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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 August 2020Bought this to replace a dying CPU fan.
Points:
* This fan is loud. However, it's not as loud as you might expect. This can be mitigated by setting your fan curves in your BIOS to only go above 20% when under load, and also just wearing headphones. 20% is easily enough to keep the fan no louder than my few remaining Molex fans (hey, they're ancient but the airflow is fantastic), while still keeping it cool at low load.
It does get fairly loud on heavy loads (Mine is set to go to 100% at 65'C), but I find video game audio drowns it out pretty well. It might bother you if you're doing other intensive tasks like video rendering.
* This fan is effective. I'm getting 10'C lower temps under prime95 load. Considering I did nothing but replace the CPU fan and I'm just using a regular Hyper 212 EVO cooler, that's damn good.
* The rubber corner pads are brown. I dislike it, but it's not exactly ugly. You can swap them out with the coloured pads that come with Chromax fans and that you can buy separately. I changed mine to solid black.
* This fan is designed for pressure, not for airflow. You'll want one of the S12A variants of whichever series for case fans (The A12 variants are good all-rounders also).
In summary:
This is a very good fan, but you should only buy this if you only about performance above all else.
Buy a different Noctua fan if you want a good balance of volume and performance. The Chromax line is good and looks pretty.
