Turbine fans by Aerocool

[NeilBlanchard]

Hello:

The blown air is sprayed outwards from the fan blades and not forwards from the fan which would create a massive dead spot if you tried to blow it towards something . It's much more suited to a case airflow position or sucking from a heatsink.

ckolivas, you have more or less said it in the above but just wanted to confirm

The fan won't be a good in a psu? I have a Yate Loon LED fan in the psu and was hoping to swap as the Aerocool seemed quieter.

I'm just theorizing, but I'll bet it does fine in a PS; possible better than most fans. I say this because blowing into a smallish closed box like a PS case, essentially pressurizes the PS and then the pressure flows out the back grill -- so the "flaring" is not really an issue, IMO.

The reason that I think it might be better than most fans, is the fact that it has 16 blades, which is likely better in situations with some back pressure, than a fan with fewer blades.

So, it seems that the only situation that the AeroCool has a (slight?) disadvantage is blowing down into an unshrouded HS, where the air is able to "leak" out to the sides easily...

[amjedm]

Oooooooops. Just seen the double post. Er em slow computer/web. [Admin -- all fixed!]

Thank you for the advice. May have to try the swap.

[ckolivas]

I think into a PSU it will be fine.

[ckolivas]

I've edited the post above with the pictures so you can now click on them to see the pictures in full resolution.

[ckolivas]

Ok here are some more goodies.

I've completed a PSU fan swap and it looks like this at 12v (click to enlarge):



The illumination gets dimmer as I said at lower voltages or with pwm control.

It does appear to be working extremely well in the PSU position with cooler temperatures than the heavily undervolted silenx I had in that place. It seems very effective as a PSU fan.

Strangely the silenx undervolted and started well down to 3.3v yet this won't start below about 7v, but runs fine at 5v once it is spinning. That's a little disappointing, but then it is probably running at 300rpm at that voltage. With pwm control the same occurs with me having to set a startup pwm setting of 150/240, then it can drop to 0 and run fine there. In contrast the silenx was noisy as hell with pwm control.

Furthermore I found this fan does have rpm monitoring. The base speed reported was about 960rpm which is right on the money for the advertised speed. The lowest speed I cannot measure but I'm estimating it's currently running around 300rpm.

So what's my current opinion? If you don't need something with very directional airflow, and don't want to use fixed voltage undervolting to run this quiet, buy one. It's damn good value.

Oh don't forget n==1 as to number of samples I tested so I have no idea about variation between samples.

[vahagn]

thx for your mini-review ckolivas. I'm in melbourne, oz as well, and just got me one of these from coolpc about 5 days ago.

/me looking forward to getting it installed soon (prob. is i keep opting to play gta:sa rather than getting to work on this mod for my shuttle box).