Hyper Cooling; Nano Vibration; Comfortable Tone! Scythe's new fan has everything!
As far as fans go, they're usually one of the more overlooked parts of a rig - after all, don't they all just move air around? While that is indeed their main function, how they do it is different - and choosing the right fan is paramount to ensuring the best cooling.
This fan from Scythe is its latest design, a simple black frame and grey blade colour scheme that should fit in almost anywhere. It's got ten incredibly curved blades, each with two notches close to the centre of the fan - these are similar to the bumps on a whale's fin, and allow the fan to push air with less resistance. They also channel the air away from the fan's blades, rather than along the length of them (as the packaging proclaims, copied at the top of this review).
A dual-ball bearing is used and while this isn't the best bearing in terms of noise it is reliable, and will last in high-heat uses such as CPU cooling. The fan runs on 0.083A through the 12V power rail; essentially consuming a single Watt of power. There is no PWM cable, and the length was disappointingly short, so make sure you have a fan controller with some extension cords if using this as a case fan.
We strapped the Typhoon to our TRUE, and recorded very similar results to the reference fan, idling at identical levels and hitting a peak load of only a single degree above, even when overclocked. The real strength of this fan isn't in CPU cooling however, but instead as a case fan due to the huge pushing power available - the air can be felt moving up to three feet from the blades!
At a noise level of only 53.5dBA it's incredibly quiet for such a fast-spinning fan and while the price is a little up there, at $30, for case
cooling there is really nothing else we'd recommend.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012