I am quite shocked about a fan grille swap having a 5+ dB benefit on a commercial product!
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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The Framework desktop in general is such a strange device.
It's a bit of a tradeoff. That side panel has much larger holes that will allow in more dust and hair.
The holes of the original look big enough to not be doing much filtration for dust other than by passively reducing airflow tbh - seems like it serves as more of a finger guard than a dust filter.
I'd definitely be interested in seeing a comparison of the two that includes dust buildup though. I assume there's probably an as-of-yet unused design which would do a better job of balancing dust filtration and airflow than the original pattern.
The smaller the hole is, the more filtering it does.
Yes, but the shape of the holes/grille also significantly affects acoustics, so it's not simply a 1D scale for hole size scaling between "maximum airflow" and "maximum dust filtration". I personally doubt the stock side panel is maximally efficient for the balance between airflow vs dust vs acoustics, and thus don't think Noctua's modded panel is purely "we made the holes bigger" improvement.
This article is very old but still gives an idea of things: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Effects-of-Grill-Patterns-on-Fan-Performance-Noise-107/
I really don't understand why PCs don't use filters today.
I swap out fans and replace them with centrigual units, which can handle the restriction of standard washable air conditioner filter media.
Machines stay much cleaner this way.
Probably because people are lazy and won't clean the filters, and after a few months they wouldn't have any airflow. Without the filter you still get dust, hair, etc, but it takes longer to get to the point where the computer is overheating for those people who do zero maintenance.
It's kind of like how some gas lawn mowers are being sold with "lifetime" oil that doesn't need to be changed. It's not better, unless you're the kind of person who wouldn't do any maintenance anyway.
Because filters restrict airflow.
Like I said, if you use a centrifugal fan it doesn't restrict airflow.
Every air handler on the planet uses a centrifugal fan with a filter because they can generate vacuum/pressure.
That makes no sense. Anything you put the air through causes a restriction.
They mean the fan is rated for that amount of restriction, and will still move a decent cfm of air. Regular pc fans will drop cfm very quickly when there's any restriction.
It doesn't matter what it's rated for. The basic principle doesn't change.
Some fan designs handle restrictions much better than others. PC fans will drop to basically zero airflow with a moderate restriction, while centrifugal fans will still move a decent amount of air with that same restriction.
And yet, once again, the principle doesn't change. More restriction = less flow.
The principal doesn't change, but the magnitude of the effect does.
Nice that they also passively cross promote their other fans by posting a noctua-modded Prusa printer 🙂.
I have the Framework desktop and it is already extremely quiet... though I'm tempted to print one of these out just to give it a shot.
Isn't the framework desktop the weirdest device ever?
Framework, the "repairability and modularity" company making a desktop computer that's less repairable and modular than any old HP office PC?
Soldred RAM and their own proprietary interal USB dongles instead of regular PCI-e for port and storage expansion.
And theen they add weird fake modularity by letting you pay €10for some weird plastic stickers without which the PC looks like half-assembled.
The LTT ~~video~~ ad even starts with this weird flex of "You only need this one screwdriver to assemble it". I can't remember a single time I've ever had to use anything else than "only one screwdriver" to assemble a desktop. And that includes a tiny HP mini PC (which had not only expandable RAM but also a socketed CPU on a smaller form factor).
To me it just sounds like a device dreamt up by some MBA who has never in their life assembled a desktop PC before.
To be fair, Framework's limited by the AMD platform here, which requires soldered RAM for electrical reasons. SODIMM sticks are not going to cut it (it already caps DDR5 speeds and baloons voltages), and apparently even LPCAMM wasn't stable in testing.
The platform is also physically limited to 4X PCIE 4.0 x4; that's simply all the chip has. They expose one x4 port internally, and the rest are eaten up by NVMe, ethernet and such. They may even be splitting some of its internal USB4 up, which would explain the weird adapters.
If you don't need the fast RAM/CPU/iGPU though, you aren't wrong; it's not super modular and doesn't make a lot of sense. For the price, most would be better served with a standard laptop CPU + dGPU, like most mini PCs have... but if that's the case, you can buy a Framework laptop.
Tbh, where's the point of them choosing a by-design non-modular platform for a form factor where modularity is the basic paradigm?
Because AMD Strix Halo is awesome. For the price+power, one simply can't get its performance from any other platform, not even close, and they made it as modular as physically possible.
Hence, it's selling well.
Making the RAM swappable was also their intent, it just didn't physically work in the time/budget they had to develop it; and they were upfront about this.