- Review -

01.09.2012 rbmods.com

We plugged in the case fan slot of our motherboard and disabled the PWM function to use the fans at their full speed. We also tested the fans at PWM speeds and with L.N.A adapter without PWM. Noise levels with all the fans are similar. In PWM mode, with our test setup, the fans were running at minimum speed nearly the whole time. Only after extensive 3DMark Vantage sessions the fan speed rose above the minimum. Even then the fans were very silent. With L.N.A adapter one could barely hear the fans. When we disabled the PWM and ran the fans at 12V, they were clearly audible. However, increasing noise comes with increasing performance. We saw about 2C decrease in overall temperature of the case when using the 120mm fan as our exhaustfan compared to the situation where the same fan was used with L.N.A adapter or PWM. Yet again Noctua did not disappoint us. The quality is on par with previous incarnations of their fans and performance is also on a very good level.

"If you can live with the pricetag Noctua is a great choice. All three fans were absolutely one of the most silent one’s I’ve encountered, and while there definitely are more powerful fans available – the Noctua fans should be more than enough for cooling your case, processor cooler or even your water coolers radiator. All the fans are PWM controlled so you can control their speeding behaviour from your bios or from your motherboards control utility in your operating system. I can recommend all these fans to whoever who is looking for silent, yet reasonably powerful fan, and does want the PWM feature. Noctua won’t let you down in terms of quality!" (Ville Ilonen, rbmods.com)