These Are The BEST PC Fans for Air & Water Cooling

can you hear that you better be able to hear i don't know if the mic is clipping can you believe it all right guys mike here with hardware canucks and with all of the air cooler reviews that i've been doing lately the conversation and comment thread usually evolves into something involving fans which are the best which are the worst is the included fan the best one that you could possibly get now what i wanted to do is round up a bunch of the fans that are out there right now some of these are ultra high infants some of them are budget picks some of them are just ones that i wanted to test out and put them into one review so i guess the first thing that i wanted to do here is really break them up sort of simplify this whole thing by putting these into two different price categories one of them is over 30 us and some of these actually cost more than fifty dollars here in canada the other category is less than thirty dollars u.s and some of these can be also considered some of the value picks so let's check out some of those prices right now kicking things off at the upper end of things and it's of course the knock to industrial ppc 3000 at a whopping 35 u.s and this thing's been used on a ton of higher end systems since it's so versatile and it can push a ton of air that's followed by the new kid on the blocks the phanteks t30 which is sitting a little bit lower at 31 bucks right now and this one needs a little bit of an explanation first of all the t30 is completely unique in this roundup since it uses a 30 millimeter thick frame instead of the traditional 25 millimeter but that could be considered a positive and a negative point depending on your specific situation on one hand it's supposed to dramatically increase airflow and static pressure while optimizing on the noise side of things but on the other well the fan just takes up more space this fan has a few other tricks up its sleeve too like a pwm profile switch that can cycle between three modes there's hybrid mode for a semi-passive operation performance that cap speed at 2000 rpm and advanced that goes balls to the wall at a maximum 3000 rpm that's followed by one of the goats here and that's the noctua nf a12 of course i'm also including the cooler master sf-120m since it's supposed to be a direct competitor to the a12 i've got to say though it's also one of the most unique looking fans here with this asymmetric design so i guess that wraps up the more expensive fans in this roundup and i've got to say it's a pretty wide variety that goes from ultra expensive to i guess a little bit less painful on your wallet but let's talk about putting less pain again on your wallet and that would be within the sub 30 price category and you know me everything that is a little bit less expensive or that's more on the value standpoint of the equation it gets my juices flowing more than anything that is ultra high-end and ultra expensive but at the same time a lot of these fans that i'm still including are on the higher end of the spectrum when it comes to pricing so i'm going to put the call out to you guys if you guys have any other fans that you want that are in the sub 30 price category please let me know in the comments below i would love to look at those as well you want performance but what about portability well that's where the new razer blade 15 comes into the equation it harnesses nvidia's latest geforce rtx 30 series laptop gpus up to an rtx 3080 mind you and with that kind of power you can experience the best visuals and lowest latencies in gaming thanks to ray tracing and all the hard work that the new rt course tensor course and ai enhancements perform behind the scenes oh and did i mention the beautiful and fast display flavors that razer offers ranging from full hd 360 hertz up to 4k oled and all of this hardware goodness is wrapped in an anodized matte black chassis and with their new anti-smudge coating it won't show fingerprints check out the new razer blade 15 down below anyways let's start out with corsair's highest end performance fan the ml120 pro in this case it's the one without rgb since it's rated for higher rotational speeds there's also the be quiet silent wings 3 high speed and guys just take note this version goes to 2200 rpm whereas the standard silent wings 3 it hits just 1450 and cost quite a bit less meanwhile sitting at 25 bucks is probably one of the most legendary fans ever created it's the nedek gentle typhoon the design has been around for more than a decade now and it's been sold by knee deck servo to a bunch of companies those companies have rebranded it as their own like scythe dark side and in this case xpg you need to watch out though since the typhoons i've seen tend to run at all sorts of different rpm levels some of them are pretty basic with unsleeved wires and top out at just 1550 rpm or maybe up to 1450. meanwhile the xpg and scythe versions have fully sleeved cables and hit 2150 rpm and speaking of scythe they're wonderfully named wondersnail is their entry into this roundup at 20 bucks they might not sell the gentle typhoon anymore in every single market but this is supposed to be its i guess spiritual replacement and man it's just got an awesome name doesn't it and then there's this the arctic p12 pwm pst and that pst part of the name is probably the most important part because this one is the pressure optimized model that runs at a higher rpm than the rest of the p12 lineup so you really need to take that into account if you're looking at this fan either way it goes for just 12 bucks and look make no mistake about it this is a bare bones unit that's focused on delivering the absolute best low noise performance at an optimal price i mean it doesn't even have anti-vibration pads in its corners like every other fan here and speaking of price you might have seen something there look you can buy five of these p12s for the price of one single noctua ppc now that's really saying something and it shows a wide variety of pricing in this roundup but either way you can tell that the vast majority of fans within this roundup have a very specific use case they are high and fast to cool off high-end systems high-end radiators or high-end air coolers now you're probably not going to be buying four five or six of these specific fans other than maybe the p12 to populate just your case in many situations that would actually put you out more money than your case itself as for the actual speeds well this is what things look like and i also have to remind you that all of these are plus minus 10 i'm also adding cable and extension lengths here since that's such an important factor when it comes to adding these to your build basically this roundup has fans that range from just 1850 rpm all the way up to a screaming 3000 rpm for the noctua ppc and phanteks t30 and when i say screaming i mean it screams like a banshee so check this out this is the arctic p12 offering 100 fan speed so listen so around 1 850 rpm this is the knock to a ppc operating at about the same pretty quiet right now let's just press this button and turn up to 3000 rpm can you hear that you better be able to hear how you know if the mic is clipping can you believe it anyways with all that being said i think we need to get into a couple of more specifications anyways with all that being said i think we need to get into a couple more specifications what distinguishes these higher-end fans from the more budget-oriented ones and i'm going to just make sure that i didn't cut myself on these fan blades okay so at least all my digits are still together but once again please feel free to pause the video here if you need to take everything in that's because things run from the arctic which is completely bare bones and you only get mounting screws meanwhile there's other fans that throw everything but the kitchen sink into the box and the price well that actually doesn't mean that you're going to get the most stuff included either because some of the most expensive fans here only include the screws the phanteks t30 on the other hand that's probably the most interesting because it comes with a bunch of longer mounting screws because of its thicker and non-standard design now at this point in the video i usually go on and on about the methodology we went through to achieve the results that you're about to see but in this situation i'm going to do things a little bit differently because this methodology is so extensive and we spent several weeks just determining what would be the best way to achieve the results that we wanted i'm gonna leave a link to a google doc with images with descriptions and everything else in the description below that you guys can go through at your own leisure all right let's start off with this little chart here the y-axis is showing how many cubic feet of air per minute these fans can move by themselves without any restrictions whatsoever meanwhile the x-axis shows how noisy each gets in decibels i'll be starting at 36 decibels which is the noise floor for the room that we're testing in this shows how much air a fan can move relative to the amount of noise that it produces so the best fans here will have the highest results at the lowest possible noise levels and something else i want to mention here is these are unrestricted results so basically there's nothing in between our measuring tools and the fan it's just free flow and these are raw cfm numbers all right let's start with the corsair ml120 pro as a baseline here and add the nf a12 which beats it right across the board and if you're willing to put up with a little bit more noise the ml-120 pro can get you more airflow since it can run at those higher speeds but one of the surprises here for me was the arctic p12 it started behind then it really got into the groove around 38 decibels or so where it ended up matching the noctua and then there's a wonder snail my god honestly i love that name and at low decibel levels it can actually perform crazy well it's not a snail at all and if you're willing to sacrifice some noise it moves tons and tons of air too the next two are interesting with the cooler master sf120m edging out the noctua and the silent wings 3 whose real strengths lie under that 41 decibel mark but if you really want to see something impressive well say hello to the gentle typhoon guys this thing is one of the cheapest fans here but in many ways it just dominates i mean look a bit closer and you'll see that at full speed it produces higher cfm than the wonder snail and at much much lower noise levels i also had high hopes for nocto's ppc model here but honestly it was just a bit of a disappointment meanwhile phantek's mantra with the t30 is simple thicker is better and it works here it just blows everything else out of the water with the gentle typhoon being the only fan that gets even close although the t30 has an extra gear since it can run fast and i mean ultra fast it can get all the way up to screaming 3000 rpm and at 56 decibels while pushing a preposterous amount of air at around 100 cfm and the t30 isn't the only one going above that 45 mark either so do the ml 120 pro which tops out around 49 decibels and of course the knock to industrial ppc and that thing is just ridiculous but it's a good five decibels louder than the t30 while actually moving less air and that actually shows where that t30 strengths lie so i guess it's time to add a little bit of air restriction to this whole equation and for that i'm going to use this this is the corsair h60 and it's got a pretty typical for an aio at least 27 millimeter thick radiator now what am i going to do with this i'm going to be measuring the amount of airflow left after the fan takes the air passes it through this dense fin array and makes its way onto the other side now technically at least if there's more air left on the other side of the radiator there should be better overall cooling potential for that fan now i know there's a vast over simplification of this whole concept but i don't want this review taking hours and hours and hours so let's get on to those results so at full speed for all the fans this is what things look like without any restriction whatsoever just remember there's a huge delta between the fastest and slowest fans here so i'm adding all the speeds just so you can keep track anyways add that rad and the order of things takes a bunch of interesting turns of course the ultra fast 3000 rpm monsters stay on top but the gentle typhoon jumps into third place and the noctua 812 it actually moves way up the chart too as a matter of fact the noctua is the second slowest fan here other than the arctic p12 and that p12 does struggle mostly because it tops out at such a low rpm and that's pretty much the story between restricted and unrestricted airflow but what if we just take a step back and check out what ends up happening at a apples to apples comparison that would mean setting all of these fans to a noise normalized constant 39 decibels well you can see right away which were designed for optimal static pressure and pushing air through a radiator the phanteks t30 takes the crown but it's followed pretty closely by the gentle typhoon and you guessed it the noctua 812 jumps up a huge number of places too then comes the wonder snail with the coolermaster sf120m and silent wings 3 giving good middle of the pack performance compared to some of the other coolers here and those are followed by the ppc and look this is an amazing fan at high rpms but for the price it's hard to recommend over something like the a12 that's specifically designed for high static pressure quiet operation environments i'm actually going to say the ml 120 pro is the biggest disappointment here to hit 39 decibels it was operating at only 1500 rpm which means it's noisy and it barely edged out the 12 arctic p12 and look cfm is one thing but to get a gauge on how these fans actually perform it's important to put them into an actual cooling scenario so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to take back out that h60 set all of the fans once again to a noise normalized 39 decibels and see how they actually perform on this cooler and starting with the aio in stock form things get pretty toasty on our 5950x meanwhile slapping an ml 120 pro onto it well you get about 2 degrees less at comparable noise levels that's really nothing special the arctic p12 gets about the same result and the next jump in performance comes with the silent wings 3 the noctua fans and the sf-120m then come a couple of surprises in this round up and that's the scythe wonder snail and once again the gentle typhoon now we're getting into some seriously impressive results with a temperature drop of about six degrees and you guessed it though the fantax t30 is way way out ahead here and look 10.5 degrees better than stock is massive it's almost like you've got a whole new aio but one of the benefits of some fans is their extra gear to push things even higher if you're willing to pay the cost in acoustics and that's where the fantix continues to shine and the knock to a ppc also gets into the action finally you'll notice i've added decibels to this chart too and there's a reason for that it's because the ml 120 pro's situation guess the scythe and the knee deck needs a little bit of an explanation even though it's technically beating the other two the ml fan gets hella loud anyways that's why the a12 is so damn impressive at just 1900 rpm it still competes well then you have the rest of the fans clustered near the bottom and yeah the slowest running arctic trails everything now the next step in this review really hits close to my heart because it's all about air cooling and for me i like those air coolers so much more than i enjoy popping an aio into my case but anyways what we're going to do is we're going to set up all these fans on a noctua u12s and see how they all perform is it really worth jumping up to one of these for an already amazing cooler i mean the ml 120 actually gets off to a bit worse performance than the stock u12s then there's a bunch of fans including the sl120m scythe and be quiet clustered between the p12 and knock to a ppc they're all within a single degree of one another and only give negligible improvements over the stock config you can also see the a12 really shines here too it's simply one of the best all-round options if you want silence and so is the gentle typhoon a fan that's been around forever and it still fights with the best of the best but there's no beating that thick boy from phanteks if you have the space it's a beast but with any cooling solution out there there's also a lot of diminishing returns when it comes to increasing fan speeds and you can see that here most of the fans only cut between four and five degrees off those last results despite running a lot noisier the only standouts are the ones that run super loud and push an epic amount of air alright so i guess that brings us to the end of this journey and are there winners and losers in this whole round and i'm gonna say absolutely so first of all the biggest loser in my opinion is you've probably already guessed this the corsair ml 120 pro for the price and the performance and the fact that it gets so bloody loud this thing is just not on the same level as all of these other fans here on the other hand is there a budget pick absolutely that will go to the arctic p12 and i've got to find it over here no no no no there it is the arctic p12 is an amazing little fan even though it wasn't anywhere close to topping our charts and there's a couple reasons for that first of all you can buy enough fans to populate your entire case plus one fan on your cooler for the price of just one knock to a ppc that is so important these days where people are fighting for every penny possible when it comes to their pc builds and prioritizing on certain components so this one it might not be the best but from a value standpoint it just knocked it out of the park now are there the best all-around fans here yes and that would definitely go to the nedek gentle typhoon and i believe it's this one yes it is a great all-around fan that is super adaptable to every single situation this one actually won my heart i'm gonna be looking to buy a couple of these for one of the builds that i'm doing relatively soon the final thing that i wanted to mention is the best of the best if money is no issue at all what would you go with and you probably guessed it by now and if you haven't you probably just skip to the conclusion so shame on you that is definitely this guy right here fantex claims that the t30 is the best fan on the market right now and there's absolutely nothing in any of my tests to suggest otherwise it is a little bit expensive and it is thicker so you need to make sure that you have the space to fit this but in every single test that thickness absolutely allowed it to dominate so look i hope that you guys enjoyed this video i enjoyed making this this was once again one of my roundups it took forever but at the same time i hope it provided you with at least some guidance about value about all-round great fans and about if you want the best of the best you've got one right now that is head and shoulders above everything else that i've tested here so i'm mike with horror canucks i hope that you have a great day have a good one and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Hardware Canucks

Views: 550,776

Keywords: best case fans 2021, pc case fans, case fan, industrial ppc 3000, noctua nf-a12, phanteks t30, masterfan sf120m, corsair ml120 pro, be quiet silent wings 3 high speed, nidec gentle typhoon, scythe wonder snail, arctic p12 pwm pst, hardwarecanucks, hardware canucks, best fans for heatsink, best radiator fan, best case fans 2022, best case fans, how to set up case fans, best pc case fans

Id: 5_-0PnpgDg8

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021