Reeven ColdWing 12 Fan Series Review
Ryan Martin / 12 years ago
These Reeven fans are scorching value for money considering you are getting stylish (in my opinion) 120mm fans for £10 or under across the board. The prices are as follows:
- Performance PWM – £10
- Silent Performance PWM – £8.50
- Performance 3 Pin – £7
- Silent 3 Pin – £6.79
All these fans serve different purposes. The Silent 3 pin fans are ideal for anyone who wants some cheap case fans that will shift decent amounts of air but be inaudible.
The Silent Performance PWM fan is ideal for someone looking for a quiet fan for their CPU cooler that has the ability to offer more cooling performance when needed but still remain mainly silent during all usage scenarios.
The Performance PWM fan offers you a lot more flexibility for the extra cost, you can have the same performance of the Silent Performance PWM fan with the low switch activated but then by selecting the high switch you can ramp up to 2000 RPM and get even more cooling performance if you need it – with extra noise though. This is ideal for someone who only needs high performance cooling on rare occasions.
The Performance 3 pin fan is an intriguing fan. It offers massive amounts of airflow and isn’t horrendously noisy like you’d expect. I’m not saying you won’t hear these fans because you will and they are loud, but inside a case the audible impact will definitely be muffled a lot more. If you do a lot of testing and sometimes you just need extra airflow over a multi-GPU configuration or you need some serious airflow for a radiator in a high performance liquid cooling loop – then these are probably for you.
The 3 Pin fans are ideal for constant use, so if you need constant silence then the Silent 3 pin is ideal, if you need constant performance but are willing to tolerate noise then the Performance 3 pin is ideal. The PWM fans bring a lot more flexibility to the table, they are more ideal for CPU coolers but if you want more airflow than an 800 RPM fan you could get the Silent Performance PWM and use fan tweaking software – such as ASUS Fan Xpert 2 – and set the RPM to 1000/1100/1200 RPM.
My only negatives with these fans is that they don’t abide to their listed RPMs very well, the specification lists a variance of 10% at each end but we found the 500-1500 RPM Silent Performance PWM fan actually wouldn’t go any lower than 750 RPM and by my maths that is not 10% higher than 500! All the other fans were more or less within 5-15% of their listed speeds so maybe Reeven should change the specifications to account for the larger variance we discovered.
On the positive side these fans are incredibly well priced, constructed to a high quality, have good aesthetics with the unique yellow design, offer a good accessory package and the ColdWing 12 series offers a solution to almost every usage scenario.
That said we can happily award the Reeven ColdWing 12 fan series with the eTeknix Bang For Buck award.
