I imagine a white PC fan would look terrible if not cleaned daily or used in a room with very filtered air.
replyWell, I have a bunch of lower-end black fans, some of them quite old, from before transparent cases were a thing. They're actually pretty much gray if I don't wipe them off.
replyNoctua's signature... brown-orange? Whatever that color is, it has the same issue. The blades are basically gray if I don't wipe them.
Haven't seen anybody start a gray craze, though. Though I have a grayish motorbike that also shows dust and dirt like nobody's business (it's a bike I use strictly on paved roads).
Silver is the ideal color for hiding dirt. I had a silver car once. Unless you drove it down a dirt road during a rainstorm, you basically never had to wash it.
replyIf it were about performance and not marketing, they'd try to optimize for resistance to dust adhesion and resource consumption: energy, cost, durability, etc.
replyI have them. They get dusty at about the same rate as a pure black fan (which also shows gray/brown dust quite easily). I need to clean mine about every 6-9 months to keep them looking good enough to "show off". I generally run a Winix HEPA filter in each room of my apartment.
replyI don't think matte white is worse than matte black in terms of showing dust. They both do.
I suspect there's a reason brown is Noctua's signature color.
replyBlack cars show road dust immediately. White cars don't. I image it's similar for computer fans
replyDust can actually be more visible on black than on white.
replyTotally. I used to favor black a long time ago when most computers were still gray and the idea of having everything in black was really cool, but since realizing that details and controls are harder to discern on black, I’m all in on white and silver. It’s also less prone to showing fingerprints.
replyHave we solved the yellowing? I guess many of us have memories of old and ugly yellow computers.
replyTIL: Generally all plastics exposed to UV start to photodegrade. If you google why old computers turn particularly yellow most sources point to bromine-based flame retardant agents in the plastic, but some people make a convincing case[1] that ABS just naturally turns yellow in UV light.
replyNot much real research into that topic, interestingly.
[1] https://medium.com/@pueojit/a-look-into-the-yellowing-and-de...
Not sure why all the fire retardants are needed. Besides, steel probably retards fire more effectively than most fire retarded resins and is probably far more recyclable.
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