120mm Fan Testing on an MCR120 Radiator Round 6

[Martinm210]

Arctic Cooling F12

I bought this one myself, because it was cheap and I like the # of blades for pressure...I also never had an arctic cooling fan, so I wanted to try one out.

Turns out very promising, perhaps a yate loon/value fan contender costing only around $9 or so..

PACKAGING
Very minimalist, but they do have color printing on the little box. Also a little instruction manual, some case screws, and stickers. The wires do not come sleeved, but it does come with a daisy chain PWM plug. Apparently you can run these in series off of one PWM controller.

VALUE
I'm always on the hunt for value fans. Googling this fan brings up a cost of around $5-8, but I've seen it typically selling for $9 which is what I paid. So, it's not quite the same value as the $5-6 yates, but it is under the $10 mark. It's a good value.

WIRE GAUGE
If there was one thing I really don't like, it's the exceptionally thin wires. By far the lightest gauge wires I've seen on a fan, it's probably adequate for the current needs, but be careful...would be really easy to break if you tug too hard or shut it in a case door.

NOISE LEVEL
Was very good and perhaps very slightly better than the Yate medium. The test gave about 1dBA lower noise levels for the same performance CFM level as compared to the Yate.

NOISE QUALITY
Very good in most areas, but there were a couple of voltage points where it seems the fan blades created a low frequency pulsing type sound. But..outside of those couple of iffy spots the noise quality was very good. The higher number of blades seemed to really smooth out the fan chop and I never really heard any apparent motor type noises.

EFFICIENCY
Not very good, it actually consumed about 50% more power per CFM than the yate, this is probably due to the smaller motor and larger/greater # of fan blades.

MOTOR HUB SIZE
Just wanted to note this fan hub motor is actually smaller than most 25mm fans. This should be good for reducing fan hub dead spots.

CFM per RPM
Did very well, better than the yate medium by a bit.

OVERALL
I'm fairly impressed for the price. It's right up there with the yates & Zalman for being a good quality value fan. The PWM daisy chain feature would also be nice in some installations. My only real complaint with this fan is the tiny gauge wires.

I give it a thumbs up for value fan with smooth sound and better than yate looks

VIDEO LINK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XQVMutaETQ