Even Noctua’s own marketing points out a majority of their fans are poorly designed and NF-A14x25 G1 isn’t among the top either. Their performance competitive fans are just NF-A12x25 G1, NF-A12x25 G2, and NF-A14x25 G2.
In my experience it’s cheaper, faster, and easier to replace Noctua parts with something else than to try to get Noctua support to actually provide support. Support experiences vary by region and who your tickets end up with but the common assumption Noctua’s premium pricing pays for excellent support has proven entirely incorrect here. Maybe if you live in a different region Noctua’s value proposition on this isn’t as bad, but even at only 2x overpricing, it’s still more cost effective to use parts from a zero support competitor and self insure. And my experience’s been either I haven’t needed support from Noctua competitors or they have pretty good support.
Somewhat similarly, Noctua claims high reliability but there’s no evidence to show their fans have longer MTTF than if you cost down 2-3x. Decent entry level fans are ~5x cost down and 60,000 hours versus Noctua and other premium fans’ 150,000. But 60,000 hours is 6.8 years and 150,000 is 17. So, even if you’re running the fans 24x7 and expecting a 15+ year build life (OP was looking for 10 in their other thread), it’s worth asking whether it’s locking in on a current gen Noctua makes more sense than replacing with another set of lower cost fans that’s likely to be of higher performance in 5-7 years. I see this as a personal preference but it does illustrate how high reliability potentially crosses over into being a bug rather than feature.
If you want to buy Noctua, buy Noctua. But if somebody’s looking at parts tradeoffs IMO awareness that marketing and branding is what Noctua does best probably isn’t a bad thing.
All the spectrometry I’ve run shows the offset speed thing’s just marketing babble. If it makes you feel better, though, just take two non-G2 fans and set their curves a little differently so they run at offset speeds.
Epoch uses North tooling and the North is pretty jank, so unless you like paying premium pricing for a case where the flex means you have to be a bit careful to get panels line up and the captive knobs regularly fall off after being used for a bit, I’d be cautious of Epoch as a way of getting preinstalled Momentum. Maybe Fractal’s addressed some of the North’s issues but, if they have, they haven’t addressed others like the solid shroud.
Meshify 3 also ships with Momentum and, as already pointed out in the other fork of this thread, underperforms relative to its competitors. Haven’t seen anything on how Meshify 3 and Epoch compare for build quality.
As @ThisMightBeAFish pointed out, depends which ones. Silent Wings 4 beat NF-A12x25 G1 at higher speeds but aren’t performance competitive with either G2. They’re also steeply priced here. Not as steeply as Noctua but still 1.5-2x Momentum, ~1.5x Vento Pro. The Toughfan Pros do better for about the same.
Perhaps, perhaps not. You’d have to measure both configurations to see if be quiet!'s “total silence concept” (quoting their marketing materials here) results in any meaningful difference. be quiet! doesn’t actually claim the damping does anything and third party measurements don’t don’t show any clear difference.
