Noctua NF F12 vs Gentle Typhoon AP15

[Paulie]

I saw Toms vid a while ago about the F12's and i saw how his results showed they performed better on the the h100 than the GT's, I was a little surprised when he thought the f12 were quiter as my own experience i thought the F12 was the louder fan at full speed.

I tested in my own setup which is a single 120 rad in the roof with single fan and 35mm of fan shroud in a pull config. I found the GT's worked better for me, but my setup is very unique to my rig and most people run rads in push rather than pull only.

Martins lab has got the his test results in for both fans using a single MCR120 rad with fans in push, so for anyone whos interested check em out.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCOuo9C69AM[/media] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw_YS7_x1Wc[/media]

 

[Pr3d4t0r]

its not only about being quiet, yes the typhoons are quieter but the noctuas have better performance, im in a mood for some physics so lets do this

Noise as you may know is the air vibrating at certain hz spectrum etc. such noises are caused by anything really but majorly kinetic energy i.e. the friction. here come s the performance v silence

fans an be completelly silent and i mean silent but the will not be pushing any air through, the whole concept of fans focuses on fins/blades bended in a curved way to force the air to push or pull the air through, now friction, friction is caused by the particles colliding with each other(not gonna go into why, but its mainly about masses and charges) as these collide they generate alot of energy, in form of kinetci energy(spin fans) heat energy(friction) and most importantly sound.

so in order to have good performing fan it needs to produce alot of noise. hope i didnt just waste 10 mins of someones life lol

 

[Master&Puppet]

GTs are regarded as the best performing fans for the noise they produce. I use them for anything upto 60mm rads at which point I think the massive pressure of the F12s is more important.

 

[SieB]

The NF12s and the GTs are pretty evenly matched to be honest.

The Noctua's are quieter than the Scythe's 22DB for the NF12s and 28DB for the GTs. Static pressure isn't far off between the two either 2.64 mm h20 for the NF12s and there is no official listing for the GTs but according to test by other people it's around 2.80 mm h20.

One advantage that the Noctuas have over the GTs is the focus flow, which is pretty beneficial for rads. What that does is direct the air flow strait through the rad eliminating dead spots, the GTs will blow the air in a sort of cone shape blowing some air out to the side as well as strait up.

There has not been any official testing, that I know of, but radiator shrouds can be bought which you place between the fans and the radiator which blocks the air that gets blown off to the sides on most fans and directs it strait through the rad. The temp results that I have seen with shrouds have shown temp drops, meaning that having a direct flow is also beneficial.

If I was buying new fans and could afford it I would be buying the Noctua's over the GTs to be honest, there isn't much between them spec wise, the NF12s are quieter and they have the focus flow.

 

[Paulie]

guys the official testing is in the vids - not my vids btw

To some it up the F12 are always a min of 10 fpm (feet per minute) in air velocity slower than the GT's, at 12v it increases to 15fpm in favour of the GT and the GT is 9db quieter @ 12v.

 

[SieB]

CFM isn't the most important thing with fans for rads though, it's static pressure, the amount of force the fan can push the air. The GTs do have a higher static pressure than the NF12s though but the focus flow of the NF12s kind of evens that out.

To see which fans are best though we need to see tests done on full sized rads like a RX240/360/420/480.

 

[Paulie]

completely agree sieb about static pressure.

It would be very interesting to measure the air flow drop off from the edge of the fan blade towards the motor and compare the two.

I'm not convinced things like the focus flow on the f12's, the channels on air penatrators and also the ring on the GT AP29's have any performance gains on a radiator, in an open case yes the benefits are obvious if you want to concentrate air flow over a gpu or cpu heatsink