PC cooling specialist Noctua has just revealed a new PC power supply that it’s designed in collaboration with Seasonic. The new Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition is clad in the distinctive brown, beige, and black tones associated with the Noctua brand, and the company also says it specially designed the grill to reduce noise even further. You’ll need deep pockets, though, as the price is a huge $569, $20 more than the coveted Steam Deck OLED.
This is about as premium as you can get in the PC PSU world, and the specs are certainly up there with the best power supply models we’ve seen. The Seasonic Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition is rated at 1,600W, and also sports the 80 Plus Titanium badge, meaning its efficiency sits at 90% or above at any load, from 10% to 100%. Perhaps more importantly, Seasonic and Noctua have specifically designed this PSU for “silence,” and in this case that doesn’t appear to be hyperbole.
According to the two companies, the fully modular PSU’s semi-passive fan control system means the supplied Noctua NF-A12x25 fan won’t even spin up until the PSU goes over 50% load at normal operating temperatures (+/-25°C).
Put this PSU in a PC with components that won’t draw more than 800W, and you’ll have a silent PSU for the most part, even when gaming. In our tests, even a power-hungry Core i9 14900K system playing games on an Nvidia RTX 4080 only draws 557W at peak load, so that’s plenty of headroom.
There’s still plenty of power on tap for those who want it, though, with two 16-pin PCIe 5.0 connectors for the latest graphics cards, such as the forthcoming Nvidia RTX 5000 series. The all-important 12V rail (the one that powers your CPU and GPU) also has a massive 133.33A current rating, which is enough to power a ludicrous level of PC power.
So what’s Noctua’s role in all this? Firstly, you get a superb 120mm Noctua NF-A12x25 inside the unit, which is one of the best PC fans you can buy right now.
However, Noctua has also really gone to town on the design of the grill that covers the fan, which it claims can “enable it to run ~8-10dB(A) quieter than the already quiet standard model” of this Seasonic PSU, and backed up this claim with graphs of its test results. This grill, says Noctua, has been “engineered and optimized to ensure as smooth as possible pressure gradients when the blades of the NF-A12x25 fan pass the struts of the grill.”
The company expands on this by saying that “the grill’s radial struts are angled and swept against the sense of rotation of the fan and the sweep of its blades, which helps to avoid situations where the leading edges of the fan blades are parallel or almost parallel to the grill struts.” This, says Noctua, “would cause a high-pressure pulse followed by a sudden drop in pressure when the blade moves out of the overlapping position.”
Meanwhile, the whole package comes with a full set of individually sleeved cables clad in the classic Noctua black and brown color scheme. It’s a big unit, though, measuring 210 x 150 x 86 mm, so you’ll need to make sure you have room in your case for it.
Noctua is making some bold claims for a fan grill, but it’s also demonstrated that it knows what it’s doing with cooling and airflow, and we’ve been impressed by the company’s cooling products in the past. If you want to see why, check out our Noctua NH-D15 review, where we were struck by this cooler’s superb build quality, excellent cooling, and low-noise operation, earning at the top place on our best CPU cooler buying guide.
