[section_title title=”Performance”]Performance
For my performance tests I did not have an anemometer to hand (will now be buying one) but I hooked the fans up to my motherboard and had a bit of a play with them nonetheless and I have to say I was quite impressed.
I started with the little bitty 40mm fan and while it is designed to be ran at 5v only as more than this and even Noctua says it will not last the warranty period, I still went ahead and put 12v through it for the purpose of the review. Amazingly, it was not quite as loud as I would have thought it would be, normally smaller fans seem like they are damn near going to fly of the table when revving them up a bit, and while there was definitely a bit of noise, I was expecting much worse and it also offered very impressive airflow for such a small fan, much better than I would have expected as well.
Testing the 80mm and 92mm went as expected, they offer a good amount of airflow and the noise isn’t that bad. At the end of the day any fan will have some noise when it is being pushed to its limits and the fact is, if you need to push your fans at full RPM all the time then it may be time to look for other cooling options somewhere else in your setup. Even when pushing them to the max the A8 and A9 fans were not so loud that it would cause t0o much of an issue, note for me anyways. I like a bit of sound from my fans and when I hop into some BF4 it’s nice to hear the RPM go up a bit as I know they are doing their job and keeping my components cool.
