Ok so I want to buy two replacement 120mm fans for my ft03. I'd really like near silence next to my nh-d14 which is very quiet. I always thought noctua were the best on dba vs cfm but I've read a few reviews which say different. I've googled and there is a huge amount of conflicting advice. Names that also come up are gentle typhoon and yate loon. Can anyone shed any light on what 120mm can produce the best cfm whilst being Inaudible ? Thanks in advance!
Both yate loons and gentle typhoons are awesome for cfm/dba but as to exactly which are the best of the three it's very hard to say. Not everyone hears everything the same. What i might consider audible someone else might not hear at all. I have extremely sensitive hearing and can say that gentle typhoons are very, very quiet and shift a lot of air. Having not worked with noctua's i can't really make a comparison though. The typhoons were definitely quieter than yate loons though (D12SL-12 yate loons). Having no fancy testing gubbins i just based it on keeping identical CPU temps under load; to keep it level with the typhoons the loons had to go up a little which made them more audible. NOTE: This was a while ago and was based on the cooling ability of a Scythe Mugen. Of course one other point is that noctua fans are major fugly. Not a major concern where noise is the key issue but you never know
I have spent far too much time and money messing around with fan combinations and have never managed to get the perfect setup, until LennyRhys sold me a 32mm deep fan, and eventually a couple of 38mm deep ones. All PWM and can be controlled using a special PWM fan controller to make completely silent. And due to the depth they have, they have high static pressure which is ideal for radiators and anything with tight fins. I am likely going to sell of my AP14 GT's and Loons and everything else as I replace them with theses. There are a couple of videos he has posted here which show how quiet you can get the fans, and how high you can get them: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=219273 You may want to consider getting some 38mm Deltas or similar, you can usually pick them up on Ebay for less than the cost of a new AP14. And so you know, it cost me £6 to build the fan controller too...
Thanks for the replies! I've managed to source 2 x 120mm Nocuta NF-S12B FLX and 1 x 92mm fan Noctua NF-B9 for a total of £33 which is a pretty good deal in my opinion. I'll try and run some test if I can but noise is a lot more important to me than cfm at this moment in time! Trying to build a quiet powerhouse! Thanks for all your help though.
I think a lot of the quiet fan specs are tosh tbh. I could definately hear an "11 dBA" 900 RPM Scythe fan from 3 metres away... I now have a completely passively cooled pc and the hard drive noise annoys me. You can never win (well until SSDs of a decent size come down to a reasonable level)
