When you want to add extra cooling to your case, you can go for performance, silence or good looks. Many manufactures have increased their research budget to come up with the most innovative fan designs, today we'll take a look at an offering from Aerocool, Sharkoon and AC Ryan.

How can you evaluate a fan? You plug it in, it starts spinning and that's about all it does, running Q3A benchmarks with different fans connected to the system did not quite deliver any existing results.

Well we split this review up in 3 parts, first up is the “Looks” department, which you can find on the next page where we compare all the fans sitting on top of a heatsink, pictured in the dark if the fan has LEDs.

Second up is performance, to measure the amount of air moved, we installed each fan on the Aerocool Extreme heatsink to see if it could keep an AXP2200+@2000Mhz cool. If the resulting temperature under full CPU load is low, then it means we have good airflow.
Lastly we come to the most difficult task, noise. As the dBA rating giving by the manufactures is not really comparable, and [M] does not currently have the means to measure the exact dBA we decided to record sound clips of each fan running 10cm away from a mic and compiled the results into a small movie clip. We asked several people to rank the fans from loud to silent.

So without further delay I introduce you to our test candidates:

AC Ryan Blackfire4

Aerocool ALU 8025

Aerocool Chameleon

Aerocool Extreme (fan included with the "Extreme" heatsink)

Aerocool HT-101 (fan included with the "HT-101" heatsink)

Aerocool Quad LED UV

NMB 3110NL

Sharkoon SL2

How do they look? Click next to find out ->