**The Niche Product: Noctua FD1**

In this video, I'll be going over my personal experience with the Noctua FD1, a product that's been making waves in the PC cooling community. The FD1 is designed to bridge the gap between the cooler and the side panel of my case, using foam adapters to create a snug fit. But what makes it so special?

As I can be seen on camera, I'm currently using an RTX 2060 as my graphics card, which is extremely underpowered for what I'm using it for. The straws that come with the adapter system serve as studs for the little pieces of plastic, holding them in place to ensure a secure fit. These foam adapters are crucial in making sure that they're 100% snug, requiring a bit of force to push them down.

**The Foam Adapters**

One of my concerns was what would happen if I clipped off the clips too far forward. Would it hit the side of my case instead of the foam? Luckily, I was able to avoid this issue by pressing down on the adapter slightly and then clipping it off. However, I did notice that using thicker foam on top and thinner foam below would have provided more flexibility when pushing them down.

**Testing the FD1**

With my system running next to me, I decided to give the Noctua FD1 a test run. I've tuned my 3950X to run at an all-core load of 100 watts continuously, which is not something I do often as I'm usually gaming on it most of the time. The idea was to see if the FD1 would make a difference in temperatures. With the L9A operating at about 60-65 fan speed, I'm looking at temperatures on the CPU itself ranging between 86 and 87 degrees.

**The Results**

Fast forward to the results, and it looks like temperatures on the CPU are almost 5-6 degrees lower with the FD1 in place. That's a significant difference, especially considering that it's all thanks to getting fresh air from outside into my case. It's clear that the Noctua FD1 is doing its job, but is it worth the money? As it stands now, I'm very happy with what noctua has on offer.

**Real-World Results May Vary**

It's worth noting that all results can't be repeated in every single case. The performance of this product may vary depending on how much heat is being sucked back into your CPU cooler. On the other hand, if you're looking for those cooler temperatures and the situation warrants it, this could be a pretty good option for a relatively affordable price.

**Conclusion**

Noctua's FD1 is a niche product that has won me over with its simplicity and effectiveness. It's cool to see what can be achieved by getting fresh air into your case, and I think noctua has done a great job of creating a solution that doesn't require super-sizing your CPU cooler.

**Author Bio**

I'm Mike from Hardware Canucks, and this is my first attempt at reviewing the Noctua FD1. I hope you enjoyed the content, even if it's a relatively simple product. If you have any comments or suggestions for future content, please leave them below. Have a great day!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell good morning good evening good night whatever time you're watching this video at i'm mike with harvard canucks and i wanted to jump on camera very quickly to talk about something that i picked up for my personal build and you guys might remember this build this is the console sized itx pc that i built with eber last year and it is still running still up there still amazing but the other day noctua announced this and i picked it up on amazon it is called the nafd1 and what this promises is something that i've been looking for my personal pc and that is to make sure that i get more fresh air to the processor as quickly as possible and that is what noctu is promising with this thing and what is it so basically what it is it's a funnel that goes inside of an itx pc to make sure that you're pulling in fresh air from the outside towards your cpu cooler but look i don't know if this is a bunch of fud i don't know if it's going to work or not i want to take you along with my journey with this nafd want to see if it's actually going to lower the temperatures of the 3950x that's inside of this system so let's do that right after a message from our sponsor excuse me want to deepen your cool deep enough to support eatx motherboards massive cpu towers and the 140 at the rear but what about the cool you have plenty of that with three argb fans for the proper cool know what i mean the new deep cool is comparatively priced and all you'll need in the compact mid tower check it out below okay with that out of the way let's talk about a couple of things that you probably want to know about the fd1 and the first of those is probably yes the price so personally i picked this thing up for about 17 canadian and i think in the us it's available for about 13 us i don't know about other regions of the world but right now with pricing going completely crazy thirteen dollars us 17 canadian i'm not really gonna complain as long as it gives me the temperatures that i want it to so what do you get for that money and some of you you're going to complain because there's not much going on here all you get basically are these seven foam adapters that create a funnel going towards a noctua l9 series cooler the other thing that you get are basically 14 little plastic straw like things that are basically inserted into these foam adapters in order to make sure that they stand upright now the last thing are of course four screws to attach it to a cooler and i'm not going to say this is compatible with every single 92 millimeter cooler on the market because it's not first of all the fan on a cooler has to be 14 millimeters in height so basically the same size or the same height as the l9 series of noctua coolers the other thing that you have to make sure is that if you want to install this on any other cooler that there are no fan clips that is why basically i was saying you have screws if you have fan clips typically you don't have screw holes on the cooler so the other thing that i want to talk about is exactly how you go about adapting the fd1 to your case so basically there are those seven different height foam adapters and what you can do is use those varying heights to adapt this thing between 5 and 45 millimeters in height depending on how much space you have between the cooler and the side of your case and i'm saying this side of your case because there's a couple of things that you need to make sure first of all do you have ventilation on the side of your case where the cooler is if the answer is yes then this is probably perfect for you there also needs to be direct access between the cooler and that side of your case so if you have a gpu or something else installed in one of these small form factor builds that gets in the way again this is not going to be for you but anyways with all that being said i really wanted to install this into the system we're going to go through the installation process see how it runs is it going to lower my temperatures let's get right to that okay guys after reading the instructions there's a couple of things first of all you're probably wondering why do you have a wooden dowel in your hand and a pencil well look noctua makes this installation extremely easy especially for retrofit cases like this one so this is what they recommend to do what you do is you take a wooden dowel or a toothpick or something else you stick it through the side of your case until it hits the edge of your fan then what you would do is you just do a small marking and my god make sure that you don't mark your case and what this gives you is the amount of space between the cpu cooler itself or at least the fan on the cpu cooler and the top of your case now what you also have to do is you have to reduce from that the amount of space or the amount of thickness of the case so in this case it's a dr zebra case and it has about one millimeter thick steel then what you do is you dimension it so this is let's just see here it's about 15 millimeters so in essence 14 millimeters now to achieve that 14 millimeters you take these different foam adapters that i was talking about before and you look at the notches on the side so they have three notches for three millimeters four notches for four millimeters all the way up to 10 millimeters so you would combine them in such a way to get the amount of distance that you need between your case and the cooler now the nice thing here is because they're foam they compress so if you're half millimeter off or a millimeter off that's perfectly okay so what i'm gonna do now with the dimension that i know i'm gonna take off the panel and continue the installation all right guys so everything's been open and the first order of business is to take off the screws that mount the fan to the cooler and you can see i've already done that here the next step is to use those screws that i mentioned before and pop them in and as i'm doing that i just wanted to mention something very very quickly about this build because you'll notice that the rtx 3090 that i originally had in here is not here anymore right now we're using that in an office project but it is coming back into the system right now i'm using an rtx 2060 and it's extremely underpowered for what i'm using it for so these acts actually as studs for your little pieces of plastic your your straws as it is so these straws are pressure fit onto each and every single one of these to act as a guide for your foam adapters now let's talk a little bit about these foam adapters because i'm pretty sure this is being done live i don't know if it's going to screw up or not these foam adapters can flex around these tubes and make sure that they are 100 snug so you can actually see it takes a little bit of force to push them down i chose the 10 millimeter and the four millimeter to bridge the gap between the cooler and the side panel of my case now what do we do with these things one of my concerns right now looking at this is if i clip these off right here where it is it'll actually hit the side of my case instead of the foam the last thing i want is one of these plastic things sort of rattling up against the side of my case so i'm still going to clip it but i think the best scenario here is i'm actually going to press down a little bit to recess it and then clip it off oh did i hit the camera just now okay so there you go so right now it's actually the phone that's going to be hitting the side of the case so this is one of my recommendations here at least actually i might have done this a little bit wrong because if i would have put the thicker foam on the top and the thinner foam down below i would have had more flexibility to push it down but anyways i'm going to get these all clipped and i'll continue talking about the the process right after that so with the system here running next to me i wanted to give you a very quick update about my personal rake so instead of it running the 3950x in eco mode i've tuned that 3950x to run at an all core load of 100 watts continuously now look i don't run it at that all-core load very very often that's simply because i'm gaming on it most of the time i'm not doing full screen renders or anything else i come to the office to do that so what are the temperatures under that all-core load anyways look with the l9a operating at about 60 65 fan speed i'm looking at between 86 and 87 degrees on the cpu itself so did the fd1 actually make that much of a difference so i'm going to check this live here it looks like temperatures on the cpu are almost 5-6 degrees lower at between 79 and 80 degrees so what that means to me is that it's not chugging down on interior case heat anymore it's getting that fresh air from outside so i guess what that means to me is that yes it actually works i mean of course it works i can't believe i made a video this long about basically seven pieces of foam but it goes to show you that as long as you're getting that fresh air into your cpu there are differences to be had but is it actually worth the money and that really depends on how much value you put in five six maybe even only three degrees temperature difference between where you were and where you're going to get with the fd1 but as it stands right now i'm very very happy with what noctua has on the flip side of that coin all results can't be repeated in every single case this is the dr zebra century with these components you might have higher end components and get even lower temperatures depending on how much heat is being sucked back into your cpu cooler right now on the other hand you might have an amazing case for internal airflow even if it's an itx case in that situation i'm not sure if you're going to be getting a huge amount of difference with the fd1 but if you are wanting those cooler temperatures and the situation warrants it this could be a pretty good option for a relatively affordable price and you don't have to super size your cpu cooler for it so i have to give noctua huge props for actually coming out with this relatively niche product i hope they come out with a bunch more of these for slightly larger coolers as well and i guess that's pretty much it i'm mike with hardware canucks i hope you enjoyed content like this i mean it's a very simple product but it's cool to me so i guess i'll see you in the next one if you have any comments about something else you want me to look at please leave them down below have a great day guyswell good morning good evening good night whatever time you're watching this video at i'm mike with harvard canucks and i wanted to jump on camera very quickly to talk about something that i picked up for my personal build and you guys might remember this build this is the console sized itx pc that i built with eber last year and it is still running still up there still amazing but the other day noctua announced this and i picked it up on amazon it is called the nafd1 and what this promises is something that i've been looking for my personal pc and that is to make sure that i get more fresh air to the processor as quickly as possible and that is what noctu is promising with this thing and what is it so basically what it is it's a funnel that goes inside of an itx pc to make sure that you're pulling in fresh air from the outside towards your cpu cooler but look i don't know if this is a bunch of fud i don't know if it's going to work or not i want to take you along with my journey with this nafd want to see if it's actually going to lower the temperatures of the 3950x that's inside of this system so let's do that right after a message from our sponsor excuse me want to deepen your cool deep enough to support eatx motherboards massive cpu towers and the 140 at the rear but what about the cool you have plenty of that with three argb fans for the proper cool know what i mean the new deep cool is comparatively priced and all you'll need in the compact mid tower check it out below okay with that out of the way let's talk about a couple of things that you probably want to know about the fd1 and the first of those is probably yes the price so personally i picked this thing up for about 17 canadian and i think in the us it's available for about 13 us i don't know about other regions of the world but right now with pricing going completely crazy thirteen dollars us 17 canadian i'm not really gonna complain as long as it gives me the temperatures that i want it to so what do you get for that money and some of you you're going to complain because there's not much going on here all you get basically are these seven foam adapters that create a funnel going towards a noctua l9 series cooler the other thing that you get are basically 14 little plastic straw like things that are basically inserted into these foam adapters in order to make sure that they stand upright now the last thing are of course four screws to attach it to a cooler and i'm not going to say this is compatible with every single 92 millimeter cooler on the market because it's not first of all the fan on a cooler has to be 14 millimeters in height so basically the same size or the same height as the l9 series of noctua coolers the other thing that you have to make sure is that if you want to install this on any other cooler that there are no fan clips that is why basically i was saying you have screws if you have fan clips typically you don't have screw holes on the cooler so the other thing that i want to talk about is exactly how you go about adapting the fd1 to your case so basically there are those seven different height foam adapters and what you can do is use those varying heights to adapt this thing between 5 and 45 millimeters in height depending on how much space you have between the cooler and the side of your case and i'm saying this side of your case because there's a couple of things that you need to make sure first of all do you have ventilation on the side of your case where the cooler is if the answer is yes then this is probably perfect for you there also needs to be direct access between the cooler and that side of your case so if you have a gpu or something else installed in one of these small form factor builds that gets in the way again this is not going to be for you but anyways with all that being said i really wanted to install this into the system we're going to go through the installation process see how it runs is it going to lower my temperatures let's get right to that okay guys after reading the instructions there's a couple of things first of all you're probably wondering why do you have a wooden dowel in your hand and a pencil well look noctua makes this installation extremely easy especially for retrofit cases like this one so this is what they recommend to do what you do is you take a wooden dowel or a toothpick or something else you stick it through the side of your case until it hits the edge of your fan then what you would do is you just do a small marking and my god make sure that you don't mark your case and what this gives you is the amount of space between the cpu cooler itself or at least the fan on the cpu cooler and the top of your case now what you also have to do is you have to reduce from that the amount of space or the amount of thickness of the case so in this case it's a dr zebra case and it has about one millimeter thick steel then what you do is you dimension it so this is let's just see here it's about 15 millimeters so in essence 14 millimeters now to achieve that 14 millimeters you take these different foam adapters that i was talking about before and you look at the notches on the side so they have three notches for three millimeters four notches for four millimeters all the way up to 10 millimeters so you would combine them in such a way to get the amount of distance that you need between your case and the cooler now the nice thing here is because they're foam they compress so if you're half millimeter off or a millimeter off that's perfectly okay so what i'm gonna do now with the dimension that i know i'm gonna take off the panel and continue the installation all right guys so everything's been open and the first order of business is to take off the screws that mount the fan to the cooler and you can see i've already done that here the next step is to use those screws that i mentioned before and pop them in and as i'm doing that i just wanted to mention something very very quickly about this build because you'll notice that the rtx 3090 that i originally had in here is not here anymore right now we're using that in an office project but it is coming back into the system right now i'm using an rtx 2060 and it's extremely underpowered for what i'm using it for so these acts actually as studs for your little pieces of plastic your your straws as it is so these straws are pressure fit onto each and every single one of these to act as a guide for your foam adapters now let's talk a little bit about these foam adapters because i'm pretty sure this is being done live i don't know if it's going to screw up or not these foam adapters can flex around these tubes and make sure that they are 100 snug so you can actually see it takes a little bit of force to push them down i chose the 10 millimeter and the four millimeter to bridge the gap between the cooler and the side panel of my case now what do we do with these things one of my concerns right now looking at this is if i clip these off right here where it is it'll actually hit the side of my case instead of the foam the last thing i want is one of these plastic things sort of rattling up against the side of my case so i'm still going to clip it but i think the best scenario here is i'm actually going to press down a little bit to recess it and then clip it off oh did i hit the camera just now okay so there you go so right now it's actually the phone that's going to be hitting the side of the case so this is one of my recommendations here at least actually i might have done this a little bit wrong because if i would have put the thicker foam on the top and the thinner foam down below i would have had more flexibility to push it down but anyways i'm going to get these all clipped and i'll continue talking about the the process right after that so with the system here running next to me i wanted to give you a very quick update about my personal rake so instead of it running the 3950x in eco mode i've tuned that 3950x to run at an all core load of 100 watts continuously now look i don't run it at that all-core load very very often that's simply because i'm gaming on it most of the time i'm not doing full screen renders or anything else i come to the office to do that so what are the temperatures under that all-core load anyways look with the l9a operating at about 60 65 fan speed i'm looking at between 86 and 87 degrees on the cpu itself so did the fd1 actually make that much of a difference so i'm going to check this live here it looks like temperatures on the cpu are almost 5-6 degrees lower at between 79 and 80 degrees so what that means to me is that it's not chugging down on interior case heat anymore it's getting that fresh air from outside so i guess what that means to me is that yes it actually works i mean of course it works i can't believe i made a video this long about basically seven pieces of foam but it goes to show you that as long as you're getting that fresh air into your cpu there are differences to be had but is it actually worth the money and that really depends on how much value you put in five six maybe even only three degrees temperature difference between where you were and where you're going to get with the fd1 but as it stands right now i'm very very happy with what noctua has on the flip side of that coin all results can't be repeated in every single case this is the dr zebra century with these components you might have higher end components and get even lower temperatures depending on how much heat is being sucked back into your cpu cooler right now on the other hand you might have an amazing case for internal airflow even if it's an itx case in that situation i'm not sure if you're going to be getting a huge amount of difference with the fd1 but if you are wanting those cooler temperatures and the situation warrants it this could be a pretty good option for a relatively affordable price and you don't have to super size your cpu cooler for it so i have to give noctua huge props for actually coming out with this relatively niche product i hope they come out with a bunch more of these for slightly larger coolers as well and i guess that's pretty much it i'm mike with hardware canucks i hope you enjoyed content like this i mean it's a very simple product but it's cool to me so i guess i'll see you in the next one if you have any comments about something else you want me to look at please leave them down below have a great day guys\n"