120, 92 and 80 mm Fan Roundup

Page 3 - 120mm, Testing

Here is the moment to say that I personally don't find the toilet paper tests to be enough accurate and objective (but on the other hand are quite significant, red. Notice), so I have decided to find a suitable cooling with which to test all fans in future thus presenting much more accurate and objective information bout the products' performance!

And now naturally lets begin with the tests, which as we already know are made with out trustworthy friend – the toilet paper!

Lets see how our pretenders fared:

NoiseBlocker

The one thing that you cannot see in the pictures was that the fans swirled somehow the air in a strange way, except in lower speeds, where not only the noise was almost missing but also the airflow looked stable, if you can call an airflow the very weak air at this speeds.

Another factor to take into account is the noise level. With both fans at lowered voltage at about 6V there was no noise but as I already said in these cases personally I hardly could say that the fan does more than just wasting electricity. Matters were different at maximum speed. There the more powerful XL2 started to rumble very strange, which definitely did not justified the “Ultra quiet” sign on the package. Besides being maybe the noisiest fan in the review, the noise itself was pretty annoying.

When testing at different voltages, we used the controller from the Gelid Wing 12 bundle.

Akasa

Here is the next pretender, the fighter for the Akasa camp.

The airflow was quite good really. The fan held most of the time the paper levelled and we saw wavering only at maximum RPMs. As for the strength of the flow it was much more nicer, especially when we have in mind the noise level,which was slightly higher than that of the most quiet fan, we tested – NB XL 1.

Here again we used the controller from Gelid Wing 12.

Gelid Wing 12

In my opinion for this fan is that it was the best performer from all:.

In the photos we see a flow, which after the tests conducted by me (all pictures you see in this review are made by Stuyo) I deducted that the paper is skewed in this way because of the very strong flow it produces. Such whirling but weaker we saw at full speed with Akasa and NB XL2. With the lowering of the RPMs the flow was coming more and more stable. Exactly the tests make me think how objective are the paper tests. I checked and compared this fan with an old acquaintance – Noctua. Personally for me surprisingly Gelid Wing 12 performed better than Noctua when cooling a CPU. The wind that Gelid makes is really strong and thre was no rival in strength amongst the current competitors. Both Akasa and B XL2 were somewhat close, but noticeably weaker.

As far as noise level is concerned. It was pretty high, but personally I think it was weaker than the noise of NB XL2. It also looks like the noise is coming not fro the fan itself but from the whirling of the air, which passed through it. It takes second place concerning noise after NB XL 2.