Apart from the ever impressive Noctuas, does anyone have any other recommendations for 140mm PWM fans for watercooling?
I've been using nanoxia deep silence 140mm fans on my corsair aio coolers and they've been great. They're not high static pressure, but they're enough, and very quiet which was what I was aiming for.
I'd strongly recommend the Thermalright TY-143, at only £6.99 a pop from amazon. They are PWM and have a really good sound profile, and there's a really good RPM range from silent to... not silent (2500rpm at the top end). The only downside is that they have 120mm mounting holes, but that can be worked around very easily. I don't think you'll find a better performing fan even close to that price point.
I've got 2x TY-143s at the moment. They came with a huge air cooler I used to have and keep as a backup. I've tried them on the rad but they're stupidly loud at top end - and with me having an X58 board, I don't have as much control over the PWM fans as you do with a modern board and the accompanying software - so they're unsuitable for my current setup unfortunately. They do move a bunch of air though...
I'm on X58 too Your Rampage 3 is a far better board than mine... it's better even than many more modern boards, especially where fan control is concerned - all headers are PWM and you can set the duty cycle % in BIOS. I LOVED that board when I had it, particularly for that reason. The TY-143s are sweet at about 40-50%, where they'll be doing about 1350-1500rpm. Since I don't have that facility any more I use custom built PWM fan controllers for my PWM fans. It's sad to see that Thermalright's popular 140mm fans are EOL (the TY-140 and TY-147). I got a TY-147 with my CPU cooler, and also have two TY-140s which I bought for my case. They are so quiet and so cheap, yet excellent quality. The TY-141 is just stupidly expensive.
Yeah, I tried them on duty cycle mode and whilst I could get them quiet 'enough', I think they'd excel with software driven speed governance - where they could be set to very low, silent rpms when the machine is at idle and steadily increase to an acceptable cap under load. You can't be that specific with X58 unfortunately. I may be upgrading soon so I'll give you a shout if I'm selling the R3E through the marketplace mate.
I know you have asked for alternatives, but I really like Noctua fans. I have a pair of 120's and 140's. Set to around 800rpm via PWM and they are almost silent @ 2ft.
I've got 4 corsair 140mm Sp LEDs coming today for my corsair H110i GT I'll let you know how I get on with them.
Agreed. I have a pair of Noctua 140's on my nepton 280l AIO and run them at and idle speed of 350rpm with an 4.4ghz oc at 24deg. Using the msi bios fan profile they never go above 50% at full load at 56deg. Absolutely silent at idle as the box is in the living room and is on 24/7 and was a requirement of my build.
It's the stomach bile colour scheme of the Noctua's that has ALWAYS put me off buying them. I'm aware that there are now Redux versions but checking the specs, they seem to have slightly 'watered down internals' compared to the brown ones and the industrials are a little bit overkill. Interestingly, I've just emailed and had a reply from Noiseblocker who stated categorically that 140mm versions of their popular eLoop fans will be out, and I quote, "end of July/early August". If that is correct, then I'll be VERY happy...
I think the Redux are just slightly over-engineered, rather than being stupidly over-engineered which is the case for the puke ones. Incidentally the colour had originally put me off, but I have actually grown to quite like the baby vom colour.
I'm very happy with the Akasa Viper AK-FN073 I bought recently, it's quietly keeping my i7 930 cool at 35-40% speed. I just wish my stupid PSU's fan was as quiet. AK-FN063 AK-FN073
