Noctua NF-F12 PWM 120mm Fan Review
Ryan Martin / 12 years ago
UPDATED PERFORMANCE PAGE
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 fans were individually tested on the Cooler Master TPC 800 CPU cooler heatsink 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
Cooling Performance
With an updated set of testing we are now able to give you an idea of the Noctua NF-F12’s performance. As you can see it fares right on par with the Xigmatek fans and beats the Gelid fans by a substantial margin.
When we factor in noise we can see the Noctua NF-F12s offer by far the best performance to noise ratio of all the fans we tested.
