Aerocool DS Dead Silence Fans Review

Performance

We normally have a page for installation of products, but these are just fans and I’m sure you can all figure out that they just screw or clip into place. What I do want to mention is that I fitted these fans to our be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 cooler, which features a 135mm fan. I used a couple of spare fan clips that I have to mount the 120mm and 140mm fan to this cooler, they do not fit with the components that came with the fans or the cooler, this is just for testing the performance of the fans against a product we already know has similar high performance, low noise fans. as you can see below, the 140mm fan features four gorgeous blue LED lights, it also matches up nicely with the colour scheme of our test motherboard.

Next up we have the 120mm fan with its four red LED lights. It is worth pointing out that the lights on both fans are permanently on, there is no method for disabling them short of pulling the wires off of the LEDs.

Our first test saw both of the Dead Silence fans beating the stock be quiet! fans with relative ease, which is impressive to say the least given that the be quiet! fan is easily one of the best fans on the market today and the Dark Rock 3 has already proven its self to be a competent cooler with the 135mm fan be quiet! supply. However, the 120mm fan from Aerocool proved to be significantly cooler under load, giving us nearly 8c lower temps. The 140mm actually came out 1c warmer than the 120mm, but still significantly cooler under idle than both the 120mm and stock 135mm. An impressive performance from all three fans, but both Aerocool fans offer big improvements over the be quiet! fan.

Noise levels on the Dead Silence fans were incredibly uniform, and while the idle on the be quiet! was a fraction lower it is unfair to say any of these fans are louder or quieter, they’re all dead silent, at a range of 10cm we detect 1-2dBA above ambient on all three, which is virtually silent, especially once you put them inside a chassis.

The real performance testing is when we dial-up the CPU clocks and voltages, putting a much greater strain on the CPU cooler by generating a lot more heat. The be quiet! Dark Rock 3 does a great job of keeping our i5 cool with an impressive 48.9c under load and 17.7c at idle. The 120mm Dead Silence managed to knock 6.7c off at idle and nearly 2c at load, while the 140mm managed a further 1c lower at idle and 0.5 at load, both allowing lower temps at load, albeit not by a huge margin.

This is also very impressive, even at higher RPM and higher temps the Dead Silence fans remained at a rock solid 40.5dBA, beating the be quiet! fans by half a decibel, but again I must stress that the be quiet! fan is already virtually silent, so you’re really not going to hear any real world difference between the Dead Silence and the be quiet! fans, they’re all impressively silent.