Performance Testing

To test these fans I bought a decibel meter, unfortunately it turned out to be incapable of reading under 40db(a), and these fans are quieter than that.  So much for that, we're stuck with subjective noise level measurements.

For testing I mounted one, and then two, of the fans on my Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme (generally called a "TRUE" heatsink, cooling an AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer CPU overclocked to 4ghz.  The Bulldozers put out a lot of heat but the TRUE heatsink can deal with it easily, IF you have enough airflow.  Will these fans cut it without being obnoxiously loud?  We'll see.

A 100% CPU load was provided by Prime95 running the "Large FFTs" test, the test was run for about ten minutes and the highest core temps reached were recorded.  A five minute cool down period was used between tests.

Temperatures are listed as the number of degrees centigrade above the ambient temperature of the case, this removes the ambient air temperature from the equation, which is important for accuracy.

First, temperatures with a single fan pushing air through the TRUE:

On "low": 29c above ambient, fan speeds were in the 720rpm area.
On "medium": 22c above ambient, fan speeds of 1000rpm.
On "high": 15c above ambient, fan speeds of 2015rpm or so.

Given an ambient of 24c (which mine was), that means that on low speed the cores are in the 53c area, this is in the safe zone for Bulldozers, but towards the top of it.  It does speak of a fair amount of airflow even at 3.3v and 720rpm though.

Noise wise Low is extremely quiet even if your head is right next to the fan, Medium is only slightly louder, and High is fairly noisy.  The noise on High isn't obnoxious, it's mostly just airflow noise, but it isn't exactly quiet either.

Next up I put a second fan on the back side of the TRUE pulling air out, and ran the same tests a second time.

On "low": 24c above ambient, fan speeds were in the 720rpm area.
On "medium": 20c above ambient, fan speeds of 1000rpm.
On "high": 14c above ambient, fan speeds of 2015rpm or so.

These results tell an interesting story, at high speed the fan is already putting out enough air and pressure that adding a second one doesn't make much of a difference.  On medium speed it helps, though not tremendously.  At low speed however adding a second fan made a big difference, and even with two fans the cooling setup is still dead quiet.

I'm impressed.

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