anything you can reveal to us?
[JD]: We have a very strict policy of not realising anything that we aren’t 100% happy with and this often leads to delays with upcoming products. In this case, we did some more fine-tuning on the stuff we had scheduled for late 2013, so all this has now moved to 2014. This means you’ll see lots of new stuff from us this year – new 8 and 9cm fans, new high-end and low-profile heatsinks and last but not least two entirely new lines of fans.

Noctua NH-D15

(Successor of the NH-D14 at Computex 2013)

[RelaxedTech]: The NH-D14 was released back in 2009 and since then, it's been regarded as one of the best air coolers to ever be made. I think you know where I'm going with this but what can you tell us about the successor of the NH-D14? When will it be released? I believe it was shown at Computex 2013 but very little is known about it. Can you reveal the dimensions of the heatsink?
[JD]: The NH-D14 successor was one of the products we had originally scheduled for late 2013, but then we found a way to squeeze out some more performance, so when that option popped up we knew we had to go for it. As you’ve said, it will have big shoes to fill and we really want it to be a worthy successor, so while it was a tough pill to swallow, we accepted the delay. If everything goes smoothly now, we should have it ready in April. Dimensions will be very similar to the D14, but the heatsink itself will be a bit wider. Thanks to a new design of the fan clips, the total width including fan clips is the same as D14 though, so we managed to get some more surface area without hurting compatibility.

[RelaxedTech]: The NH-D14 is able to compete and beat some of the high end closed-liquid-coolers out there, do you think that air cooling can keep up with closed-liquid-cooling?
[JD]: Yes, I am quite confident that air cooling will remain attractive. Single radiator water coolers are mostly bottlenecked by surface area and there is only so much you can do about this, so I think top end air coolers will remain competitive from a performance point of view. At the same time, air cooling has some key advantages such as much better reliability, no worries about leakage, no pump noise etc.

[RelaxedTech]: Have you guys ever thought about joining the water cooling market?
[JD]: Yes, we actually have several development projects in this regard, but I can not say much more than that at the moment, sorry.

[RelaxedTech]: Noctua's fans are engineered for quietness and a lot of R&D goes into making a Noctua fan. Are you guys working on new fan designs?
[JD]: We’re constantly working on new designs. We’ve just finished new 8 and 9cm models and are almost done on a 20cm one. The biggest R&D project for fans we’re working on right now is the Active Noise Cancellation project with our partner RotoSub.

[RelaxedTech]: Many people hate the coloring scheme of Noctua fans but love the performance. Will we ever see Noctua fans with different color schemes?
[JD]: Don’t worry, this is actually one of the things we’ve got coming up this year.

[RelaxedTech]: Last but not least, is there anything else you want to mention to the public about Noctua?
[JD]: What about some trivia? I suppose most of RelaxedTech’s readers think of Noctua as a manufacturer of PC cooling equipment, but over the years, we’ve won more and more customers from completely different industries who found out that the efficiency and reliability of our fans allows them to improve their products. So Noctua fans are now being used in ways we never would have imagined ourselves, some of the craziest examples being surgeon’s helmets and waterbeds!

[RelaxedTech]: We would like to thank Jakob Dellinger for taking time out to do this interview.