You wanna know how these things perform? Well, I can tell you that it does a very substantial job of cooling my non-overclocked machine. Just for the hell of it, I hooked each of them up to my motherboard and checked out how fast they were actually spinning. It turned out that they were pretty right on with the specs. Since they have the speed correct on the box, I’m going to assume they have have the airflow correct, too. Since I’m American, I’m going to have to turn their cubic meters per hour into cubic feet per minute, which is what’s most commonly used in the states. Their 80mm is said to blow 53 cubic meters per hour. Since there is about 1,827 cubic feet in a cubic meter, if we divide 1,827 by 60 minutes/hour, we have a total of about 30CFM (cubic feet per minute). Doing the same math with the 120mm-1200rpm and 120mm-800rpm, we find that they produce 48CFM and 35CFM, respectively. Now, we can compare their flow rates to other case fans along with their noise ratings in dB(A).

Assuming all the manufacturers aren’t giving us bogus numbers (chances are that at least a couple of them are a little off), I can now see which fan has the highest CFM to dB(A) ratio. First though, I’d like to point out that the Noctua fans have nearly the best CFM to RPM ratio of all the fans, only being beaten out by the Enermax 120mm fan, which they still beat in the CFM to dB(A) department. This tells me that Noctua DOES, in fact, have some sort of special fan design that the others don’t. I assumed that they were just making stuff up to sound cool, but this isn’t the case. Now, let’s check out a bar graph of the CFM to dB(A) for each fan class (120mm and 80mm).

Interestingly enough, the 120mm 800rpm Noctua fan fairs better than the 1200rpm. The Noctua fan does have the highest ratio of CFM to dB(A), but only 800rpm one. The 1200rpm model does come in 3rd, though. In the 80mm class, the Noctua fan is the best across the board, with the GlobalWIN 80mm being last. I think I’m ready to draw some conclusions now.

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