Noctua is one of the very best fan makers on the market, but introducing its fan into the Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition gaming mouse seemed to involve a truly horrible sequence of fan tests.
Noctua has "custom-built torture-test rigs", all designed to put fans through their paces to see if they can withstand how the average gamer treats their mice. One video of six fans getting rapidly from left to right says, "This is what 30 sideways movements per second look like."
This is what 30 sideways movements per second look like. See how our custom-built torture-test rigs subjected the NF-A4x10 to forces of up to 20g and hundreds of thousands of cycles to validate it for the @PulsarGears Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition: https://t.co/IijYjNvhXP pic.twitter.com/Oi7FMxnvTQJuly 30, 2026
Effectively, the new Noctua mouse has a fan inside, which then blows air on your palm as you play. I've had the chance to try it out in the PC Gamer office, and so far, it's surprisingly pleasant. But ultimately, if you are gaming, you will do a lot of sideways movement and will often pick the mouse up and tap the top of the table. Noctua wouldn't want its fan to break down in a game, and it has taken to its blog to go over its testing methodology.
One test, conveniently named the 'drop test', has a series of fans on a motor that is picked up by a wheel and then dropped rapidly. You can see a video of that particular test in action below.
The results, according to Noctua, are positive for both tests. It says, "The answer to the question of how long NF-A4x10 fans can survive this type of torture is simple: surprisingly long!"
The horizontal test, pushing 12 fans back and forth rapidly, stopped after 280,000 cycles as one of the fans had failed. However, that turned out to be a bearing issue with the tape that fixed the fan coming loose.
In the vertical drop test, all eight fans were still functional after 20,000 drops. "After another 5000 drops, all the fans had their impellers pop out due to failures of the bearing lock-ring, but by this time, the foam padding at the base of the test setup that we used to soften the impact was completely shattered, so the impact force had become much higher than our accelerometer could measure."
So it seems like the gaming mouse is ready for the big league (ie gamers throwing their mice around because a monster has popped up on-screen). We'll just have to see how it fares for gaming in its other aspects. I have my hands on one, so you can expect my thoughts soon, though I don't anticipate dropping it 20,000 times.
1. Best overall:
Noctua NF-A12x25 G2
2. Best budget:
Arctic P12 Pro
3. Best RGB:
Corsair iCUE LINK LX120 RGB
