Arctic Summair & Summair Plus Desktop Fan Review

Performance

So how well do these fans actually work? Let’s start by looking at the noise level. For the sake of fairness, I took a reading of the ambient noise in the room before I started to record noise from the fan. The fan wasn’t pointed at our noise reader, this done so that we aren’t recording the noise of air rushing past, which would have skewed our results and left us with inaccurate data.

So this is our benchmark, at 33dBA the noise is about what you would expect for ambience.

The first setting I put the fan on was the minimum, this is the least it will push air and subsequently the least noise it will make, and it makes less than a decibel of extra noise over the ambient noise of the room which is very good, but unfortunately, you can barely feel the fan at this setting, so whilst it’s quiet, it doesn’t really matter.

At half power, the fan jumps up quite a bit to 42.7 dBA, 9 decibels higher than when it was barely on. To the ear this is barely noticeable still, and with this being where I generally have the fan set I hardly ever realize it’s there because my music normally drowns it out.

With the fan set to three-quarters of its power, we see another jump up in noise, up to 50dBA, this is where the fan starts to get noticeable, it’s still not terrible but if it’s the only noise in the room it would start to get pretty annoying.

The maximum setting was just a little higher than at three quarters, but this small jump up to 52.5 dBA was actually the one that, to the ear, was the easiest to notice. At this noise level, the fan is almost too much, if you were wearing headphones or had earbuds in then I doubt it would be a problem, but if you aren’t then you may end up turning the fan down just to save your ears a bit.

The Regular Fan Test

Testing out the Summair on a desk, I noticed that the design on the fan grill does a very good job of directing the air forward, there is very little air to the sides of where it’s being pointed. This takes a little getting used to but once you do, it’s quite nice since it means the fan is more efficient, we aren’t wasting any energy blowing air at nothing; because of this, I had the fan at a slightly lower setting than I would use other fans. I found for me that my preference was having the fan at about half power, this was a good balance of noise and air. So concluding this portion of testing I was already impressed, for everyday desk use this has pretty much no compromise.

The Gaming Test

Testing the fan out while gaming was a similarly impressive affair, I noticed no noise when playing a game with my headphones on at the same half-power setting that I used before. For testing purposes, I ramped up the fan to full power to see how easy it is for headphones to drown out the noise, and to my delight I could barely make out the noise of the fan when gaming, this is most likely thanks to the fact that the Summair makes a very low pitch noise, meaning it’s easy to drown out and ignore. In addition to the passive noise cancellation that you get from simply wearing headphones, we also get the bass of noise from games, the combination of the two end up meaning that in the heat of the game, these fans will never be noticed.

The Coffee Table Test

I previously mentioned that the airflow on these fans is very direct, this works in the fan’s favour as I tested the range of them. When sat back on my sofa with the fan on the coffee table about a metre away from me, I noticed that the narrow area that the fan manages to push the air meant that I had to stay quite still for the fan to make an effect, but also because of this, I was able to feel the fan without cranking it all the way up to the maximum setting. Even though I didn’t need to use the fan at the maximum setting, it was where I would want it when sitting this far away, but as a result of that the noise is now a problem, especially if you wanted to watch TV or put on a vinyl record to listen to.