120mm Fans vs. 140mm Fans - Are Bigger Fans Better?

is it true what they say is bigger actually better if you have a choice between using a 120 millimeter fan or a 140 millimeter fan should you always go for the 140 fan most computer cases these days have mounting points where you can fit either a 120 or 140 fan lots of heat sinks can be used with either a 120 or 140 fan and sometimes you can even use different fan sizes on a radiator with the right adapter so if you can choose between a 120 fan or 140 fan which one should you actually use in your system luckily I just completed a video on 120 fans and a video on 140 fans and I tested all the fans in the exact same way so they can be compared against each other to finally figure out what's better 120 fans or 140 fans if you miss those videos and want to see the results and exactly how I tested the fans check the links in the description and if you'd like to skip through this video to any section check the timestamps at the bottom of the description now let's take a look at the data from our previous fan tests to see if the 120 ones or the 140 ones are the best here's the graph for case performance the key to understanding these graphs is that lower is better we want lower temperatures and lower noise so the lines that are closest to this lower left corner are the best we can see the average 140 fam in red is definitely performing better than the average 120 fan in blue things get a lot closer at higher fan speeds but the 140 still does perform slightly better noise levels are almost identical between the two now let's look at the graph for heat sink performance here we can see a much larger difference with the 140 fans outperforming the 120 fans by almost 10 degrees of some noise levels at high speeds though things get really interesting with the 140 fans producing much higher noise levels without much drop in temperature this may just be due to having some higher noise fans in my 140 fan group or the 140 fans just have too much high-end range for their own good overall though the 140 fans are definitely better than the 120 fans here now let's look at the graph for radiator performance we see a very similar pattern here to the heatsink graph with 140 fans performing much better on average although they do get very loud at high speeds still so looking at the averages we can say case closed right 140 fans are clearly better but wait just looking at the averages doesn't actually tell the whole story let's look at each individual fan and see how they compare to each other here's the graph for case performance with all the individual 120 fans in blue and all the individual 140 fans in red we can now see there are a few 120 fans that are actually outperforming the 140 fans let's take a closer look and see what they are aha they just so happened to be the 120 fans that I actually picked as the best ones in my 120 fan video the nffa 12 X 25 pwm in green the biotics p 120 in yellow the kaze flecks 120 pwm in light blue and the nbe loop B 12 PS in pink so we can see that good 120 fans can actually outperform some 140 fans now let's look at the heatsink test again with all the individual fans we can see again a couple of the blue 120 fans are outperforming the red 140 fans let's see what they are oh look it's the nffa 12 X 25 and the nbe loop again these fans both seem to be outperforming almost all of the 140 fans now let's look at the radiator fan test again with all the individual fans displayed things are not as good for the 120 fans here with most of them performing a lot worse than the 140 s and some just matching the worst of the 140s but there is one 120 fan that is clearly better than almost all the 140 s let's see what it is oh look it's the nfa 12 X 25 the MFA 12 X 25 seems to be better than almost all 140 fans and almost all our tests which is quite interesting so what do we make of all this are the 140 millimeter fans really better than the 120 millimeter fans let's come to some conclusions number one the average 140 fan is better than the average 120 fan however a good 120 fan is actually better than the average 140 fan the important thing is to choose a good fan regardless of size the best fans above all are good 140 fans if you can fit a 140 make sure you buy a good one you'll get the very best performance that way if you'd like to know which fans I recommend is the best for 120 or 140 check out my 120 and 140 videos or just check the links in the description now this wouldn't be a hardware scientists video without giving out some kind of award so I'm going to give the NF a 12 X 25 PW by Noctua an honorary 140 millimeter fan award this 120 fan outperformed almost all other 140 fans in my tests which is quite impressive it's not quite as good as the best 140 fans I've tested but if you already have one of these feel free to use it in place of 140 because it's almost as good I'm definitely looking forward to knock to his real 140 version of this fan which should be coming out within the next year thanks for watching my video if you liked it be sure to hit the thumbs up leave a comment and hit subscribe to see more computer part reviews coming soon if you really want to help out hit the share button to share this video with others on places like Reddit Twitter Facebook forums and other social media I'm a small youtuber so every share helps a lot I hope this video helped you make better consumer decisions see you next time

Channel: Hardware Scientist

Views: 182,944

Keywords: 120mm vs. 140mm fans, best 120mm fan, best 140mm fan, 140mm vs 120mm fans

Id: 2xL1BC1Tb5A

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020