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CAF 12 CASE FAN: REVIEW
120mm 12v DC@.25A Brushless 2BB Fan with 64CFM Airflow
Well I was some what skeptical on the way
home , as to just what use I could put this 120mm fan to. As I already had 3
fans blowing air out of my case. It did have a bracket fitted that would allow
the fan to be mounted inside the case so as to blow air on the Graphics card
and or the MB. You simply mount the fan onto the pci mounts in the back of the
case, where the attachment screws go for pci cards. It took 60 seconds to mount
the fan so that it blew air on my AGP graphics card ,unfortunately due to the
piggy back 80mm extractor fans , the CAF 12 is blowing air mainly on the lower
half of the MB, aprox 85% . If it were not for the piggy back fans I could have
had the CAS 12 blowing air onto the middle of the MB, so please keep this in
mind. There was plenty of room to close the side cover, so that is what I did.
The fan comes with two metal grills fitted , so as to avoid getting all your wiring caught in the fan, and has the look and feel of a quality unit . Noise wise ,I cant make the fan out at all , there is no extra noise to contend with. This is a very impressive fan and If I had not already fitted 3 fans in my case , this is the fan I would want sucking air out, at 64cfm, I cant see the need for any more fans, as this unit would be an excellent stand alone item.
So just how effective is the fan at cooling my MB. Well half a MB , earlier today before fitting the fan, the MB was doing 24deg Celsius . Not forgetting that the side cover is on, and that the MB has to share cooling with the graphics card, it is doing 21deg Celsius. Thats a 3deg C drop in operating temperature. Now you might not think that thats much of a drop, but I already have very good case cooling, and in the past I tried putting a 12cfm fan in the side cover to do the same thing (sucking outside air in onto the MB ) only to find it did nothing. The other thing to take time to think about is the room temp which happens to be 18deg C, that means that the MB is only 3deg C above ambient room temp. As well the CAF 12 is cooling my graphics card, the tiny little fan on the heatsink can only do so much, hell Im blowing 64cfm of air at it, I just wish I had a way of monitoring the graphic cards temp.
Seriously though, if I were on the market
for a fan, this item would certainly command some attention, the fan certainly
blows a lot of air, and it does it quietly, something strangely rare today.
So the next time your at the computer show ( Sunday market) give the Nucleus
tables a good going over, you just might find something you thought you would
never find, a CAF 12 case fan, MB cooler and graphics card cooler all in one.