Noctua showcased a monster passive CPU cooler a year ago at CES that can cool a Core i9-9900K without any fans necessary. Now, according to @Fanlesstech, it appears Noctua is finally ready for production of this cooling behemoth.   

Noctua was supposed to put this fanless CPU cooler into production by 2020; however, presumably due to the pandemic, the cooler didn’t see the light of day this year. Thankfully Noctua still wants to produce its fanless CPU cooler, so hopefully, we’ll see it by early next year.

There’s still no official name for this “fanless CPU cooler” from Noctua, and we still don’t know the full dimensions of this monster CPU cooler. Judging by the image, you will probably need a very wide ATX chassis to support it.

At CES 2019 last year, Noctua set up a demo rig running a Core i9-9900K with its fanless CPU cooler. Noctua ran Prime95 to stress test the CPU cooler fully, and surprisingly, the fanless cooler managed to keep the Core i9-9900K at a temperature of 95C. While that is very hot, keep in mind that Prime95 is a synthetic stress tester that’s designed to push CPUs to their limit, so the test isn’t fully representative of what you might see with regular applications. Also, 95C is within the safe temperature envelope for the processor. In either case, it is impressive that a fully-passive CPU cooler can cool a top-tier (at the time) Core i9-9900K being pushed as hard as it can while staying below its TJmax.

Also, Noctua says adding fans to the cooler and/or in the chassis will dramatically increase its cooling potential, from the rated 120W up to 180W. We don’t have an official launch date for this fanless CPU cooler from Noctua, but if it is entering production very soon, we should see a launch date sometime in 2021.