120mm Fan Testing on an MCR120 Radiator Round 6

[Martinm210]

Nidec Servo (Scythe) Gentle Typhoon AP-14

Special thanks to RatDog & Cisco Systems for giving me a general fund to pick from, I've had the old batch one AP-15 for a while and wanted to try a new batch AP-14. The AP-15 was driving me nuts with it's inconsistency, so I was really curious to get my hands on a brand new sample and also have a chance to look at the lower RPM variety.

Vapor is sending me a couple of batch two AP-15s I'll give a run on too when they come. Then I'll have an opportunity to get some good runs on some new fans from batch 2.

This fan is brand new however, so I feel more confident it's at least not suffering from shelf life.

OK, on with the results.

BATCH 1 vs BATCH 2 FANS
These fans have changes slightly, the good news is, I don't think noise was affected by the changes from what I can tell.


PACKAGE
Fairly average. Comes with the fan without any sleeving on the wires and it comes with some case screws and a molex connector in a plastic box. Overall, about average.

NOISE LEVEL
At the high end this fan spins around 1450RPM and is a full 8 dBA lower in noise level on my particular test rig than the yate medium, that is significant. At 7V or roughly 850 RPM is is about 3 dbA lower in noise level than the yate medium. 3dBA is considered barely perceptible, so that's not so significant, but still worthy of note. Nothing short of exceptional here I mean REALLY OUTSTANDING noise level.

NOISE QUALITY
This is a difficult one to evaluate. On one hand, the exceptional noise level is amazing, but the GT has a way with sound. The normal noise of air movement from the fan blades is nearly absent. What you are left with is very small amounts of bearing/motor noises and those small noises are not quite as smooth as the sound of air movement. Also while I didn't pick up any measurable noise spikes from harmonic issues, I could very faint amounts of tone developing over the voltage range from time to time.

In the end, I guess I've generally rated noise quality as exceptional, if it was purely a smooth air like sound where motor noise was absent. In this fan, there is no air noise, all you hear is the faint motor/bearing working. That's not quite as pleasing as smooth air. However, the fan is very quiet and there is not any motor tick that's generally the most annoying type of sound. I'll give noise quality an average rating, although I think that's totally subjective.

ELECTRICAL EFFICIENCY
How is .5 watts, the GT is absolutely the most electrical efficient fan I've seen. Even the GT15 keeps power under 1 watt. It's about twice as efficient as the yate loon. That'll keep the stress off of overloading your fan controller. Another exceptional by the GT.

CFM per RPM
About average in this test. The more I test and compare this chart, the more I think I'm just seeing variability in RPM sensor accuracy. I don't think I'll worry too much more about this comparison.

COST
I've seen this fan sell for about $15 to $19 a piece, so it is not a bargain fan and not going to be cheap to fill a case full of a dozen of these. I think it's probably justified if you need the full RPM power, but perhaps not if you're looking to undervolt down in the sub 1000RPM range.

VISUAL
This is pretty subjective, but I've seen many nicer looking fans. I suppose I appreciate the fact that they focused on performance only on this fan, but it would be nice to have a few color choices. It's unfortunate when you see people painting the fan blades, as that's a pretty good sign folks want something other than grey and black. I also wouldn't ever recommend painting, could very easily throw off blade balance if you're not careful. I'd give visual an average.

OVERALL
Jaw dropping noise/cfm ratios from 1000-1450RPM, it flat dominates in this area. Average noise quality, exceptional electrical efficiency, average to high cost, and average visual.

I'll give it three thumbs for it's dominating cfm/noise ratio on a radiator, it's really exceptionally quiet at medium speed RPMs.

VIDEO LINK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yuj7GZqNpOs







And for giggles, I compared it to my wonky GT15, while my Batch one (lower result) didn't check out well, it did compare very well to the Batch 2 GT15 test..



And this was my retest of this fan in batch 4 compared to my results in batch 3. About 1CFM difference, but very similar.