Noctua NF-S12B FLX Fan

Testing Method

The testing procedure used to obtain the results was simple but effective, using CPU temperatures to show how effective the fans are at efficiently moving heated air through a high performance heatsink. This was done by fitting the fan being tested in the middle of the Cogage Arrow’s two giant heatsink radiators resulting in the fan both push and pulling the air through the cooler and to the outside of the system. Lower temperatures mean the fan is pushing more air and therefore has higher performance; the noise levels will also be rated as this is of course the area all Noctua fans are well regarded.

The i7 920 D0 processor was set to stock speeds with turbo mode enabled, resulting in a clock speed of 2.80GHz with 1.2375v of Vcore. The test will help to show how the Noctua fan copes with a medium heat output against competing 120mm fans. The fans themselves are connected to a 4 Pin Molex to 3 Pin adapter to ensure they are provided with the full 12v at all times and RPM is monitored with the sensor cable connected to the CPU fan socket. CPU Smart Fan Control (PWM) was completely disabled in the BIOS to ensure it does not alter the fans RPM through the sensor cable.

Software Used

To Load the CPU:

One of the best overclocking stability testing programs is LinX, I’ve found it pushes hardware harder than more well-known software like Prime95. It produces higher max temperatures than anything else I have used, which is perfect for what we need here. I am using version 0.6.4 and the settings used are All Memory Run for 20 Minutes which loads both the CPU to 100% and the memory to a very high usage point.

To Monitor Temperatures and Fan Speeds:

From the makers of CPU-Z, which is one of the most popular CPU information and overclock validation software comes the well-known HWMonitor. This software offers excellent compatibility and accuracy from Windows and I’m using the latest version, 1.17 in the 64bit flavour. RPM values were also verified via the BIOS.

Recording Results:

To ensure that the results are accurate, each test is run three times and an average is taken from the resulting values. The system is allowed to cool for 10 minutes between tests and the room temperature is monitored to make sure that it does not change enough to affect the results. The room temperature remained between 24.1 and 24.7 throughout the testing.