So I am back in the game! Literally, I have built a new PC and I am playing games again. By my calculations most of my box of tricks is from 2012 or earlier, this is a bunch of fans, cables, some fan speed controllers, random expansion cards, sound cards, and whatever else you would expect. I got thinking as I put in some Scythe Gentle Typhoons into my Lian Li PC-A05N and looked at the two Akasa Vipers already in the roof (240mm cut out by me), do fans from 2018 work better than these in any meaningful way? I.e. more airflow or static pressure depending on use case for the same or less noise? I am just about dead set on getting a Fractal Meshify C which comes with 2 fans, and possibly an AIO which again will come with 2 fans. I have literally no idea what fans would be best to use. From what I can remember I have at least 2 of each of the following; Scythe Gentle Typhoon (as I understand Scythe no longer make these but you can get direct from Nidec for a billion squids) Akasa Viper Sharkoon Golf Ball Silent Eagle Yate Loon Lian Li Stock fans Fractal Stock fans
The gains in fan performance are minimal compared to the gains in component efficiency - providing you had half decent fans in the first place. What hardware was you cooling then, compared to now?
A different but relevant question: do fans get slower/noisier as they age? Even if the tech hasn't moved on, under what circumstances would it be worth replacing them?
They get noisier, for sure. They might also slow due to increased resistance in the motor, particularly from the bearings.
I do love the look of Noctua fans, but I find they are somewhat at odds with the styling of almost every other piece of hardware in this "RGB-era" of components. The fans lasted through a few iterations of PC but I think my final PC before I left it to collect dust (before cleaning it up and giving it away) was an i5-750, 5850 1GB, and a bunch of SSDs, and HDDs. Now a Ryzen 2700x and a 1070ti with 1 m.2 ssd, and 1 sata ssd. That is pretty interesting, it's not something I have ever given much thought. Having a look around the MTBF quoted on fans varies wildly between 35K hours (fans included with Kraken AIO) and "over 150k" hours (a Noctua on Amazon), so 4 years and 17 years of constant use... who knows. Constantly changing RPM and boot cycles must impact this figure as it takes a lot more power to increase speed than to maintain it. My only evidence to put forwards is that my Gentle Typhoons still run at around 1350 RPM when on 100% according to my motherboard.
- Max diameter available has gotten a little larger - Soft mounting has become more the norm rather than the little bundles standoff things being the exception - Some fans have gained proper dust-rejection on startup (on first power on, run in max speed in reverse to blow dust out of filters before switching to normal direction and commanded RPM, to prevent clogging over time) - PWM slowly becoming more the norm, voltage-control bizarrely still hanging around for no good reason
The cheap sleeve bearing fans (and the fifty billion marketing names used to disguise them) peddled by flingers of cheap tat (Aerocool and the likes) pretty much inevitably develop issues like clicking sounds and so on, however you are likely to get annoyed and replace them due to the changing sound profile before they slow down / fail. But with "proper" fans you are extremely unlikely to encounter any issues even if used for a decade or more.
Going back to the subject of fans, those I highly recommend in no particular order are - Akasa Apache's - next to silent and plenty of airflow, still as good now as they always have been. Akasa Piranaha's - PWM and high static pressure. EK-Vardar F3-120's - PWM and high static pressure (the new GT's on the block).
I'll just shamelessly plug the Corsair ML fans, I've had zero problems with them and pretty pleasant noise profile.
These are what I use nowadays, quiet enough but nothing is quiet enough for me (hence the headphones) but that's mainly due to the gpu/cpu fans when gaming rather than the case fans (3x120mm in my case).
