GELID Wing 12 Gamer Fan

A fan clad in true Atomic colours, with some tricks under the hood.

This fan arrived in a rather conservative box, with all the information you’d need to know, and small windows to show mere glimpses at the fan inside. Once open, there are four rubber grommets (kinda like the rubber nipples on Clooney’s batsuit, but actually useful) to reduce vibrations, a small box with a variable speed controller inside, and the fan itself.

The frame of the fan is glossy black, and has the direction of airflow and blade rotation printed on it, something that is handy for those who can’t tell. High quality cable sleeving is on the fan power cable, all the way to the connector, but is not present on the control box.

The Wing 12’s fan has nine blades, and each of these has a slightly bent wingtip to create a stronger funnel of air, something that actually works – we could feel air moving up to a few feet away. This can be controlled via the included box, which varies the voltage from 11-5V (the fan can start at 5V too, a great feature for those into quiet computing).

Most of those features are pretty standard, but the Wing has one other feature that no other fan can – the fan blades can be physically removed from the frame! This is done by a small tug on the blades, that lift right off to expose the bearings underneath. In fact, the whole blade system is magnetically levitated, and from a flick of the blades it takes a significant time to stop rotating. The principle is similar to MagLev trains, but much cheaper to manufacture.

Performance was quite good compared to the Noctua fan that we use for testing, with cooling almost as good at high settings, and only two degrees higher at the lowest. It is slightly noisy at high, but is very quiet at low.

This kind of fan would be great as a part of a themed mod, lit up by UV lights, or just as another case fan. We definitely like this one.