Rough Akasa Apache 120mm Review
Fans arrived. Ordered at 3pm arrived at 9am. Usual faultless performance by OcUK!
The fans arent too bad. Did some objective comparative tests with an older Akasa Amber, Tri speed antecs and a silentX fan. Dont have any testing equipment etc so all thoughts are just based on opinion.
The silentxs provided good flow, and are pretty quiet but have an annoying ticking from the motors.
Tri speeds are actually better than I thought/remember. On high they are loud and don’t seem to push much more air than when at medium. To make them quiet though they need to be set to low and at low they don’t move much of anything.
The Amber, Akasas old fan seemed to have similar performance to the new apache…
airflow was probably higher from the amber, although it was spinning faster by default. Sound levels also seemed similar. Both fans are not what i call silent at full speed.... they are quiet in terms of motor speed but the noise comes from the air flow. Reducing the RPM of the fans so they became virtually silent at arms length (1000rpm for the apache) resulted in the apache winning out. Or at least I think it did… Using my hand to feel the air isn’t exactly scientific… haha
However when installed it was apparent the amber had a different sound characteristic to the apache. The apaches seemed to blend into the background with just a gentle whoosh and zero motor noise, it was hard to hear them above the PSU. The amber had a distinct ticking noise (very quiet) that I could pick out over everything else… This may just be because it’s a few years old now.
I need to get a fan controller so I can more accurately control speeds and test the fans against others. Also need to pick up a Noctua S12.
They are well made, solid frames with a rubbery feel to the fan blades.
Few issues I found as I was installing and playing:
They have quite a limited connectivity out of the box. They only have a shortish (maybe 20cm) 4pin pwm connection (no 12/7v steps, molex adapters etc). I guess this is because they are meant to be plugged into the mobo rather than the PSU. The 4 pin works with existing 3 pins, only issue is sometimes a cap or battery or another 3 pin socket on the mobo is in the way. Wouldnt be too tricky just to swap the end plug over to one from another fan though. I ended up using modified cut 3 pin/12v extenders allow the wider 4pin. Not an issue if your mobo had pwm control.
They require quite a bit of power to start and run. i.e., my BeQuiets specific fan connections dont give them enough juice to start. Neither does a fanmate2 on minimal setting... or my mobos 12v fan connections when I have the standard quiet fan enabled in the bios. Ambers are much more free spinning and easier to start and run.
But overall... once I had tweaked the fan mates and reduced the RPM to about 1000 and was happy with the amount of air going through my case the fan noise had all but disappeared into background noise. The loudest thing in the pc at the moment is probably the BeQuiet PSU... which is a bit ironic.
Sorry dont really have any temps before and after either. Ive adjusted my set up so i have offsets between the dust filters and fans to promote flow through the case so there are too many varibles to compare with my old set up. I have an arctic pro7 so cant fit a fan on that to test cpu temps either. Might get a HR-03-GTX for my 260 though so will be able to do some tests with that.