Not sure what you mean by the "not best".Originally Posted by AndreaBZ
TFC 480 vs. GTX 480:
Excellent test.... as always!
..........
According to me,this is not the best system to compare the two radiators.
It is a few misleading.
It doesn't consider the different flow rate that is in the system.
In reality the parity of performance is over the 1880 RPMs,
it depends on the composition of the system.
For example in this case is had to 2250 RPMs ..............
Require the test RPM > CFM (db) of the three fans!
I did test flow rate with one test, but that was before I switched to "Average of Water In and Water Out", so I didn't include it. I had to manually correct for the error from that method. Anyhow, the difference was very minimal from flow rate. >.5GPM was only 2% worse than 3.5GPM, so I didn't bother doing more. This one flow rate test alone took about 16 hours of testing. To do the same for every one of the other data points, I'd be testing for months. I gave up after this one test:
Also note that you can't directly compare my old test to this new method. The old Water Out tests will be incorrectly HIGHER than they would per this new method because they gain half of the water delta between in and out which can be as much as a 10% Error. On the high performance fans test, I measured up to 1.1C delta between inlet and outlet. So that's about .55C error in a 5C delta which is about 10%.
Anyhow, sorry, but you can't compare the two without recalculating per the same method. I found that my old "Water Out" delta method is in error, so I've changed to this new method of comparing to the "Water Average" delta instead.
It all depends on pressure through the fan curve, but they seem pretty close to the 1850RPM Gentle Typhoons in terms of CFM per volt.
I'm not sure why on the CFM number. I had to reset up everything, so something may have been slightly different. I did run all of the last four tests overver again so at least though should be an ok comparison.
In general, I'm not satisfied with testing and my ability to quantify fans. It's very clear to me that dB numbers don't match my own perceived level of loudness and I have to think it's due to the different sound tones and mixture of motor vs air vs blade chop type noises. In addition, CFM is not the bottom line either because each fan has a slightly different dead spot and the blade design also distributes the air flow differently at the outlet. This is something that causes my air out measurement to be so inconsistent in radiator testing.
In the end, I feel fan testing is really simply too hard to do and come out of it with something that's very conclusive. Ideally it would be a noise quality per delta C type of comparison... Problem is...how do you quantify noise quality, it's very different from noise level, that I am sure of. Secondly, testing just one fan on a radiator takes at least 5 good runs on a radiator each of which takes about 2 hours per run. This means about 10 hours of radiator testing per fan per one noise position. As I've began to learn more about noise level, the sound tone does have some influence on how distance affects noise level. Soo...ideally again, you would need to measure noise levels at many different positions to do that any justice as well.
So...to do fan testing right, it would probably take something like this:
There's probably 50 different fans out there:
50 types of fans x 5 radiator testing points x 5 noise/distance measuring points x 2 hours each = 2,500 hours.
I raise the white flag and leave you with a couple of videos...enjoy!!
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