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Noctua Case Fan Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Benchmarks
Since we don't have an accurate way to test fans here in the Ninjalane Labs we're going to take some time and graph out the key specs of the Noctua NF-S12-1200 fan as it relates to the other 120mm fans we have in hopes of illustrating how good these fans really are.
We can contrast the specs against a couple of different fans, for instance around the Ninjalane Labs we have 2 other 120mm fans including a Silverstone FN121 and Delta AFB1212SH.
The Silverstone unit is a low speed fan we bought to power one of our watercooled systems, it has yet to see action but does spin quite slow and with minimal amount of noise. Specs show a 1500 rpm spindle speed (we tested this fan at 1200 rpm) and moves 53.24 CFM. Noise is reasonable at 26.6 dB.
The Delta on the other hand spins at 3500 rpm (which concurs with our rpm testing) and moves a total of 113.1 CFM with a noise level of 46.5 dB, quite the little monster. We salvaged this fan from a Chenbro workstation case that happened to be RPM controlled to reduce noise output.
We can contrast the specs against a couple of different fans, for instance around the Ninjalane Labs we have 2 other 120mm fans including a Silverstone FN121 and Delta AFB1212SH.
The Silverstone unit is a low speed fan we bought to power one of our watercooled systems, it has yet to see action but does spin quite slow and with minimal amount of noise. Specs show a 1500 rpm spindle speed (we tested this fan at 1200 rpm) and moves 53.24 CFM. Noise is reasonable at 26.6 dB.
The Delta on the other hand spins at 3500 rpm (which concurs with our rpm testing) and moves a total of 113.1 CFM with a noise level of 46.5 dB, quite the little monster. We salvaged this fan from a Chenbro workstation case that happened to be RPM controlled to reduce noise output.
For the purposes of these benchmarks we are looking to have low RPM, high CFM and low dB. The Noctua NF-S12-1200 wins the RPM and dB benchmarks and given the specific RPM level is technically on par with the Silverstone FN121. We can safely say that the NF-S12-1200 moves more air with less noise than anything we have ever tested.
