- Review -

19.05.2007 TechDomain.com.au

My test system up until now has used a "hair-dryer" blower fan on a smallish (compared to some others) heatsink. The CPU in there is a Prescott 3ghz - so it knows how to put out some heat! On the back of the case was an Antec 120mm LED Fan. Please excuse the dust on the Antec! Mounting the Noctua fans was extremely simple, thanks to the rubber "vibration compensators". To use them, you simply hold the fan against the holes in the case, and push the rubber pins through from the other side. You then grab the end of the pin, and pull until the edge of the pin pulls through and the fan is secured snugly against the case. To be honest, I did not know if this was going to work acceptably. The 120mm fan was a given - after all, it is doing the simple job of removing hot air from the case. Replacing a high powered but extremely noisy blower fan with a low noise 80mm fan was more of a gamble. Obviously this is not a review about the ability of the 80mm fan to be attached to a heatsink that it was never designed for, and I promised myself I would not be disappointed if it did not work out. Thankfully though, the fan attached, and it actually managed to keep the cpu cool, even when at 100% load (running 2 instances of Toast). The Noctua fans are completely silent inside from outside the case, with the only real noise that I have to live with now coming from the GPU cooler and the PSU.

"Both the Noctua NF-S12 and the NF-R8 are, in my opinion and without a doubt, the best quiet fans on the market today. They offer serious performance, unrivalled quality, while pleasing the "quiet" enthusiasts. I am pleased to recommend these fans to anyone needing a quiet solution. To sum it all up, the Noctua fans presented today are reasonably priced, and excellent value for the product that you get. The design benefits are obvious, with the resulting lack of noise paying testament to the high quality work and testing that Noctua has been able to produce. If you want quiet fans, then look no further, because the Noctua NF-S12 and the Noctua NF-R8 are the best." (John Wilholt, TechDomain.com.au)