This Noctua power supply is really something. It's an optimised and improved version of Seasonic's Prime TX-1600. It now comes in brown, of course, including the cables, and includes a single NF-A12x25 fan and redesigned grill.
For these seemingly small changes, it's 8-10 dB quieter than the standard Seasonic model.
"Depending on where in the RPM range, you'll look at around six to eight of that is coming from the fan and around two decibels contributed by the fan grill," Noctua's Jakob Dellinger tells me.
"So that's custom designed to reduce turbulence."
I'm told the idea with the new grill is the fan blades are never, ever parallel to the grill's struts. If that were to happen, the high and low pressure fluctuations that would occur would increase noise. You'll notice looking at Noctua's grill, the fan blades and grill never run the same way.
So, next time you're PSU shopping, keep an eye out for those parallel struts.
Other features of the Seasonic PSU include semi-passive operation, ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 compliance (good for modern GPUs), and 80 Plus Titanium and Cybenetics ETA Titanium certification. It's also a honking 1600-watt power supply that'll keep pretty much everything you plug into it well fed.
I'm told the Noctua Edition, as it's set to be called, is expected to be around $30 (€30) more than the standard Prime TX-1600. That's more reasonable than I was expecting. Though it isn't set to arrive until the end of the year.
