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MF120R A-RGB
COOLER MASTER £16
I tested a few
(reasonably) budget-
friendly RGB options
and I’m recommending Cooler
Master’s MF120R A-RGB kit.
Cooler Master’s RGB design is
a bit less high-tech than the
LL120s, featuring only fan-blade
lighting instead of the second ring
around the outside. It’s still a
pretty attractive fan though, fairly
bright and with smooth
transitions. And while the triple
pack kit lists for £70, you can
usually find it on sale for much
cheaper. Add in the fact that
additional fans only cost £16
each, and you’re set to save a
whole lot of money on your
cooling setup. So what’s the
catch? They’re loud. Like, reallyloud. Even Cooler Master admits
it, listing the MF120R at 31 dBA. In
my own tests the MF120R kit was
reasonably quiet at 1200 RPM
but completely unusable at its
maximum 2000 RPM speed.
Granted, the MF120Rs move a
lot of air at top speed, tying the
Noctua NF-A12x25 for the
highest airflow. There’s no way
you’d want to run them at that
speed though. Still, you get a full
RGB lighting setup and some
pretty strong fans for a fraction of
the cost of Corsair’s kit.Affordable RGB lighting
Lots of airflow potential
Louder than the competition
Less advanced RGB lightingVERDICTSPECS BEARING TYPE: RIFLE BEARING / RPM RANGE: 6 50 - 2000 / LISTED CFM: 5 9.0 | LISTED DBA: 31.0 / RGB: YES,
EITHER THROUGH MOTHERBOARD OR COOLER MASTER’S CONTROLLER / 140MM MODEL NO.: N/A1
Kaze Flex 120 PWM
SCYTHE £10
Scythe doesn’t make a
great first impression,
granted. The Kaze Flex
120 PWM arrives in a cheap
plastic package, looking more like
it came from an auto shop than a
modern PC retailer. Side-by-side
with Noctua’s Redux packaging,
or Corsair’s weighty boxes,
Scythe feels every part the
budget fan solution.
And to some extent that’s
true. Chances are if you were
planning to skimp on fans, Scythe
would come up in some of your
searches. Scythe makes a ton of
fans, and some are much better
than others in my experience.
The Kaze Flex 120 PWM I
tested is one of the company’s
better models though. At 1200
RPMs the Kaze Flex 120 moved
more air in my test rig than some
of the competition (Corsair, for
instance) did at 1400 or even
1600 RPMs, presumably a result
of having eleven blades where
most fans have only nine. Lots of
air goes hand-in-hand with noise
though, and indeed the Kaze Flex
120 PWM is also noisier than the
competition at any given speed
setting – though since it tops out
at 1200 RPMs, the noise is never
as bad as models that spin up to
higher speeds.Cable is durable
Fairly inexpensive
Feels inexpensive
Relatively noisyVERDICTSPECS BEARING TYPE: FLUID DYNAMIC BEARING / RPM RANGE: 3 00 - 1200 / LISTED CFM: 51 .2 / LISTED DBA: 24 .9 /
RGB: NO / 140MM MODEL NO.: N/A
HOW WE TEST
There are a lot of case fans out
there, so we had to set a few
guidelines. First, we limited our
tests to 120mm fans. It’s not
because we hate 140mm, but
120mm is still the ‘default’ case
fan, and it’s hard to compare
different fan lines when you’re
also comparing different sizes, so
we stuck to 120mm versions.
That in mind, we contacted a
number of the most popular case
fan manufacturers and had them
send over both their best-selling
and their personal favourite
120mm models. Then we hacked
together a miniature wind tunnel
with an anemometer inside, a
device that measures airflow and
then used a decibel meter to
measure relative loudness. We
took our decibel readings from
five inches, which is closer to
these fans than you’d ever be, but
helped clarify what are otherwise
minute differences in noise level.
We then also maxed out the
RPMs on each fan to test a
theoretical airflow limit, and the
accompanying noise. Chances
are you’d never run most of these
fans at 100 percent – that’s why
they’re PWM fans! As for RGB
lighting? Well, we used our eyes.2HARDWARE
Group Test