Phanteks PH-F120S and PH-F140TS Fan Reviews

Sadly, I haven't had the opportunity to work with Phanteks much in my time here at eTeknix. However, today I am able to take a look at a set of fans from Phanteks. As usual they have the trademark mouthful-of-letters-and-numbers names that Phanteks like to endow upon their products. The PH-F140TS is a 140mm fan while the PH-F120S is a 120mm fan. Both are intended for cases and heatsinks and both come with 3 pin connections. You can see the specifications below with their respective product pages. Phanteks PH-F120S Phanteks PH-F140TS If you are interested in what packaging the two fans come in you can see that below. First up we are looking at the Phanteks PH-F120S. Included with the fan is a set of adhesive anti-vibration rubber pads, four anti-vibration rubber fan mounts, four silver fan screws, a molex adapter and the fan itself. The back of the PH-F120S features a three pronged design which I think looks very good, reminds me of a Mercedes Benz. The front demonstrates the notched design found on the fan blades. The entire fan is white including the cable which is a very nice design feature. It is worth noting these fans are available in a wide range of colours. From the side we can the fan sports a standard 25mm thick form factor. Next up is the Phanteks PH-F140TS. This fan has a more feature rich bundle. It includes a molex adapter, a "Patented thermal bracket", two fan speed reducer cables which reduce to 900 and 750RPM respectively, anti vibration pads, anti vibration mounts, fan screws, fan bracket mounting screws and the fan itself. The fan uses that same tri-pronged rear design as the PH-F120S. The front also uses a notched design but as you can see the fan utilises what appear to be 120mm fan mounting holes. This fan is also available in a wide variety of colours. The width is also 25mm, the standard fan form factor. Test System ASUS P8Z77-V Intel Core i5 3570K at 4.5GHz (1.3v) with Gelid GC Extreme Thermal Paste (the best thermal paste we have ever tested) 16GB Kingston HyperX 1866MHz DDR3 AMD Radeon HD 5870 128GB Kingston SSDnow V100 (Boot Drive) and Samsung F3 1TB (storage) Antec High Current Gamer 620W Cooler Master Test Bench v1.0 Testing Methodology All 120 and 140mm fans were individually tested on the Cooler Master TPC 800 CPU cooler heatsink or Thermalright Macho Rev.A (BW) heatsink, respectively, to determine cooling performance. We understand using a CPU heatsink performance can only ever be a proxy for performance/airflow, and that the performance figures will vary between different types of heatsinks, BUT this is the best method we are able to conduct. Temperatures were taken at a consistent room temperature of 20 degrees Delta temperatures have been used to account for small fluctuations in room temperature Prime 95 was run for 15 minutes and the average maximum CPU temperature was recorded as noted by CPUID HW Monitor The acoustic measurements were taken 2 inches/ 5cm away from the tested fans with the power supply fan and GPU fan isolated/turned off The ambient noise level as recorded by our sound meter was 37 dBA and delta noise levels have been used in our graphs There is approximately a 1 degree celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software There is approximately a 1dBA margin of error with our decibel meter Software Used CPUID HWMonitor Prime 95 First up is the cooling performance of the PH-F120S. As we can see it did exceptionally well at 1000RPM being the second best fan. Unfortunately it could not operate at 1500RPM so we were unable to test it at those speeds. Note in all these graphs results have been ordered based on 1000RPM scores as all fans were able to test at this speed. The acoustic performance of the PH-F120S was also pretty good although it is maybe a decibel louder that I would of liked to see. The Phantek's PH-F140TS also had very good performance being the second best fan posting a very impressive temperature result. However, the Phanteks PH-F140TS was let down by some terrible bearing noises. The noise sounded like a sheet of paper blowing around and the noise was present on both fans. This leaves me to believe I had two fans from a faulty batch or the fans are just made with a design flaw. I hope the prior is true. Either way the swooshing bearing noises were significantly louder than the fan noise so I am not sure what to make of these results. The Phanteks PH-F120S costs £11.99 while the Phanteks PH-F140TS costs £16.99. I will not attempt to review each of these fans together so let me go over my thoughts of each fan individually. Phanteks PH-F120S I was quite impressed by the performance on offer from the PF-F120S and in relation to the acoustic performance this was actually pretty decent. The build quality and overall design of the fan was also excellent. However, I am slightly disappointed that Phanteks do not include any adaptors. We tested the PH-F120S at 1000RPM using our own adapter, however the fan runs stock at 1200RPM and is too noisy for my liking at that speed. So if you were to buy this fan you would get good cooling performance at 1200RPM but weak acoustics, I'd recommend pairing this with a low noise adapter or a fan controller in order to get the best out of it in terms of that acoustic to performance balance. Now despite the absence of a fan speed adaptor I still think the PH-F120S is a good buy at £11.99. If you're looking for an inaudible PC then you'd definitely need to get an adapter with this like we did. However, even then this fan is still £4 cheaper than the Noctua NF-F12s, offers similar performance and is only marginally louder at equivalent RPMs. The fact you can also get this fan in a multitude of colours is also a very nice touch from Phanteks. Therefore, I am happy to give this fan the Bang for Buck Award because it offers exactly that, although as suggestion for improvement I think Phanteks should have offered a fan speed reducer cable or PWM functionality. Phanteks PH-F140TS Unfortunately as we mentioned there were some issues with the Phanteks PF-F140TS in the sense that the bearings on both our samples made very strange and loud noises that are not normal to hear from a fan. Judging by many other reviews on these same fans I can safely assume we a couple of fans from a defective production bunch. This is sad because it means I am not able to come to a fair or accurate conclusion. I can only imply that given the performance of this fan's younger brother, that this fan would of also offered a similar level of excellent performance. And given the fan's extensive bundle set this fan would of been a lot more flexible. However, I will not attempt to come to a judgement because my test results are clearly flawed in the sense that they do no represent what a non-faulty version of this product would of delivered. We would like to thank Overclockers UK and CaseKing for providing these review samples.