Are quiet fans worse for your 3D printer? You might be surprised!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 พ.ค. 2024
- Comparing the cooling performance of the stock Creality fan vs. the Noctua fan on an Ender 3 V2. The widely debated topic gets put to the test today! If you enjoy this video, consider subscribing to Desktop Inventions!
Disclaimer: I am not sponsored by Creality or Noctua. I am just sharing my findings between these 2 fans on my 3D printer setup.
Link the the extruder fan mount model:
www.thingiverse.com/thing:496...
40x20 Noctua Fan link:
noctua.at/en/products/fan/nf-...
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0:00 intro
0:55 Assumptions
1:37 Testing Setup
2:23 Cross Section and Explanation
3:11 Start of testing
4:34 Results and Analysis
8:00 One final tip!
8:41 Conclusion - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Thanks for the tip at the end! I always turn off my printer without letting it cool off, time to change that!
You’re welcome!
Just found your video, a great experiment. It is refreshing to find real facts on an important topic. It goes to show that there is more to fans than just maximum air flow. Cooling the heatsink requires a fan designed with good static pressure performance too - which is an indicator of how well the fan will push air in a restricted space past the fins.
Yea agreed, while I admit these noctua fans aren’t the best for static pressure, I think a radial blower fan would be a better solution for cooling. But at this point I’ve been trying to optimize noise and “good enough” cooling. No speed printing yet 😂
I really appreciate the effort you took to capture all those data points. Well done!
Glad it was helpful! 😃
I was actually hesitating due to this concern on if i should replace them or not cause the stock fans do too much noise as the printer is on my bedroom. This video helps me clear my mind into changing them. Thanks for this video and keep up the insane work!
You’re welcome! Have fun the upgrades!
Quality video, I can see a lot of effort went into it and we thank you for it!
Thank you for the support 😄 I will keep up the hard work!
Great video!!
Diagram helps a Ton!
Nice job on your testing and analysis! Great presentation!
Thanks!
A very well made video! I will replace my stock fans just as you did when I gain more experience, thanks!
Thanks for the comment! Yes it took some work to do, but afterwards it’s such a nice improvement that makes me happy about the noise level every time I fire up my printer
Good video. I wonder then if you could drop the voltage and speed of the noctua further and still reach spec but even lower noise and power draw?
Well done! Just wonderin why u did not choose the 4010 from noctua for ur test, as most people pick as replacement for the stock fans. This is sorta effecting the results cause of cfm. Noctua 4020 do deliver about the same cfm as stock 4010, noctua 4010 are worse due to the lower rpm. As far as I remember from my thermodynamics class, flow is effecting the amount of heat u want to get rid of in a severe way
Very good suggestion, to be honest I thought the Noctua 4020 was going to be slightly worse than the stock fan, but still good enough. I didn't even consider the Noctua 4010 standing a chance to compare to the original fan. But now that you mention it I will purchase a Noctua 4010 fan and do a follow up video along with some of the other good suggestions yet to come. Thanks for the reply!
Very well done video!
Thanks for the feedback! I’m working on a part 2 video extension on this one with a 40x10 noctua fan as well.
Thanks for pointing this out!
It's not always good to improve beyond necessity - but the silence will be worth it for me :)
Absolutely! If you're living/working near your printer a quiet fan upgrade is pretty much a need!
Nice job again. While you have the measurement equipment there: what about the part fan? I am wondering whether your 2xAxial is as good as 2xRadial 4020s…
Good request! I'm not sure what I would physically measure to find the performance of the part cooling fans, but I do think I could do a series of bridging and overhand tests to compare the performance!
@@DesktopInventions that‘d be nice as it is a real life test!
holy cow you really went in depth with this. gotta be the best comparison video about this topic. thank you for doing this it is greatly appreciated. why would the printer spike like that when you turn it off when its hot? why would power be going to it to make it spike like that when it is turned off?
You’re welcome! The temperature spike was on the heat sink. Normally with the fan blowing on the fins it cools the heat sink, but when the power turns off and the fan stops blowing the heat from the heater block creeps up the aluminum heat sink pretty quickly and the temperature rises without the fan blowing on it.
This is interesting, I avoided Noctua as I was certain the reduced CFM would not be adequate. I had no idea they'd do this well.
Nicely demonstrated. Could you run the noctua fan slightly slower for even more noise saving and maintain similar temperature to a stock fan?
If you lower the voltage given by the buck converter, you will run it slower and therefore, quieter. But I am sure that the Noctua fans at 100% are significantly quieter than the stock fans, so I doubt that you will have the need to slow down the Noctua.
would be great to have the sunun maglev fans as another comparison
I recently did some testing on Sunon Maglev fans in my latest video! Thanks for the advise!
something I would like to see is the differential in power consumption on the heating element between fans. The largest temp difference was at the heat break so if it is keeping it cooler, with a Noctua fan, is forcing the heating element to work harder to maintain temperature?
That is an excellent suggestion! I think the power difference would be quite small in terms of overall power but it might be surprising! Also see the difference in power with and without a heat sock which insulates the hot end from the part cooling fans.
I'm trying to print homemade (260C) PET Filament. I'd constantly get heat creep and Jams after 10 minutes of printing. I'm hope switching to a noctua fan is going to help with this.
It might help some, but you may want to consider an all metal hot end with a metal heat break if you haven’t already. With this type of hotend the Bowden tube doesn’t go all the way down to the nozzle so the Bowden tube won’t get as hot.
What an amazing video. Bravo
Thank you very much!
This is a great video. It wasn't a 100% clear to me where you step down the current for the hot end fan as the noctua is 12V and the stock creality is 24V. Did you remove the buck converter when you swapped out the fans? Is the voltage converter in the wiring chase? Does it get hot?
Yes there is a buck converter there on the Noctua fan. You can see it around 4:11 in the video. The buck converter came out with the harness I made for it.
Thanks for this! Just watched someone on TH-cam shit on Noctua as a whole, saying you’ll get terrible performance & heat creep if you dare use their fans for prints longer than 8-10 hrs. I used a single 4010 set to 12.5v & have seen no effects of heat creep after many 10+ hour and recently 2 26-hour prints. I do plan to use this setup you show in the video though.
Yea agreed I’ve heard similar statements but haven’t seen an issue out of it. Especially on the hot end, they really don’t need as much cooling as you’d think with the stock fans that come on them!
Its a small system heated by a controlled and powerful heating element. As the video shows the heatsink gets to pretty much steady state within 30mins. If they haven't reached stable temperatures after 8+ hrs they have serious design problems unrelated to fan choice.
Agreed, that’s what I’ve seen within my testing, almost steady state within 20-30 minutes.
I found a video on the CHEP channel where he takes the temp inside the hot end heat sink when he swaps out the stock fan for a noctua 4010. Did you take any temps from inside the heat sink?
Not inside the heat sink. How did he manage to do that? I am considering drilling some holes and sacrificing a heat sink on the next video :P
@@DesktopInventions I think Rob was talking about this: th-cam.com/video/vjL38udVS24/w-d-xo.html
Also, thanks for this great video. I was one of the believers of the "no-noctua-on-the-hot-end" talk and you managed to change my mind. 👍
Thanks for the link, that’s a good idea, I shall try that next time! Glad I was able to help get you on the Noctua train XD
would be great to have the sunon maglev fans as another comparison
I recently got some Sunon maglev fans. So I'll probably be giving those a try at some point 😁
In the Ender 3 V2 stock hot end the ptfe tube goes down to the nozzle right?
Yes correct, I made the diagram wrong based on a full metal hotend.
2:24 nice optical illusion. Due to the diagonal stripes it looks like the tubes are not straight
yea good catch! I didn't notice that before! Also I apologize, the cross section for the stock ender 3 hot end should have the Bowden tube go all the way down to the nozzle. What I drew at 2:24 would be a full metal hot end.
The noise warning was just hilarious, I have the ender 3 V2 and it's like a jet engine. I've said to creality and they sent a replacement nozzle fan. They are a joke. I don't understand why they can't use 12v fans that are quieter and do a better job. Awesome video. Just a last question, what is a CFM from a nozzle fan? Anyone know?
Yea creality printers are very great MVPs minimum viable printer at a good cost some of the nice to haves auto bed leveling, quiet fans, etc. don’t make the cut. Not sure on the exact creality ones but I found fans of the same size and RPM online that are about 2-3CFM
because of cost. if you want all those nice things on your printer you arent going to be spending barely 200$ USD and more like 700$USD and more
How does the print quality differ with two Noctua FLX part cooling fans? I was wanting to do this same set up but I’m worried the quality of the prints will be far worse.
I haven’t noticed a huge difference in quality when changing the fans for the hot end. More so help to prevent filament jams in the future. But for the part cooling fans on the sides, the 4020 noctua fan will have better performance than the 4010 and you will notice the quality difference on difficult overhangs.
just installed 40x20 noctuas
they're quiet, but they also don't like the pwm control from the ender 3v2 at all
they don't even start themselves until around 75% fan speed, and there they seem to cool so much that adhesion is a problem with the fang shroud I'm using
kinda annoyed that I'll have to do so much recalibrating now to get things working again
Do you have them in series or parallel? I struggled with this a bit too. Ended up connecting them in parallel with a dc converter before them to step the voltage down. Yea the pwm doesn’t like it but I turned the fans on after the first few layers and didn’t have issues with cooling adhesion. Just had to keep a clean bed. I actually struggled with cooling under performance from the noctua fans on part cooling so now I switched to 5015 fans that can be controlled with PWM.
@@DesktopInventions each one has it's own fan port and buck converter
the 40x10 mainboard fan that the ender controls via the part-fan setting has no problem at lower duty cycles, the 40x20 on the same signal does.
it also has super weird lag, setting it to 100% and then 90% will be much stronger for a little while than 0% to 90%.
not sure if that's on my buck converters or something weird the ender is doing
idk, maybe the adhesion is not a fan problem after all but some other stuff, but it's just a shit feeling to have something working perfectly, try to upgrade it and then it's worse :D
I was not surprised at all and I do like to read, so if you could provide links to where this topic is "widely debated", that would be awesome!
I don't have exact links but I know in the ender3 subreddit people have talked about this topic, I think CHEP did a video about the topics too
I see it fairly often in the TH-cam comment section. My previous video had a few commenters on this also teaching tech has a video installing noctua fans there are also some comments in that video. Debated maybe a stretch since most of these people won’t defend their point. But that’s why I wanted to make a video with some real testing :D
Great. Instrumented hot end. Now I have one more thing to add! Might as well add an Arduino to display the hot end temperatures. Then I'll need to create a new enclosure from scratch so it all looks factory. Kidding aside, thanks for showing this with real data. My CR-10v2 (24v hot end) is pretty noisy.
Why no kapton tape?
Good suggestion, that might work, the trick is wrapping the tape tight enough to make a good contact on the part. I've also purchased some high temp glue for the future that I think can work.
Do you have two sets of power wires for the fans? The two fans run at different voltages.
If you run the stock fan at 12v, you are running at half voltage, and that would reduce RPM and airflow.
If you run the Noctua fan at 24v, you are running the fan at too much voltage, it will run faster… For a while, then die. Temporarily the airflow would be better.
Noctua makes good fans, in both airflow and static pressure types, as well as hybrid types.
I am considering doing this change, but don’t feel like wiring in a buck converter ATM. Have to find the space for it too.
Winsinn fans are a little quieter and move air better, so using those ATM.
If the stock fan has an air flow of 7.26CFM and Noctua 5.5CFM, why the hotend gets colder with the fan that is providing less air?
Maybe 7 is a bit too much flow and is causing the air to back up in the printer, making the fan less efficient.
Where did you find the 7.26 CFM value? I wasn't able to find that online. my short answer, I'm not exactly sure. but I have 2 possible explanations, 1. the Creality fan doesn't actually meet the 7.26 CFM value or 2. the air flow pattern is different for the 2 fans, the creality fan when I turn it on and feel it with my hand most of the air is flowing at the edges and directed away from the center of the fan, and the noctua fan feels like more even air flow across the face of it, although it does have a small dead spot in the middle.
Static pressure also matters. CFM is not the only important value.
If you need high temperature resistant tape, you need to use Polyimide tape, I think.
Yes I call this one kapton tape at work and we use this through SMT reflow ovens all the time. Great stuff!
hahah a bunch of beer openers now. I'll take one!
I’ll save one for you with a local currency coin inside ;)
They are quiet, and about the air flow ?
Airflow is les than the 24V noctua fans. But for cooling the hotend they work just fine.
The 4020 is a thick boi though lol ill be buying one now.
God damn an HDR 3d printing video
Is it? I had no idea haha
The fan grills seriously hurt airflow with those little fans. I run mine without them
yea true that! I designed some different fan grills later that are much more open. I hesitate to go grill-less because I don't want to accidently stick a finger in there and break an expensive noctua fan 😂
RPM and CFM numbers don't tell you what you want to know, more RPM does not mean you move more air because of blade pitch, while the CFM rating does not factor in load other than the weight of the air. Positive static inside hotend cover is putting load on the motor, wattage of two like motors will determine how much the motor slows down. You go by the amperage rating. Another thing to keep in mind is you don't just want airflow, you need some velocity to drive air through the fins. Velocity is going to make some noise so don't cut off your nose to spite your face. With a slower fan at least lower the heat load by wrapping the heat block in cotton
yes, it's been an experience, but learning that the axial fans are not great for part cooling because the static pressure is relatively low. Now strong enough to push the air through small ducts. Thanks for the comment! Not sure I understand wrapping the heat block in cotton though?
@@DesktopInventions Heat load targeting, it reduces radiant heat around the heat sink. Heat goes to cold so the lower the heat sink temperature the more heat will travel into sink verses the direction of the filament.
also the stock ender 3 fans are horrible quality. the stock blower had bad bearings from the start on mine, used the brissfang setup for along time with dual 4020 noctuas with no problem. using stealthburner now it does have better part cooling. but its mostly for looks
Nice that is a great looking printing head!
nothing beats noctua
Yes I’m a big fan of their fans 🤣
I really liked this test you did, but you are not comparing the same size of fans, they are different
Yes this is true. I was conservative and went with the bigger fan to make up for the noise reduction with some more volume. I did another comparison video comparing the 4010 noctua fan as well!
@@DesktopInventions Yes already saw it!! very good by the way, after watching this video I saw the other one, but you know what, I made that change from the original to the noctua 4010 on my Ender 3 Max and now I'm suffering from clogs in the first few hours of printing, I don't know if I'm doing something wrong...
When you did your tests, did you make long prints to test it?
From the temperature testing I saw things reached steady state in less than an hour. I also did several longer prints 6+ hours and even used a 30mm tiny fan at one point just using PLA anyways. If you’re still struggling it might be good to upgrade to a micro Swiss or some type of all metal hotend to get your Bowden tube further from the nozzle.
too much weight if you want to print fast with high accelerations.
Yea it’s a heavy setup for now, might try fast printing some day later
I think the real comparison in performance is more about flow and static pressure and noise is just a side effect of the design of a fan. Typically speaking more "powerful" fans are louder, but that's not necessarily the case. Well designed fans will can have similar performance and be quieter, which I think is likely the case here. Would be interesting to have the CFM and pressure ratings of the fans to go with this data as well, though finding that for stock fans can be pretty tough. So I wouldn't necessarily say "quieter fans are always better", in this case it's more just "this Noctua fan is better than the stock Creality one".
This whole video is misleading. It compares two approaches to cooling, not comparing two similar fans. Of course a larger fan is likely to cool better...