Arctic P12 MAX Review - The Best Budget Fan got BETTER

well guys I wanted to kick this video off right away with a little discussion about the current state of high-end cooling fans so while these fans keep on getting better and better and better with every single generation they are also getting extremely obscenely expensive in my opinion let me show you what I'm talking about so the fatex T30 you're looking at 35 to 40 dollars U.S per fan here in Canada about 50 the new be quiet silent Wings Pro 4 an amazing new fan you're looking at 32 dollars for the 120 millimeter version let's continue knock to an industrial PPC 30 knocked to an 812 25 to 30 dollars even my personal favorite the need a gentle typhoon that used to be going for about 18 bucks 20 to 22 dollars at this point in time but this is where arthic comes into the equation because what they are doing right now is launching a new p 12 Max that's looking to absolutely Buck this trend of more expensive fans being delivered every single year while not sacrificing one iota on performance and look arctic's original p12 is an absolute Legend since it goes for about 10 bucks or even less in some situations it's also widely available it's super versatile giving good performance on CPU coolers radiators and as a simple case fan in most situations it's way better than the pre-packaged crap you usually get but while it's a great budget fan it was never really designed for high-speed High static pressure situations that's the one thing that was missing but not anymore and that's where the new 13 Yes you heard that right 13 dollars per fan p12 Max gets factored into the equation and look don't think of this as just a simple updated p12 even though it has the same name as that older fan this is a brand new design they use the lessons learned from that p12 and also arctic's newer bionic series and blends them into a brand new fan with a bunch of additional new tech too so in comparison to the traditional p12 you'll notice that the hubs a bit bigger here that's because it's hiding a brand new moral bust motor that's attached to dual ball bearings instead of a fluid Dynamic bearing this combination allows it to run at a constant 3 300 RPM which is just so much faster than the p12's rotational speed and it eliminates one of the p12's biggest weaknesses which its top level RPM setting the fan blades on the other hand have also received a bit of an update with a revised pitch and a slightly different profile but the biggest change here is a closed blade design to increase airflow and static pressure at the same time the max also gets integrated rubberized vibration pads and a zero decibel mode if it detect X less than a five percent pwm signal so overall this is meant of course to be arctic's new flagship fan but at the same time it also takes a little bit of a path Less Traveled versus a lot of the other manufacturers here because it takes a simple Bare Bones approach which is why of course this thing can go for less than half the amount of all of these other fans that you're looking at right here look and I know a lot of you think high-end fans should come with a lot of extras but the p12 comes with just four mounting screws and a flat 40 centimeter cable there's no sleeving interchangeable mounts or extension cables here just the fan itself the series 500 man that sounds like a spaceship with these 60 porosity panels and perfect dust filtration on all the ventilated areas an optional LCD can be mounted on the PSU shroud for extra bling all fan locations fit 140ml fans for that powerful and colorful takeoff because cooling is Now supported by the new best performing case fans from a thermaltake plus that PCI area rotates on the frame level for proper FPS Destroyer support so you don't waste any potential Check It Out Below all right I guess that covers all the basics for what is a pretty basic fan but at this point in time instead of jumping right into the benchmarks I wanted to give you guys a little bit more of a perspective when it comes to noise versus RPM levels for the p12 Max and there's a few things that'll stand out right away first of all the p12 max is unbelievably quiet I mean 35 decibels of noise output happens at an amazingly High 1500 RPM that ability to run High rotational speeds at lower noise levels will give it a serious leg up on the competition also at its maximum speed of about 3 300 RPM it hits just 50 decibels which is technically loud but you also have to remember that a lot of these other high-end fans are running at 3000 RPM and at much much higher decimal levels we're talking about 56 decibels all the way to over 60 in some cases so with that in perspective let's start off with some of the Benchmark results that we've got starting with raw CFM which is a good indication of how much air a fan can move without any restrictions whatsoever basically there's a cluster of different fans that are close to the bottom here but remember while these are technically low on this chart these are still some of the best fans on the market right now that's why the original p12 was so impressive for its price it couldn't match or beat more expensive fans like the ml120 and knock to a PPC at low noise levels still fans like the T30 gentle typhoon and the silent Wings Pro 4 were just Leaps and Bounds better but check this out between 36 and 38 decibels the p12 max is pretty much tied with the T30 a fan that costs almost three times as much after that the T30 does tend to pull ahead and the Max starts trading blows with the pro 4. sometimes it loses while other times it's essentially tied being a bit better than the gentle typhoon 2. and yet the best fans have always been able to start stretching their legs at higher rotational speeds so an extra gear that goes above 45 decibels you can see that with the PPC T30 and be quiet Pro 4 where they pretty much Start dunking on everything else it's also why the original p12 ended up getting buried by peaking at just over 1800 RPM it was actually the slowest fan we've tested but now the p12 max goes all the way to that 3300 Mark and on the March upwards it stays locked in step with B quiet Flagship but that all changes above 47 decibels at that point it really steps things up a notch it's almost got like a sweet spot here because it's essentially running between 300 and 400 RPM higher at each respective decibel level so what does this all mean well from a raw CFM perspective active the p12 max can simply move more air while being quieter than almost anything else on the market but let's give this into a little bit of a different perspective by narrowing it down to a single decibel level because I need to explain this probably just a little bit more to you guys so Addie constant 39 decibels the p12 max splits the difference between B quiets Pro 4 and gentle typhoon which is impressive by itself but look at the RPM levels here while most of the other fans are running between 1500 and 1750 RPM the max is sitting around 2 000 so it basically can run faster without getting louder and that is so important but there's a flip side to this equation too and we can see that when every fan is running at full speed the p12 actually needs that speed advantage to be so competitive since other fans with better air movement characteristics can usually run a fair bit slower and yeah they can get louder too Alright as it stands we now know that the p12 max is one of the absolute best fans on the market right now when it comes to Raw air movement with no obstacles in its path so that makes it an amazing case fan but what happens if you want to run this thing on a radiator on an air cooler or something else that introduces some restriction into that airflow path well at 100 fan speed the CFM values of every fan Drop Like a Stone but the Arctic does hang on to third place by narrowly and I mean narrowly keeping ahead of the pro 4. at 39 decibels though the p12 max is still amazing but it just doesn't have the raw static pressure envelope to power through a radiator like the T30 silent wings and gentle typhoon and that's despite running at a higher fan speed here on the positive side the max is still Leaps and Bounds better than the original p12 and it costs much much less then the fans it's competing against so those are the more technical numbers but I also wanted to put things into a little bit more of a practical perspective for everybody I mean look these top fans all of them can absolutely Ace every single one of the CFM tests but what happens when we start talking about their effect on cooling temperatures and to do that I want to start with of course an AIO are these fans gonna make that big of a difference for raw temperatures and overall there might be a pretty significant difference in CFM numbers but that doesn't necessarily lead to much in the way of raw performance Deltas since the top four fans are within just three degrees of one another on the other hand if we overlay decibels onto this the Max has the absolute best noise to Performance ratio here when running at full speed narrowing that down to 39 decibels again still shows the max being in the same class as a lot more expensive fans like the meadec Wonder snail and sf-120m the silent wings and T30 on the other hand well those are on a whole other level and the final step in this journey is of course air cooling performance and look I know you aren't going to be using these fans at 100 on an otherwise quiet noctua u12s but there's still a pretty clear gap between the top dogs and all the rest the p12 max is obviously gonna go down in the history books as pretty groundbreaking when you take its price into account here at a constant decibel level though well the fan becomes a bit less of a factor here since the heatsink's overall efficiency actually plays a bigger part so most of these end up being clustered within just three degrees of one another even then the max is hanging right with some of the legendary Alternatives that are regarded as top tier options right now so I guess that's pretty much it and I guess there's only one thing to say here and that is 13 13 is is what you have to pay for the p12 max in order to get performance that is similar to the silent Wings Pro 4 that cost more than double the price that is just it's so important right now when building a PC or even upgrading one is becoming more and more expensive Arctic wanted to Buck the trend when it came to extremely high-end fans offering great performance but also coming at an insanely high price and you know what they've done exactly that basically you can actually see what arctic's building up to here up until now they simply lacked a true high performance fan that could take their aios and air coolers to the next level well now they've got it and I'm sure the max is gonna form the foundation for a bunch of cool new products that are coming up and I've never actually done this before you could go back through all my videos I am very very hard on so many products but this time it is the first time that I'm going to give a product p12 Max two Awards one of them is the damn good value word of course and the other one is the damn good award honestly this thing it surprised me I love it it bucks these trends that we've been seeing from high-end fans for so long I Gotta Give it to arthik and I hope you do too all the links to buy this thing are in the description below and I am going to see you in the next one take care guys

Channel: Hardware Canucks

Views: 217,117

Keywords: arctic p12 max, arctic p12 max review, arctic p12 max vs p12 pwm pst, best fan for air cooling, best radiator fan, best case fan, hardware canucks, hardwarecanucks, arctic p12 max price

Id: xpSO_Mpu9Eg

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023