Most reliable medium & high-speed 120mm fans?

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NKDietrich

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jul 25, 2004
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I'm looking for fans in the 50-60 & 80-100 CFM ranges, preferably. It's been a few years since I bought any new fans, and just recently ran out.

Back in the day the thing to get was the Panaflos. How are the Noctua fans? They seem a bit costly for medium-speed fans.
 
The main selling point with the Noctua fans is that they don't make any noise, at all, at any rpm. I did some research here and there, I got some Scythe something or others, they flow ~68cfm. My computer now sounds like a dust buster. So it's all in what you want to achieve. As far as finding out about different fans, go to google type in "120mm case fan review", or something similar. I know there are lots of reviews out there.
 
The Scythe SFlex is one of the highest quality 120mm fans you can purchase. The 1,600 RPM version will flow 64 cfm and it does so very quietly. I have one on my Ultra-120 Ex and can't hear it operating with the case closed.

S-Flex product page
 
Crap, I wish I read this before I headed out to Microcenter last night (long drive), I would have picked up a few, tried one and if I liked it better than my Panaflo 120's I would use the Scythes instead. The Panaflo's aren't screamers like the Thermaltake tornados (my rig sounded like a big ass hair dryer when pushed to the max) but they can sound like a small dustbuster when you push several of them to the max in a CM Cosmos.
 
graysky said:
The Scythe SFlex is one of the highest quality 120mm fans you can purchase. The 1,600 RPM version will flow 64 cfm and it does so very quietly. I have one on my Ultra-120 Ex and can't hear it operating with the case closed.

S-Flex product page
Click to expand...

I installed 2 sflex 64 cfm versions to my TRUE 120 and they are silent.
 
Scythe "Slip Stream" 1600rpm 88.11CFM 33 db. Love mine - it's quiet. They also make a 1900rpm 110.31CFM fan if that interests you. At 37 db, that's quiet considering how loud fans pushing that volume used to be!

Here

The Noctua looks great on paper. Maybe someone else can comment on it. It definately has a longer rated MTBF (150,000 hours vs 30,000 hours). If not for the price and lower CFM, I might have jumped on it.

Here
 
magoo said:
I had a sythe 120mm die on me after about 2 months......bah.

I just use the medium speed Yate-Loons......you can get them from Performance for 6 bucks, sleeved.http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=49&products_id=22033

I have some Panaflo fans, they move a shit load of air but sound like leaf blowers.
Click to expand...

Yeah I bought a bunch of 120x38mm Panaflos back in the day, loud mofos and the longest operating ones are all starting to die. Lost two this week. Guess the HydroWave bearings arent the most reliable.

WarLust said:
Scythe "Slip Stream" 1600rpm 88.11CFM 33 db. Love mine - it's quiet. They also make a 1900rpm 110.31CFM fan if that interests you. At 37 db, that's quiet considering how loud fans pushing that volume used to be!
Click to expand...

Yeah, my fans are like turbines. 33 and 37 db are quiet by my standards.
 
I found my 1600 rpm S Flex F series too loud. They made my computer 2x or more as loud. I should have gotten the E series.
 
Wow, some people have really high noise tolerance. A fan with 64 CFM is not going to be silent. A fan with an rpm above 1200 is not going to be silent. Silent is silent. If you don't hear anything, it's probably because your hard drive, video card, psu, case vibrations, or other fans are masking the "silent" fan.

You simply can't have a silent or near silent fan unless the bearing uses some type of fluid dynamic bearing. In that respect, only Noctua, Scythe (s flex), and Arctic Cooling do this. SilenX does too, but they're overrated junk. Nexus comes close, but still isn't as efficient at low rpm.
 
The most reliable fans for me would be the Scythe S-Flex series. The 1200rpm versions are too noisy for me, but I need my PC to be really silent. At 10v they run at 1000rpm which is practically inaudible.
 
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